Grant, Lee led intertwined lives

New York —- Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee met face-to-face only twice —- near the end of the war with Mexico in 1848, and 17 years later at Appomattox, where Grant accepted the surrender of Lee’s battered Confederate army.

But the lives of these two iconic 19th century Americans were parallel and intertwined, as an exhibit opening today at the New York Historical Society makes clear. “Grant and Lee in War and Peace” illuminates two men who in their similarities, differences and self-contradictions embodied the travails, successes and failures of the fast-expanding nation.

A 1920 painting of the Appomattox meeting, by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris, dramatically underscores these themes: Lee, the loser tall, dignified and resplendent in gray uniform and gilt sword —- shaking hands with Grant, the victor, a rough-cut figure in muddy boots and an ordinary solder’s tunic.

“It’s really a ‘Lost Cause’ version of the event, in which Lee is the central figure and Grant looks as if he is the one who’s surrendering,” says Kathleen Hulser, exhibit curator. That image reflects the post-Civil War adulation heaped on Lee while Grant’s efforts as president to make postwar Reconstruction succeed received little credit and are not well-known today.

Some artifacts in the exhibit reveal lesser-known aspects of the rival leaders. There are sketches by Lee as an Army engineer and two remarkable watercolor paintings by Grant. Lee’s black dancing slippers rest near a pair of beaded moccasins worn by Oglala Sioux chief Red Cloud when he met with President Grant in Washington.

Lee was a Virginia aristocrat whose father had fought with George Washington, and who himself married into the Custis family, Washington’s in-laws. He ranked second in his West Point class and later became its superintendent. He professed to hate slavery, yet commanded an army that fought for its preservation.

Grant, 15 years younger, was the son of an Ohio tanner and finished 21st in a class of 39 at the military academy. He also abhorred slavery, yet had a personal slave until 1859. And like Lee —- and Abraham Lincoln —- he married a woman whose relatives owned slaves.

Both men served with distinction in the war with Mexico, yet both regarded that war as an act of aggression.

A centerpiece of the exhibit is Grant’s famous order at Appomattox, spelling out surrender terms and allowing Confederates to retain their horses and side-arms —- handwritten by his secretary, Col. Ely Parker, a Seneca Indian who later became commissioner of Indian Affairs in the Grant administration.

Lee retired to semi-private life as the president of Washington College in Lexington, Va., which was renamed Washington and Lee University. He died in 1870, two years after Grant was elected president, but remained the symbol of the “Lost Cause” cult of Southern sentiment.

The same unrepentant rebels who mythologized Lee vilified Grant as a “butcher” and drunkard. Bribery scandals that plagued his second term as president —- though not of his making —- made matters worse.

Financially ruined later by bad business deals, Grant recouped his fortune with his memoirs, completed just days before his death from throat cancer in 1885.

Like Lee, he had lived 63 years.