NYT Review: Grant & Lee (Exhibit/N-Y Historical Society)
“Grant and Lee in War and Peace,” which opens on Friday at the New-York Historical Society, is a rejiggering of an exhibition mounted last year by the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond, where it was called “Lee and Grant.” The flip-flop in billing is partly a nod to local bias and to the fact that Grant is, after all, buried right here in New York, where he was a bit of a substance abuser and lost a fortune on Wall Street — he was one of us, in other words — while in Richmond they prefer the white-bearded patriarch who seemingly had no faults at all. But the title switch is also a reflection of the way these two generals, implacable opponents on the battlefield, have been linked by posterity in push-me-pull-you fashion, so that the reputation of one can’t go up unless the other’s sinks.
For most of the last 140 years Lee, or a romanticized version of him, has been on top. This Lee is the tragic and valorous embodiment of the Lost Cause, a mythic South that fought not so much to defend slavery as to protect states’ rights and a noble, superior way of life, while Grant becomes a drunken butcher, a slaughterer of his own men and a failed, scandal-plagued president who belongs in the company of Warren G. Harding.
The scale had so far tilted that by 1920 or so, when John Leon Gerome Ferris painted his famous depiction of the surrender at Appomattox, “Let Us Have Peace, 1865” — which is in the show — he put Lee, regal and imposing, bathed in light, in the center of the picture, while a shadowy, supplicant Grant, in muddy boots, approaches from the left. If you didn’t know better, you would think Lee had won.
Only in the last few years have historians tried to address the balance a little — demolishing the long-cherished notion that Lee was personally opposed to slavery, for example, and arguing that it was he who was reckless about casualties and that overaggressiveness contributed to his defeat. In this light Grant starts to look a little better.
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For most of the last 140 years Lee, or a romanticized version of him, has been on top. This Lee is the tragic and valorous embodiment of the Lost Cause, a mythic South that fought not so much to defend slavery as to protect states’ rights and a noble, superior way of life, while Grant becomes a drunken butcher, a slaughterer of his own men and a failed, scandal-plagued president who belongs in the company of Warren G. Harding.
The scale had so far tilted that by 1920 or so, when John Leon Gerome Ferris painted his famous depiction of the surrender at Appomattox, “Let Us Have Peace, 1865” — which is in the show — he put Lee, regal and imposing, bathed in light, in the center of the picture, while a shadowy, supplicant Grant, in muddy boots, approaches from the left. If you didn’t know better, you would think Lee had won.
Only in the last few years have historians tried to address the balance a little — demolishing the long-cherished notion that Lee was personally opposed to slavery, for example, and arguing that it was he who was reckless about casualties and that overaggressiveness contributed to his defeat. In this light Grant starts to look a little better.