![]() In 1900 President Theodore Roosevelt, A.B. At his death he was arguably the most famous man in America and the most recognizable American in the world. Grant became a casualty of this new narrative. Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Public Domain Lee.Īn 1888 collectible from the "Great Generals" series The revisionist Civil War narrative-glorifying the Lost Cause through song and story, textbooks and statuary cloaking with chivalric ritual and romance the doctrine of white supremacy abstracting the battle from the cause sacrificing African-American rights to what Frederick Douglass called “peace among the whites”-created a hero who still infatuates the American mind: the knight-errant, Robert E. Yet even as he finished his memoir, its story was being eclipsed, just as Hamlet’s doubts are drowned out by Fortinbras, who arrives to take over Denmark and bury its prince with a wildly inappropriate soldier’s funeral. He was suspicious of braggarts, “men who were always aching for a fight when there was no enemy near,” and self-deprecating. Although he possessed physical courage and recognized it in others, he prized “moral courage” above all. To a perhaps surprising degree, Grant shared Hamlet’s mistrust of a particular kind of martial honor. Terse, cool, free of melodrama, Grant’s book is an anomaly among the era’s many Civil War memoirs. Causes, for Hamlet, are never ancillary: with his dying breaths he commands Horatio, “report me and my cause aright.” The skull prompts Hamlet’s unflinching meditation on the fate of even the greatest heroes: Alexander’s dust might seal a beer barrel, while Caesar’s clay “Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.” In the Norwegian Fortinbras, willing to bury 20,000 soldiers to secure a worthless piece of land, Hamlet sees a puffed-up prince hungry for martial honor. Contemplating human remains was nothing alien to that audience. The anecdote nicely illustrates the difference between the excitable, voluble Sherman and the calm, unobtrusive Grant. When Hamlet picked up Yorick’s skull, a soldier at the back bellowed, “Say pard, what is it, Yank or Reb?” The audience erupted, and Grant said, “We had better get out of here.” The officers were sitting incognito in the balcony when, according to one, Sherman started complaining loudly that the actors were butchering the play. The mood was raucous from the start, the audience full of soldiers on their way to or from leave. One night, at the suggestion of William T. In December, Grant had summoned senior officers to Nashville to discuss the winter campaign. ![]() War-time sketch credited to German immigrant and Union Army captain Adolph G. ![]()
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