【正文】 Lee. 7. Grant, the son of a tanner on the Western frontier, was everything Lee was not. He had e up the hard way and embodied nothing in particular except the eternal toughness and sinewy fiber of the men who grew up beyond the mountains. He was one of a body of men who owed reverence and obeisance to no one, who were selfreliant to a fault, who cared hardly anything for the past hut who had a sharp eye for the future. 8. These frontier men were the precise opposites of the tidewater aristocrats. Back of them, in the great surge that had taken people over the Alleghenies and into the opening Western country, there was a deep, implicit dissatisfaction with a past that had settled into grooves. They stood for democracy, not from any reasoned conclusion about the proper ordering of human society, but simply because they had grown up in the middle of democracy and knew how it worked. Their society might have privileges, but they would be privileges each man had won for himself. Forms and patterns meant nothing. No man was born to anything, except perhaps to a chance to show how far he could rise. Life was petition. 9. Yet along with this feeling had e a deep sense of belonging to a national munity. The Westerner who developed a farm, opened a shop, or set up in business as a trader, could hope to prosper only as his own munity prospered and his munity ran from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from Canada down to Mexico. If the land was settled, with towns and highways and accessible markets, he could better himself. He saw his fate in terms of the nation’s own destiny. As its horizons expanded, so did his. He had, in other words, an acute dollarsand centsstake in the continued growth and development of his country. 10. And that, perhaps, is where the contrast between Grant and Lee bees most striking. The Virginia aristocrat, inevitably, saw himself in relation to his own region. He lived in a static society which could endure almost anything except change. Instinctively, his first loyalty would go to the locality in which that society existed. He would fight to the limit of endurance to defend it, because in defending it he was defending everything that gave his own life its deepest meaning. 11. The Westerner, on the other hand, would fight with an equal tenacity for the broader concept of society. He fought so because everything he lived by was tied to growth, expansion, and a constantly widening horizon. What he lived by would survive or fall with the nation itself. He could not possibly stand by unmoved in the face of an attempt to destroy the Union. He would bat it with everything he had, because he could only see it as an effort to cut the ground out from under his feet. 12. So Grant and Lee were in plete contrast, representing two diametrically opposed elements in American life. Grant was the modern man emerging。 beyond him, ready to e on the stage, was the great age of steel and machinery, of crowded cities and a restless burgeoning vitality. Lee might have ridden down from the old age of chivalry, lance in hand, silken banner fluttering over his head. Each man was the perfect champion of his cause, drawing both his strengths and his weaknesses from the people he led. 13. Yet it was not all contrast, after all. Different as they were — in background, in personality, in underlying aspiration these two great soldiers had much in mon. Under everything else, they were marvelous fighters. Furthermore, their fighting qualities were really very much alike.14. Each man had, to begin with, the great virtue of utter tenacity and fidelity. Grant fought his way down the Mississippi Valley in spite of acute personal discouragement and profound military handicaps. Lee hung on in the trenches at Petersburg after hope itself had died. In each man there was an indomitable quality… the born fighter’s refusal to give up as long as he can still remain on his feet and lift his two fists.15. Daring and resourcefulness they had, too。 the ability to think faster and move faster than the enemy. These were the qualities which gave Lee the dazzling campaigns of Second Manassas and Chancellorsville and won Vicksburg for Grant. 16. Lastly, and perhaps greatest of all, there was the ability, at the end, to turn quickly from war to peace once the fighting was over. Out of the way these two men behaved at Appomattox came the possibility of a peace of reconciliation. It was a possibility not wholly realized, in the years to e, but which did, in the end, help the two sections to bee one nation again…after a war whose bitterness might have seemed to make such a reunion wholly impossible. No part of either man’s life became him more than the part he played in this brief meeting in the McLean house at Appomattox. Their behavior there put all succeeding generations of Americans in their debt. Two great Americans, Grant and Lee very different, yet under everything very much alike. Their encounter at Appomattox was one of the great moments of American history.From: K. Flachmann and M. Flachmann, pp. 3053119