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aCTIvITy 2.2
continued
Nonfiction Narrative
GRANT AND LEE: A STUDY IN CONTRASTS
my Notes
by Bruce Catton
1 When Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E.
Lee met in the parlor of a modest house at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, on April 9, 1865, to work out the terms for the surrender of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, a great chapter on American life came to a close, and a great new chapter began.
2 These men were bringing the Civil War to its virtual finish. To be sure, other armies had yet to surrender, and for a few days the fugitive Confederate government would struggle desperately and vainly, trying to find some way to go on living now that its chief support was gone. But in effect it was all over when Grant and Lee signed the papers. And the little room where they wrote out the terms was the scene of one of the poignant, dramatic contrasts in American History.
Ulysses S. Grant
3 They were two strong men, these oddly different generals, and they represented the strengths of two conflicting currents that, through them, had come into final collision.
4 Back of Robert E. Lee was the notion that the old aristocratic concept might somehow survive and be dominant in American life.
5 Lee was tidewater Virginia, and in his background were family, culture, and
tradition . . . the age of chivalry transplanted to a New World which was making its own legends and its own myths. He embodied a way of life that had come down through the age of knighthood and the English country squire. America was a land that was beginning all over again, dedicated to nothing much more complicated than the rather hazy belief that all men had equal rights and should have an equal chance in the world. In such a land Lee stood for the feeling that it was somehow of advantage to human society to have a pronounced inequality in the social structure. There should be a leisure class, backed
by ownership of land; in turn, society itself should be tied to the land as the chief
source of wealth and influence. It would bring forth (according to this ideal) a class of men with a strong sense of obligation to the community; men who lived not to gain advantage for themselves, but to meet the solemn obligations which had been laid on them by the very fact that they were privileged. From them the country would get its leadership; to them it could look for higher values—of thought, of conduct, or personal deportment—to give it strength and virtue.
Unit 2 • The Challenge of Utopia 105
fugitive: fleeting; transient vainly: futilely; unsuccessfully
poignant: passionate; emotional
deportment: behavior
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