![]() With their modest Midwestern backgrounds came a shared democratic ethos: “Grant put on no airs with his men and treated officers and ordinary soldiers with similar courtesy,” Chernow says. Both overcame hardscrabble upbringings in the American heartland, married into slaveholding families and suffered periodic bouts of depression. Similar life stories bonded the men as well. “Too many of Lincoln’s generals were quick to scapegoat him for their failures,” says Chernow, “whereas Grant, as a matter of both pride and honesty, never blamed the president.” Not only was the general a self-starter, but he had a quiet self-confidence and a refreshing willingness to accept full responsibility for his battlefield defeats. “I think it was Grant’s aggressive, fighting spirit that endeared him to Lincoln,” says Ron Chernow, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Grant. Lee at Appomattox, however, the cauldron of four years of war had forged a strong partnership between Grant and Lincoln-one that, for all intents and purposes, saved the Union. By the time General Grant accepted the surrender of Robert E. ![]() In his memoirs, Grant confessed that he was “by no means a ‘Lincoln man’” in the years before the firing of the first shots of the Civil War at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. But their mutual respect and trust grew deep over the final year of the Civil War as they together steered America and its armies through the most convulsive period in the nation’s history. President Abraham Lincoln and General Ulysses S. ![]()
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