| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Making of Robert E. Lee. By Michael Fellman. (New York: Random House, 2000. xx, 360 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-679-45650-3.)

Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Adversity, 1822–1865. By Brooks D. Simpson. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. xxii, 533 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-395-65994-9.)

Two biographical studies could scarcely present a greater contrast in approaches than The Making of Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant do. Brooks D. Simpson's Grant, while making ample use of quotations from its protagonist, nevertheless approaches him from outside, with Simpson a spectator observing his growth as a soldier and in personal character. Michael Fellman's Lee is not strictly speaking a biography, but rather an analysis of the mind and character of Lee looking outward on his world. 1

Taken together, the two books show that Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee more closely resembled each other than we usually think. It is obvious that we would not be likely to remember much about either had it not been for the Civil War. The war was indispensable to both, helping them attain the fame and perhaps greatness that they did. At the beginning of 1861, Grant was clerking in his father, Jesse Grant's, general store in Galena, Illinois—an apparent failure as a civilian just as he had left the U.S. Army under a cloud of alleged drunkenness and ineptitude. Lee in contrast had a high reputation in the army, but he felt his aristocratic self-image being pulled down by the decline of his social class in Virginia. He had entered his fifties in 1857, probably felt symptoms of deteriorating health, and, even as a military officer, had few additional laurels to win in the somnolent peacetime force. . . .

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