Mississippian William Faulkner once famously said that the past is never really dead; it is not even past. Two men hover over America's past, making it not even past, Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee. Without Lincoln, there would not have been an American Civil War; without Lee, Lincoln would have won the war in less than a year; without Lincoln, Lee would have won the war in two years. The 700,000 Civil War American dead are a direct result of the deadly Lincoln-Lee historical placement in the same time and place. General Lee is not dead; he is not even past. We know that from the frenzied fetish the current protesters have shown in trashing, vandalizing and tearing down his statues. The protesters validate their vendetta against stone replicas of Lee because they call him a traitor. He was; he thought so himself. When he arrived at Appomattox to surrender to the Union General Grant, he wore his best uniform because he thought he would be arrested for treason. He thought it
On April 9, 1865, General Ulysses S Grant closed out the Confederacy. General Ulysses Grant is the best writer among the Civil War Generals; his book, PERSONAL MEMOIRS OF ULYSSES S. GRANT is a masterpiece. He won a brutal campaign of attrition to end the American Civil War with a Union victory. The first battle of the campaign of attrition was the Battle of the Wilderness, in the dense thickets known as the Wilderness of Spotsylvania . Grant hurled the Union Army of the Potomac into tangled woods, against Lee's Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, to bloody results. The Army of the Potomac lost 17% of its troop strength in one battle. So many Union soldiers were casualties that, for the first time in American history, rumors had it that the Federal Government fudged the casualty lists downward, to assuage the public dismay. Grant was a drunk; he qualified his drunkenness by stating that he never drank when his wife was near or when he was on active duty. Hence, General G