The Lincoln Forum hosted this one hour 15 minutes talk. Good evening and welcome. It is my pleasure to introduce our friend, my friend, William C Jack davis as our keynote speaker this evening. Jack is an author of over 50 books. Richard mcmurray gives as well as he gets. Mutual the surface is affection that is fairly well hidden. [laughter] he is a loyal member of our Lincoln Forum and a loyal friend and we are glad to have him. The dispute over the use of the confederate battle flag that still simmers, if not rages. Lengthy and telling essay for the july 11 wall where heurnal discussed the controversy over the use of the confederate battle flag as a symbol which must not be understood misunderstood or whitewashed. Davis believes americans cannot afford to forget the confederacy as it teaches lessons about americans themselves, how they react crisis in the matters beyond just slavery and theifice that constitute bedrock of our national being p. The important lesson from this is jack daviss discernment without the kneejerk reaction to something that we find unpleasant. Please bring your hands together for jack davis. [applause] rapier wit. [laughter] how hungry are you for that cake, frank . [laughter] im just delighted to be here tonight and see all of you hungry people who will stay another hour or two longer. It is great fun to be with the Lincoln Forum family again. I first joined this group when we were at the old holiday inn eons ago when god was a boy. It is great to see how this happy fellowship has grown and spread in the way you continue to come together to host this fellowship every year, it is wonderful, remarkable and great to be part of it. Now, the two right most popular and most influential men in america were ulysses s. Grant and robert e lee. Grant was more popular than anyone in the north. More popularly than lincoln while lincoln was alive. He was the one man who defeated the confederacy to whom all confederates looked for guidance in the dark and difficult days following defeat. We know a lot about them. Theres been a lot that we dont know about the other men and thats what i will talk about tonight. Theolen a title generals nobody knows. ,e will talk about the origins the personalities come other lives, their experience prior to them becoming preeminent military commanders and how that came to influence the way they were as commanders. I come by my interest in grant honestly in that one of the few things ive come by honestly i thought i would say that for mcmurray since he is not in the room. We movedim from post to post and his command shifted. His last command was in san francisco. Toer he retired, they moved california to escondido and almost bought a home from a man who was the august surviving the youngest surviving grant. On a lowbeautiful home hilltop surrounded by orange groves. Growing up in california, their is not a lot of civil war going around. In the 1960s. He was a charming old fellow. Out of which spring a friendship that landed 10 years until he died in his early 90s. He was a marvelous fellow, crusty old cavalry. He accompanied blackjack pershing. He was a pioneer herpetologist. That is not the study of herpes. Which nevertheless can be very interesting, especially if you have it. [laughter] his specialty was reptiles. He edited a magazine on reptiles and founded a separate research station. He lived in this house filled of themorabilia grandfather he had never met. The quid pro quo that developed was poor major grant was suffering either glaucoma or macular degeneration, he could no longer see berkeley in front of him. Directly in front of him. If he was going to watch the television, he would sit like this and he could see the moving shadows. , in i visited major grant would read to him. He loved victor hugo. In return, he gave me carte to walk his house filled with grant memorabilia. We dined occasionally on white house china. On the wall was a photograph of abraham lincoln, one of the more famed side views signed by lincoln over to grant. A presentation sword given to grant hung on the wall. There was a peace pipe that had been sent to grant by sitting bull, who must have done it tongueincheek some kind of misunderstanding over something. [laughter] in the papers. He had some of grants papers from his early days. If you were a teenager interested in history, especially in that great event in our National Experience and you were growing up on the west coast where there werent could you imagine a more heady, more powerful influence than to be able to see and touch these pieces of genuine history . I attribute a fair bit of my withr to that association grant, who was aiming this is an a magnificent fellow come in spite of the fact that he tried to kill me. He made us lunch one day. Loath cheese. In all of its manifestations. I do not understand why anybody wanted to sit and eat congealed bovine glandular excretion. Its like eating a block of cholesterol. He could not see very well, he made us lunch one day. A sandwich, cheese and tomato sandwich. The bread was something called salt risen bread. The damn bread tasted like cheese. On it was a slice of something that came out of a cow. He set this in front of me on white house stationery. The bread was ok. The tomato was not bad. Stuck with this piece of cheese. Embarrass ort to be a bad guest reform i host. Before my host. The light came on and i realized, hes blind. [laughter] as long as i keep them looking at me, he cannot see what i do. And, he had a dog. If theres anyone from the Humane Society in here, please close your ears. A little terrier. I broke the cheese into quarters and while i was talking to him , i would hand a quarter of this piece of cheese down to the dog. Even the dog was smart enough not to eat the dam stuff. The dog would take the First Quarter and gum it a little bit and then spit it out. Dogs are very smart. Our dog is with us. I guarantee you she will never eat cheese. And handed it up to the dog a second time, he would consume it. Going through this arcane process, i eventually got all the cheese in the dog and he never knew what had happened. Comes to mein grant honestly because i once had lunch with his grandsons dog. [laughter] when you look at the kgrounds of these two men contrasts from youth come almost into old age. Robertk at the youth of ealy, you know the stories about his father was a gambler who could not hold on to money. He was an embarrassment to his family. He eventually abandoned his family. Lee became the man of the house at age eight or nine and had to assume a tremendous amount of response ability at an early age. Imagine being eight or nine years old and having responsibility to care for a become an invalid and a hypochondriac. A couple of sickly sisters who are not in good health and have trouble taking care of themselves in a house that is too big for the family to maintain. And on an annual income that his mother thinks is not enough to get by. Consider what that might do to you, to your worldview, your personality. You have essentially lost the chance to be a boy. He had to become a man at an early age. Thanks to bequests from her motherand sister, his had an annual income from stock of about 4000 a year, which in the 1820s put her in the top 10 of families in america. They were not hard up for money, see what could theen to money, lived with thoughts of not having it. As if heive and act does not have money. It made a deep impression on him. On the other end of the scale is ulysses s. Grant who grew up in the wealthiest household in georgetown, ohio. His father is a very prosperous businessman, he was not just a r but was ane entrepreneur in several varieties of the leather trade. Grant grew up in a house filled with books. He could read if you chose. But his favorite thing to do was to scribble his name on the flyleafs of the books. Wantd not know the kind of , the kind of selfinduced hardship that robert e lee grew up in. Of a wide beginnings divergence of personality between the two. Grant always expects good things to happen. He is the incurable optimist, sometimes too optimistic. Life for him was easy as a child. He did not grow up under those constraints. Haps he had something more lee has no freedom as a boy. Up until the time he will leave for west point when he is 18 years old mothers no evidence to suggest he has ever traveled more than 50 miles from alexandria. He is faulted for a virginias centrism. Grant does not face that. His father does interstate trade. Jesse grant gets his son involved in the trade at an early age. May have been a horse whisper. Theres no question he had an affinity withar horses. Some kind of rapport almost instantly develops between him and horses. Andas a brilliant rider horses took to him. One of those accidents of nature. Let ulyssesould take a horse and ride it anywhere he wanted to in the countryside. If his school work was done. He would send his son out on arinze with a horse and then send him out on errands with a team of horses and a wagon. Send his son out on errands with a horse. He could travel miles at the age of nine or 10 with the responsibility to pick up goods for the grand store or trade for goods or trade for a horse. The older he got, the further he went. By the time he was 17 years of age, by himself, he had taken the grant family carriages or wagons as far as from southern ohio to pittsburgh to louisville, kentucky to chicago as far north perhaps as st. Paul. By himself at the age of 17. He had probably troubled somewhere between 1700 and 2000 miles with a horse or horses and a wagon by himself by the age of 17. How many of you would trust a 17yearold to drive 1700 miles by themselves . That did for grant was gave him a completely different worldview than what lee would develop. Grants view of the world will always be outward because his experience as a youth has been here is a hell, there is ll, there is hi something beyond it. They both get decent educations. Lee is educated in a series of academies in alexandria. Among the finest available. Is not in academy, he will sometimes have a private tutor. The tutor that had not previously been known, james watson ripley, who would become a distinguished botanist. Lees career, you will find him commonly commenting on the flora. The influence of just that one tutor gave him an appreciation for the growing things around him. As an old man, he would talk thet how much she missed snowball pushes that grew around their house in alexandria. Bushes. All grant had an Academy Education in ohio. He does have some interesting influence. Willf the academies he attend is called the Ripley Academy just across the ohio river in kentucky. Woman had escaped from kentucky with her baby in her arms. Who lived not far from ripley . Harriet beecher stowe. She incorporated the story of that young woman to produce eliza. It is in that environment that grant begins to get his Academy Education. They go to west point. Cadet. The exemplary grant is not. [laughter] , howere is mythology robert e lee is the only can it is the only cadet to ever graduate without a single demerit. The root five other graduates who also had no demerits. , thereacademy that year were 26 who had no demerits that year. Yours possible to work off demerits or offer a good excuse to explain why you got the demerit and they would be taken from your record. There is no question he was the model soldier from the very beginning. The academy in those days cap a demerit book. There was a page for each cadet. It would hold for years four years worth of space for demerits. After two years come on the lee page, not a single have been entered. The administration decided he is not going to get any and we cannot waste this page. His name was crossed out and another normal cadet bus name has been written in. Every soldierdier wanted to be. Grant was just average. He had a good time. He got the merits when he was , he was to be reading often reading humorous novels. One of his favorites was the socalled autobiography of davy crockett. An early milestone in american humor. Grant liked novels. Lee did not like novels. Recommended against his Children Reading novels because he thought they presented a view of life as it was not. It gave people a false hopes and false expectations to read fiction. They should read nonfiction. , both of them are very similar. Neither of them show any interest whatsoever in religion. s were a episcopalian. Hel into young manhood, showed no interest in religion whatsoever. And after heurting is married, mary nags him and f to letter, you should go to church and be more pious. His response is, woman, you are irritating me. [laughter] he said i shall remain the same bad old robert i have ever been. Do not try to convert me. Perhaps something happened in the war with mexico were immediately afterward. Lee will have an epiphany of sorts and he will come back from mexico in 1848 with a different view and more and more, references to the bible. Maybe it was the horrors he saw, the loss of friends. It may have been the death of a particularly close uncle. He was constantly finding father figures and uncles because his father was always a stranger to him. These expressions will start to appear in these letters. By the early 1850s, he is a fullfledged providential list and he had an epiphany and he goes radically off toward a fundamentalist viewpoint in which man is helpless, man has , we are the tools of the almighty and it is our duty withr lives to put up unending disappointment and misery. God does not want you to have that cake. [laughter] eventually, you have good fortune to die and you will go to heaven and things will be better. A pretty depressing outlook but this will be his religious touchstone for the rest of his life. To the point that when he learns that an infant, a child has died , he will write to his wife saying what a blessing. Because now that i will not have to go through life and in under endure its miseries. When a young man dies three weeks after being married, lee has write how fortunate he that he does not have to go through life to see his marriage deteriorate through all the disappointments and the hurts and miseries. He wrote this to his own wife. [laughter] you can see he does not have a happy expectation for life. Grant is the same happygolucky sort of fellow hes completely silent about the matter of religion. He said nothing about it. We know his mother had been a quicker. They were methodists back at home. He went to a Methodist Academy but he is virtually silent. After he wins a battle, he does not say god has given us a victory. Nothing. To the end of his days, hes something of a cipher about his religion. It doesnt enter his mind, apparently. Or have very different views experiences when it comes to friendships. Perhaps again because of that stunted childhood that was forced upon him, robert e lee will form very few friendships. His closest friends will be his cousins like caches lead. Sius lee. His closest friend was jack, a fellow officer. He will die in his 30s and lee never finds another one to replace him. He will write to one of his young son saying how sorry he was that he had made so few friends because he had no one with whom to share his joys and his sorrows. He advises his sons, meet more places, make yourself a and a congenial family in the world that he never had. Other hand has friends all over the place. This is one of the things that grant will be faulted for. Sometimes he was not a good judge of his friends. He is happygolucky, affable. Life seems to be easier for grant. Girls. Grant love for goingl known miles to go to a dance. Too. Ure lee did, but theres no evidence of any teenage romances or infatuations. When we finally decides to get serious about it, he identifies his distant cousin and courts until they arene married. When grand finally meets a woman he falls in love with, he does the same thing. A long courtship through letters , which was the custom of the time in which the young women would play hard to get. Keep writing to me and, by the way, get religion. Case, he will beat julia dent. Grant falls in love head over heels immediately. They have extremely different marital experiences. Lees wife is a brilliant young woman. Houseme is arlington across the potomac from washington. Grand welltodo, the daughter of martha washington, she has the right blood, has everything. Including, possibly, bipolar disease. Its always dangerous to put dead on the couch and psycho them because they cannot answer back. Them becauseyze they cannot answer back. It is apparent she was at least willful, idiosyncratic, impulsive. She got up one morning and apparently had a bad hair day so she got all of her hair off. Cut all of her hair off. Lee had a bald wife. She would be habitually late for an engagement. Lee is impeccably dressed as an officer. He is punctual to a fault. When he attends a fair, she bedt show up dressed in her clothes. She had no sense of what was appropriate. She is a spendthrift, and iparty i already told you how he felt about money. They spent their lives together trying to get her not to be a spendthrift. She exhibits other things that sounds like something that is erratic at best. Perhaps more than that as well, the bloom is off the rose. You can see it after a couple of years of marriage. The dynamic between them changes. Dramatically and stays changed in which he in his letters was constantly admonishing her about her behavior. About what you spends. She spends. Officers wife off ught to act. That will continue throughout the entire nearly 40 years of their marriage. I think it is a marriage after a few years in which they are accustomed to each other but you see very little sign of passion, of romance. They are just kind of used to each other. Lee will have a big hole in his life because of the loss of that aspect of the life he expected to have. Grant is completely different. He is nuts about julia. That is the way it is until he dies. This man had to be in love when you see a photo of julia grant. [laughter] jack she is very intelligent, very well educated. She apparently has a vivacious personality. She is extremely popular in the social orbit around st. Louis in which the dent family lived. She is in many ways almost a 20 century woman. She is not anxious to give up her bachelorhood because she is having a heck of a good time as a free young woman in st. Louis. Everyone seems to like her. She has strabismus, an eye not focused with the other. When youre talking to her you never knew which eye to talk to. [laughter] jack its possible during that era for surgery to do something about that. Grant did not want her to. He liked her just the way she was and decently adores her. If she spends too much, fine. Spend all you want. Be happy. He wants her out with her friend and have a good time. When they are together he is as happy he is never happier in his life than when he is in his home in galena, illinois in 1860 with his children around him, his newspaper, despite that hi his pipe, and julia with them and they can discuss the events of the day. Its been argued that there may have b