Grant, Sherman, and Lee: Defending Political Space—Patriotism’s Price

Abstract

There is nothing more tragically maladaptive than when a nation’s sons start killing one another. Descent into national fratricide raises the immediate question of how the violence unleashed can be stopped. Intransigence and misperception of threats that drive the actions that lead to civil war are not easily quelled or defeated. And even once it is over other questions arise: what next? How is prolonged and lethal fighting within the whole restored into a shared devotion to a common cause? How can all of that tragedy be put behind? This chapter will focus on the first question—how the organized violence that cost 620,000 Americans their lives was ended—so turns to the military leaderships of Robert E. Lee, famed commander of the Confederate Army of North Virginia, and Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, the two Union Army generals most responsible for the successful prosecution of President Abraham Lincoln’s chief war aim: the preservation of the Union.