"GRANT AND LEE: A STUDY IN CONTRASTS"
by Bruce Catton
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“Grant and Lee: A Study in Contrast” was written as a chapter of japane girl freeThe American Story, a collection of essays by noted historians. In this study, as in most of his other writing, Bruce Catton does more than recount the facts of history: he shows the significance within them. It is a carefully constructed essay, using contrast and comparison as the entire framework for his explanation.
When Ulyss S. Grant and Robert E. Lee met in the parlor of a modest hou at Appomattox Court Hou, Virginia, on April 9, 1865, to work out the terms for the surrender of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, a great chapter on American life came to a clo, and a great new chapter began.
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南金东箭 The men were bringing the Civil War to its virtual finish. To be sure, other armies had yet to surrender, and for a few days the fugitive Confederate government would struggle de
absolutionsperately and vainly, trying to find some way to go on living now that its chief support was gone. But in effect it was all over when Grant and Lee signed the papers. And the little room where they wrote out the terns was the scene of one of the poignant, dramatic contrasts in American History.
They were two strong men the oddly different generals, and they reprented the strengths of two conflicting currents that through them, had come into final collision.
Back of Robert E Lee was the notion that the old aristocratic concept might somehow survive and be dominant in American life.
动名词作主语 Lee was tidewater Virginia, and in his background were family, culture, and tradition… the age of chivalry transplanted to a New World which was making its own legends and its own myths. He embodied a way of life that had come down through the age of knighthood and the English country squire. America was a land that was beginning all over again, dedicated to nothing much more complicated than the rather hazy belief that all men had equal rights and should have and equal chance in the world. In such a land
Lee stood for the feeling that it was somehow of advantage to human society to have a pronounced inequality in the social structure. There should be a leisure class, backed by ownership of land; in turn, society itlf should be tied to the land as the chief source of wealth and influence. It would bring fourth (according to this ideal) a class of men with a strong n of obligation to the community; men who lived not to gain advantage for themlves, but to meet the solemn obligations which had been laid on them by the very fact that they were privileged. From them the country would get its leadership to them it could look for higher values – of thought, of conduct, or personal deportment – to give it strength and virtue.
Lee embodied the noblest elements of this aristocratic ideal. Through him, the landed nobility justified itlf. For four years, the Southern states had fought a desperate war to uphold the ideals for which Lee stood. In the end, it almost emed as of the Confederacy fought for Lee; as if he himlf was the Confederacy… the best thing that the way of life for which the Confederacy stood could ever have to offer. He had pasd into legend before Appomattox. Thousands of tired, underfed, poorly clothed Confederat大量英文
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e soldiers, long since past the simple enthusiasm of the early days of the struggle, somehow considered Lee the symbol of everything for which they had been willing to die. But they could not quite put this feeling into words. If the Lost Cau, sanctified by so much heroism and so many deaths, had a living justification, its justification was General Lee.
Grant, the son of a tanner on the Western frontier, was everything Lee was not. He had come up the hard way and embodied nothing in particular except the eternal toughness and sinewy fiber of the men who grew up beyond the mountains. He was one of a body of men who owed reverence and obeisance to no one, who were lf-reliant to a fault, who cared hardly anything for the past but who had a sharp eye for the future.
The frontier men were the preci opposites of the tidewater aristocrats. Back of them, in the great surge that had taken people over the Alleghenies and into the opening Western country, there was a deep, implicit dissatisfaction with a past that had ttled into grooves. They stood for democracy, not from any reasoned conclusion about the pro
per ordering of human society, but simply becau they had grown up in the middle of democracy and knew how it worked. Their society might have privileges, but they would be privileges each man had won for himlf. Forms and patterns meant nothing. No man was born to anything, except perhaps to a chance to show how far he could ri. Life was competition.
数学高考题 Yet along with this feeling had come a deep n of belonging to a national community. The Westerner who developed a farm, opened a shop, or t up in business as a trader could hope to prosper only as his own community prospered – and his community ran from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from Canada down to Mexico. If the land was ttled, with towns and highways and accessible markets, he could better himlf. He saw his fate in terms of the nation’s own destiny. As its horizons expanded, so did his. He had, in other words, and acute dollars-and-cents stake in the continued growth and development of his country.
睥睨什么意思 And that, perhaps, is where the contrast between Grant and Lee becomes most strikin
g. The Virginia aristocrat, inevitably, saw himlf in relation to his own region. He lived in a static society which could endure almost anything except change. Instinctively, his first loyalty would go to the locality in which that society existed. He would fight to the limit of endurance to defend it, becau in defending it he was defending everything that gave his own life its deepest meaning.
