In the spring of 1865, with his army shattered and his supply lines severed, Robert E. Lee wrote to Ulysses S. Grant asking for a meeting to discuss terms. Grant, having received the letter while camped near the Virginia village of Appomattox Court House, felt jubilant.

The long war was finally nearing its end. But as he rode toward the village to meet the Confederate commander, something shifted inside him. The triumph he had expected to feel was giving way to something else entirely. By the time he stepped into the parlor of a house belonging to a man named Wilmer McLean, the joy had drained out of him completely.

What General Lee’s feelings were, Grant later wrote, I do not know. As he was a man of much dignity with an impassive face, it was impossible to say whether he felt inwardly glad that the end had finally come or felt sad over the result and was too manly to show it. Whatever his feelings, they were entirely concealed from my observation. But my own feelings, which had been quite jubilant on the receipt of his letter, were sad and depressed.

I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought and one for which there was the least excuse. Those words, written years later, come from a man who was never given to exaggeration or sentiment. Grant was dying of throat cancer when he set them down, racing against the clock to finish his memoirs so his family would not be left destitute. The result of that race, the Personal Memoirs of U.

S. Grant, is blunt, unadorned, and at times almost conversational, like a man telling his story across a table. And in those pages, Grant does not hide what he thought of Lee. He did not gush.

He did not build monuments in print. But neither did he tear Lee down the way many other Union officers did. Instead, he delivered something far more complicated: a measured, unsentimental assessment of the man he had spent four years fighting. To understand that assessment, it helps to know the two men who walked into that parlor on April 9, 1865.

Grant had come from the rougher edges of Ohio, a tanner’s son who had failed at just about everything the world had put in front of him before the war finally gave him a purpose. He arrived at Appomattox that day in a private’s blouse, with Lieutenant General straps sewn onto the shoulders, no sword at his side, and the mud of the campaign still clinging to his clothes. Lee, by contrast, was the product of Virginia aristocracy, a man who had walked the halls of West Point with the kind of quiet grace that people still talked about decades later. He arrived in full dress gray, sword at his side, every inch the Southern gentleman.

The contrast between the two men could not have been sharper. Grant noticed it, described it almost matter-of-factly in his memoirs, and then moved on. They had known each other once, back in the old army, during the Mexican War. It had been a brief and distant acquaintance, separated by differences in age and rank.

But at Appomattox, Lee remembered him. They talked a little about Mexico before getting down to the business of surrender, exchanging polite and civil conversation in the middle of the bloodiest war Americans have ever fought. Lee asked for the terms, and Grant supplied them. The Confederate soldiers could go home if they stacked their arms.

They would not be molested as long as they observed their paroles. It was a generous set of terms, far more lenient than many in the North wanted. And Grant intended to hold to every word of it. The deeper judgment of Lee as a soldier would come later in the memoirs, and that is where the assessment gets more interesting.

Grant wrote that he never ranked Lee as highly as some others of the army. That is to say, I never had as much anxiety when he was in my front as when Joe Johnston was in my front. Lee was a good man who had everything in his favor. He was a man who needed sunshine.

That single word, sunshine, carries an enormous weight. Grant meant that Lee performed best when conditions were ideal, when he had unquestioned support across the South, a good deal of sympathy even in parts of the North, and admiration from abroad. Everything he did was right, Grant observed. Lee was treated like a demigod.

The Army of Northern Virginia got the best headlines and the most devotion, while Union generals faced hostile newspapers and divided support at home. Grant believed Lee was never tested in quite the same way other commanders were, and he went so far as to compare him unfavorably to Joseph E. Johnston, who had fought a defensive campaign that forced Grant to think harder and bleed more for every inch of ground. Those passages have been read in many ways over the years.

Some see them as sour grapes, Grant quietly diminishing the rival he had finally beaten. Others read them as simply Grant being Grant, plainspoken and allergic to romance. Either way, the record makes one thing clear: Grant had known from the beginning that Lee was mortal. Back in 1864, when people kept warning him about facing Bobby Lee, Grant brushed the warnings aside.

I had known him personally, he wrote, and knew that he was mortal. He never feared Lee the way some in the North did, though he respected the difficulty of the task before him without question. The Overland Campaign was savage and unrelenting. The names of its battlefields, Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, still carry the power to make people wince.

Cold Harbor in particular weighed on Grant for years afterward. He called it his greatest regret. But he never bought the idea that Lee was unbeatable. Even after the war, when Lee was transformed into something close to a saint across much of the South, Grant refused to join the chorus.

Yet he also never once attacked Lee’s personal character. When some voices in the North demanded that Lee be put on trial for treason, Grant made it clear he would not stand for it. He had given his word at Appomattox. The surrendered men could go home if they stacked their arms.

He intended to keep that promise. When President Andrew Johnson and others talked about hanging Confederate leaders, Grant quietly let it be known that he would resign his commission if the government broke the parole. He protected the man he had defeated. That is not the behavior of someone who hated or despised his opponent.

It is the mark of a man who saw the war as a tragic necessity, not a personal score to settle. That same balance carried into Grant’s presidency. He fought hard against the Ku Klux Klan, enforced civil rights laws, and appointed Black officials. But he also issued pardons to many former Confederates.

His view of Lee remained consistent across the years: a worthy enemy, a general who had earned much of his reputation the hard way, fighting for a cause that was wrong and doomed, yet still a man of personal honor. In 1869, the two men met one final time, this time at the White House. Lee, now president of Washington College, had come to ask for clemency for former Confederates. Grant received him courteously, but the visit was brief.

No long reconciliation took place, and no deep conversation was recorded. Just two men who had once faced each other across battle lines, now trying to live in the same country again. In the end, Grant’s words about Lee are measured. There is no worship and no venom, just the unvarnished truth as he saw it.

Lee was good, but not superhuman. He was brave and dignified, but he was lifted higher by advantages the other side never enjoyed. And when the moment of victory arrived, Grant chose restraint over celebration. He offered generous terms, showed no gloating, and felt a quiet sadness instead of triumph.

So what did Ulysses S. Grant truly think of Robert E. Lee? He thought Lee was a man.

Formidable. Dignified. A soldier who deserved respect. But still only a man.

Not a god on horseback, and not a villain in black. In his plain, stubborn refusal to mythologize, even when the whole country seemed hungry for myths, there is something quietly powerful about Grant himself. In a war that left scars that still have not fully healed, that moment of quiet respect at Appomattox might be one of the few things both sides could, in time, look back on without bitterness. Grant’s own words, set down as he faced his own death, survive as the rawest and most honest account of the war from the man who won it.

He did not deliver a eulogy for his enemy, and he did not deliver a condemnation. He delivered the truth as he saw it, plain and unadorned, with all the complications left intact.