ader, it is unbecoming for others, and especially
for men who are not soldiers, to contradict their judgment.

Whether he was a greater soldier than General Robert E. Lee, the
commander-in-chief of the army of the Confederate States, is a question
on which there may always be two opinions. As time passes, and the
passions of the war expire, it may be that wise students of military
history, weighing the achievements of each under the conditions imposed,
will decide that in some respects Lee was Grant's superior in mastery of
the art of war. Whether or not this comes about, Lee can never supplant
Grant as our national military hero. He fought to destroy the Union, not
to save it, and in the end he was beaten by General Grant. However much
men may praise the personal virtues and the desperate achievements of
the great warrior of the revolt against the Union, they cannot conceal
that he was the defeated leader of a lost cause, a cause which, in the
chastened judgment of coming time, will appear to all men, as even now
it does to most dispassionate patriots, well and fortunately lost.

In the story of Grant's life some things must be told that are not at
all heroic. Much as it might be wished that he had been what Carlyle
says a hero should be, a hero at all points, he was not a worshipful
hero. Like ourselves all, he was a combination of qualities good and not
good. The lesson and encouragement of his life are that in spite of
weaknesses which at one time seemed to have doomed him to failure and
oblivion, he so mastered himself upon opportune occasion that he was
able to prove his power to command great and intelligent armies fighting
in a right cause, to obtain the confidence of Lincoln and of his loyal
countrymen, and to secure a fame as noble and enduring as any that has
been won with the sword.

CHAPTER II

HIS ANCESTRY

This hero of ours was of an excellent ancestry. Until lately, most
Americans have been careless of preserving their family records. That
they were Americans and of a respectable line, if not a distinguished
one, for two or three generations back, was as much of family history as
interested them, and all they really knew. This was especially true of
families which had emigrated from place to place as pioneers in the
settlement of the country. Family records were left behind, and in the
hard desperate work of life in a new country, where everything depended
on individual qualities, and forefa