Grant had a lot more warts. Lee had fewer but Lee also had a lot more people even from the beginning in the civil war burnishing and airburshing them out of the pictue. Grant has had none.
Once film got going, Lee and the South has had many apologists and glorififiers from Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind) to "Gods and Generals" (or Stonewall Jackson and his friends). Gone with the Wind has been a runaway success, though "Jezebel" which has a far more unsympathetic view of slavery and the south, was never as popular. The movie which was supposed to be a "Northern, Gone with the Wind" -- "Raintree County" was a flop.
Modern attitudes are far more conditioned and influenced by movies, television shows and film thatn the old novels used to be. Generally even today, those films whic show the ante-bellum south as a more or less benign place are far more popular (than those which take an unblinking view of it.
Once, when I was in Bradford County Pensylvania, looking for land for a retirement home, I stayed in a bed and breakfast which was an old Victorian house, extensively remodeled. There were lots of old books, one of them a "History of Bradford County." Leather bound, quite prestigious, with lots of testaments and reccommendations. for those of you not familier, this area is smack dab in the southern area of the Iroquois confederacy in the 18th century, and it was written in the 1870's.
The chapter on the native inhabitants will literally scorch the skin from your face. It shreds the idea of "the hoble savage" and anyone beliving the Indian as an innocent nature loving, greenpeacer ecology denizen will son be summarily disabused of this belief. Remember, the author might have still had vivid memories passed down from the French and Indian Wars, and this was exactly the time when relatives and families moving out west would be full in the way of the depradations of the Indian Wars. Still, it wasn't the worst of the type that I have read. He did attempt to hoe to the records as best he could.
The problem is that no one now is in danger of having their loved ones carried off or massacred by Indians, and it matters not if Indian reprisals are right or not. That is cold comfort to the families who see them as innocents. Wich we now know they are not.
The simple though grim fact is that while the Indian apologists attempt to excuse indian atrocities as "their way" that is "the only way they could react given their culture and means" to say that opens the door up to the other side to note that the whites were then reacing in "their way" that is, "the only way they could react given their culture and means." So you can exhonerate all and move on, or you can take the other tack and condemn all, Indian and white together, for the victim of these "ways and means" still suffers wether innocnet or not, guilty or not, complicit or not, and that the suffering itself is then contidioned on motive. That is, either side KNOWS that the atrocity is atrocious, that is why they are doing it. and be it revenge or not, all you have the means to do or not, it is still atrocious. Thus you either exhonerate all or condemn all, with none of this Marxist, "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
Yes, I know that was Orwell in Animal Farm, but it is Orwell restating the philosophy or Marxist-Leninism.
To return to Grant.
Gran't mistake or sin was that He realized that it was no good to "out Lee, Lee" ha had to pursue the war in a way that Lee could not pursue, and he did, and then he had the ultimate affrontery to win.
Otto
