The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable Players Present
Grant and Lee at the White House

It is not widely known that Robert E. Lee visited Ulysses S. Grant in the White House during Grant's first term as president.  Little is known about this meeting, what was discussed, or how either man felt about meeting with his old adversary.  The following account comes from Anthony Bergen's Dead Presidents blog:

On May 1, 1869, President Ulysses S. Grant welcomed the president of Washington College, Robert E. Lee, to the White House. Lee had considered inviting President-elect Grant to visit Washington College before Grant was inaugurated, but Lee didn’t want to make a request that his busy former adversary felt obligated to accept. After Grant was inaugurated in March 1869, he learned of Lee’s interest in visiting with him, and the President invited Lee to the White House. Unfortunately, there are no definitive answers to what was said between President Grant and General Lee. They two men only spent about 15 minutes together, and one observer suggested that there was a bit of sadness when the two men saw each other. Perhaps it was because of what they put each other through five years earlier, but perhaps it was the fact that the two former generals were older and in much different places.

What’s remarkable about the short meeting is that Robert E. Lee may have been the only American in history to visit the White House after being stripped of his citizenship. A bill to restore General Lee’s American citizenship was passed by Congress in 1975 — 110 years after the Civil War ended — and President Gerald Ford signed off on the restoration of Lee’s citizenship in a ceremony at Arlington House, the home that Lee lived in before it was occupied by Union soldiers during the Civil War and turned into a National Cemetery.

After just fifteen minutes on May 1, 1869, President Grant and General Lee once again parted ways. We don’t know what they said or how they felt or what they thought as they parted. The two men who had been such a huge part of each other’s lives would never see each other again. Perhaps the most amazing thing is that Grant and Lee could come together at all after chasing each other throughout the country and killing thousands of Americans while trying to destroy each other. It’s a tribute to the two men that they were living in a country still needing time to heal, and they stepped forward — leading the way just like they did while waging war — to model for Americans how to wage peace

Well, bad news for historians is good news for the Cleveland Civil War Roundtable Players who will perform an original one act play free to speculate on what Lee and Grant might have said to each other that day.  Join us for what should be an entertaining and educational close to another fine Roundtable year.

Our performers: Portraying Robert E. Lee will be CCWRT past president Mel Maurer, while Ulysses S. Grant will be portrayed by CCWRT Secretary and Treasurer-elect, Chris Fortunato.  Acting as reporters and provocateurs for the evening's festivities will be CCWRT past presidents William F.B. Vodrey and John Fazio.

To make a reservation: Use the Dinner Reservation Form on this website, send an email to or call 440-449-9311 and leave a message on the voice mail.

Meeting place: Meetings are held at Judson Manor at the corner of East 107th Street and Chester on University Circle in downtown Cleveland.  Map to Judson Manor

Act Natural Lee

WILLARD HOTEL
May 2, 1869.

To Mrs. George G. Meade

Today I accompanied General Howard whom you will remember from West Point to attend services at his church the First Congregational at 10th and G streets. The regular minister preached his final sermon on Sunday last and has since departed under a cloud, taking half the congregation with him and alleging many improprieties by Howard who claims the cause of the split is to be found in their different desires for the future of the Negro race, a question of integration versus independent development. He has always been quite the radical and remains a familiar of the Grant administration for whom he heads the Bureau of Freedmen.

Speaking of Grant, I shall not soon forget the events of yesterday morning. The President was ensconced in the lobby at Willard’s and somehow espying me through the fog created by cigars and brandy even at such an early hour, insisted that I accompany him to the White House as he was expecting a person of great importance and of both our acquaintance. As we walked the two blocks of the city Grant confided in me that the best of his former army staff such as Rollins, Dent, Porter and Badeau were either with him at the White House or were named Sherman, which he found vastly amusing. Upon reaching his new home he inadvertently called the doorkeeper “Meade” although that worthy servant politely corrected him to “Pendel” more than once as he slipped the chain to allow us entry to the second floor.

Leaving me quite alone in the secretary’s anteroom Grant went into his office and closed the door. To my surprise, only one hour later John Motley our former Ambassador to the Austrians came into the room followed within a few minutes by none other than General Lee and a civilian couple. I rose at once and held out my hand but he only gave me his hat, understandably confusing me with the absent secretary. All four personages then entered Grant’s office and the door was once again closed. Grant made loud and boisterous sallies about destroying southern railroads, the inexplicable result at Gettysburg, had Lee visited the new cemetery at Arlington and the like but Lee is soft-spoken and I was unable to hear his necessarily brief replies if any.

After no more than ten minutes, a visibly embarrassed General Lee and his party took their leave and he his hat from me with a brief word of thanks. Grant emerged also flushed in the face to say that he’d forgotten my presence but hoped I had enjoyed almost catching up with Lee for a change, before once again vanishing into his office. I sat for a time bemused by his behavior and then left to return to the hotel and my abandoned breakfast plans.

As I walked I fell to pondering why a subordinate commander humiliated at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg should obtain the honor of having a university named after him and a good position within a presidential administration, while another and more significant leader who shone at those same battles may receive no more recognition than a gold medal of Congress, an honorary law degree from Harvard and an onerous military department.

My business here in that most tiresome matter of Reconstruction being almost concluded I anticipate returning to Philadelphia on Tuesday next.

MORE MEADE>>

Editor's Note: In the more than 100 years since his decease, the General has been busy reconstructing from memory his secret, lost letters which shed new light on topics of great interest to the members of the Cleveland Civil War Roundtable. He currently is living in Bloemfontein South Africa working on a complimentary biography of General D. E. Sickles (decs'd) and may be contacted at Majgenlmeade @ aol.com.

Every now and then I get into arguments with people about the law of war.

“There’s no such thing as the law of war,” they say (or words to that effect). “War is hell. Anything goes. The only thing that matters is winning.”

“Oh, really?” I reply. “So you’d have no problem with, say, an officer ordering his men to kill all the unarmed civilians in a foreign town they occupy after it surrenders? Or, as a matter of policy, to always shoot prisoners after they surrender? Or work them to death in a concentration camp? Or torture or rape them? That’d all be fine, right, because there’s no law of war?”

“Uh…no,” they reply.

Clearly there is a law of war – but just how widely-observed it is, and just how effective it actually is, varies from war to war. In Justice in Blue and Gray: A Legal History of the Civil War (Harvard University Press 2010), Scottish legal scholar Stephen C. Neff explores the law of war as it existed and was honored, or more than occasionally breached, during the American Civil War.

Both the United States, as a republic under the rule of law, and the Confederate States, as a group of states attempting to secede from that republic and win independence in its own right, intended from the outset to wage war within the bounds of the law as it was then understood. Both wanted to maintain domestic support and win international backing, and being perceived as lawless or ruthlessly unprincipled would not be helpful in achieving those goals.

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On April 6, Mel Maurer, Chris Fortunato, and I went to Georgetown, Ohio to attend the ceremonial rededication of U.S. Grant’s boyhood home. Georgetown is just east of Cincinnati, about four and a half hours’ drive from Cleveland.

We arrived to find a large tent set up in the backyard of the home; a dozen Civil War-era replica flags snapped in the breeze. Burt Logan, the Ohio Historical Society’s executive director, and Mike DeWine, Attorney General of Ohio, made some dedicatory remarks, as did several local bigwigs, and then it was time to tour the house. It is two stories tall and, after a multimillion-dollar restoration project, looks great both inside and out. The house was built in 1824 for U.S. Grant’s father, Jesse Grant, when the future general was just two years old. "Sam" Grant lived there from 1824-39, when he left for West Point; the family moved away the next year. The house changed hands several times over the years and was eventually in danger of being razed when it was bought by John and Judy Ruthven, local benefactors, who eventually donated it to the Ohio Historical Society. It is now run by the U.S. Grant Homestead Association and was named a National Historic Landmark in 1985. We saw, from an OHS sign, that we were parked on the nearby site of the long-gone Grant tannery, and had the pleasure of meeting former CWRT President Jon Thompson’s brother, Jerry, and his wife, Louella.

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Dear to Democracy
By David A. Carrino
Roundtable Historian 

I am nervous every time I present one of these history briefs, because I know that the knowledge of history possessed by every member of this Roundtable far exceeds my own. But tonight my level of trepidation is at a record high, because tonight's speaker, Harold Holzer, is without question one of the most eminent historians of today. With that in mind, I grappled mightily with how best to present a history brief that is palatable to a renowned historian like Harold, and I came up with three strategies.

I thought that I might try flattery, but then I realized that Harold is such an accomplished historian that no matter how much hyperbole I injected into any flattery, nothing I said would be an exaggeration. I also thought that I could plead ignorance, which in my case is entirely plausible, since I have no formal training in history. I am honored to be the Roundtable's historian, but I will never understand why the Cleveland Civil War Roundtable chose a biochemist to be its historian. When I was in college, history was a course that those of us majoring in science took only because it was a requirement. Because I feared that flattery and pleading ignorance did not provide a sufficiently high likelihood of success, I decided upon a third tactic. I will present a history brief that has as its focus Harold's own words.

The passage that I selected for the history brief comes from the Introduction for a book titled Lincoln on Democracy. This book is a compilation of various writings by Abraham Lincoln that was edited by Harold Holzer and Mario Cuomo, and Harold wrote the Introduction. There is an anecdote in this passage about Venezuela that occurred in 1957. This anecdote is particularly appropriate because it demonstrates that Lincoln's words still have power in modern times. The motivation for the book Lincoln on Democracy was a desire by some Polish schoolteachers for documents about American democracy that could be used to educate students in Poland during the early 1990s when that country was transitioning to democracy. Eventually the book, meaning Lincoln's writings, was translated into Polish. The last part of this passage conveys succinctly and brilliantly why history is relevant and also expresses, much better than I ever could, why this biochemist has done an about-face on his college-age opinion that history is just an unpleasant and burdensome mandate and has instead come to enjoy and appreciate history. The last part of this passage includes some Lincoln quotes woven into text that Harold wrote. I won't indicate the quotes because doing so makes this passage sound clumsy when it is read aloud. If this history brief is posted on our web site, then everyone can see which words are Harold's and which are Lincoln's. What I think is interesting about that part of the passage is how seamlessly Harold's and Lincoln's words are woven together, as if Harold and Lincoln are of one mind.

CONTINUE BRIEF>>