Standing directly in front of the United States Capitol, facing the Washington Monument, with the Lincoln Memorial facing back from the opposite end of the Mall, this statue of General Grant occupies an honored place in the city, an appropriate location for a man who along with Lincoln was credited with saving the Union. One can start an argument very easily among students of the Civil War by asking who was the greater general in the conflict—U.S. Grant or Robert E. Lee. The answer is complicated, but regardless of how one decides the comparison, Grant achieved a record seldom equalled in the annals of war. From his first engagement at Belmont to the surrender of Lee at Appomattox, Grant never lost a major battle.

Grant's capture of the fortress city of Vicksburg on July 4, 1863, completed what most scholars believe to be the most brilliant campaign of the war. By capturing John Pemberton's army of 35,000 and dividing the Confederacy at the Mississippi River, Grant virtually doomed the South to being completely surrounded and eventually defeated. As Grant had captured a Confederate army of about 15,000 at Fort Donelson in 1862, Lee's Army of Northern Virginia was the third he had neutralized, putting something like 80,000 Confederate troops out of action. At the same time, no serious student of war doubts the brilliance of Robert E. Lee, whose personal character and leadership abilities rank him among America's finest men of any generation, nor do many seriously doubt that had Lee possessed the kind of resources Grant commanded, the outcome of the war might well have been different. But great generals adapt their strategies and tactics to the resources available, and some military historians have argued that Lee's two invasions of the North (which cost him about 35,000 casualties) led to losses that the Confederacy could ill afford. Those debates will go on as long as people study history. In the meantime Grant looks out over the Mall, while the most famous statue of Robert E. Lee looks out over the Gettysburg battlefield from the point where Pickett's charge began. Both men served their countries with honor--but both could not win.