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...ound was based on family, culture and tradition. “Lee embodied a way of life that had come down through the age of knighthood and the English country squire.” This is why Lee was tidewater Virginia. He also embodied the noblest elements of his aristocratic ideals. Now Grant, however, was everything Lee was not. Grant grew up the hard way and personified nothing except toughness and sinewy fiber, which any man had who grew up beyond the mountains. Grant was a frontier man who was the exact opposite of the tidewater aristocrats. The most striking contrast to Lee and Grant is that “Lee would fight to the limit of endurance to defend society because defending it was defending everything that gave his own live meaning. Grant on the other hand, would fight with an equal tenacity for the broader concept of society. So you can see that Grant and Lee are in complete contrast with one another, but it was not all contrast. Even though Catton talks a lot about the differences of Grant and Lee, he also talks about their similarities, which I think is the main point he tries to get across. The similarity is that “they were two strong men, these oddly different generals, and they represented the strengths of two conflicting currents….” Two people, who seem so different, can also have a lot in common. They were both great fighters, and their quality of fighting was very much the same. Both had tenacity and fidelity, as Grant showed as he “fought his way down the Mississippi valley in spite of acute personal discouragement, and profound military handicaps,” and Lee “hung on in the trenches at Petersburg after hope itself had died.” They shared a similar characteristic of any good fighter, the refusal to give up. Perhaps their best similarity was the ability to know when to go from war to peace when a fight had ended. Catton does a good job of showing us how these two people, different in their ways, l...