Lee met Grant at Appomattox:
Northern newspapers had dubbed him “Victor,” a play on the word victory and on King Victor Emmanuel II of Italy. Other headline writers shortened his name to “Ulyss,” a Shakespearean rendition of the famous Greek hero. Those personally close to Grant called him “Lyss” (unless they knew him as a boy, when he went by “Tex”).
There was another nickname for Grant, in both the North and South, and it hurt him, as it would any man. “Butcher,” he was called, in grim rebuke to his willingness to wage war by attrition -- to send wave after wave of blue-coated infantrymen against Confederate lines.
But those tactics had crushed the rebellion, and now as Richmond burned, loud Northern voices rallied around Grant and Lincoln, men whom they had previously doubted, while calling for Lee’s hanging and the South’s destruction.
On this day 150 years ago, however, it was Grant who would decide Lee’s fate and the fate of his men. In “April 1865,” a masterful account of the Civil War’s last month, historian Jay Winik sets the scene this way:
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