Bruce Catton, "Grant and Lee: A Study in Contrast"

Grant and Lee were two strong men these oddly different generals, and they represented the strengths of two conflicting currents that through them, had come into final collision. Lee was tidewater Virginia, and in his background were family, culture, and tradition... the age of chivalry transplanted to a New World which was making its own legends and its own myth. He was the notion that the old aristocratic concept might somehow surviveand be dominant in American life. Lee embodied the noblest elements of his aristocratic ideal. Through him, the landed nobility justified itself. On the other hand, Grant, the son of a tanner on the Western frontier, was everything Lee was not. He had come up the hard way and embodied nothing in particular except the eternal toughness and sinewy fiber on the men who grew up beyond the mountains. These frontier men were the precise opposites of the tidewater aristocrats. Nevertheless they stood for democracy, not from any reasoned conclusion about the proper ordering of human society.