Think of the way Robert E. Lee is often described by authors and historians, even those who favor the Union, and how he is often described in terms that would not be out of place in describing a medieval knight (gallant, chivalric, gentlemanly). The way the war in some sense was a struggle between the past (represented by the sharply hierarchical agrarian south with its aristocracies and slave labor) and the future (the industrial, forward-thinking, more friendly toward the concept of egalitarianism north who valued the idea of being self-made, in many ways the birthplace of the “American dream”), and the way the idea of the Confederacy seduces people who don’t know the issues of the war well (or who care more about the aesthetics) through its gauzy visuals and ideas of ideas not unlike the Victorian medieval revival. A lot of Civil War buffs who fanboy over the Confederate generals seem to talk and think of the war almost like a gentleman’s game. Lee himself is a borderline mythological figure as the public knows him nowadays, more idea than man. The Confederate military history focus on sweeping battlefield tactics also reflects on this.

You contrast that with Ulysses S. Grant, considered one of the first modern generals if not the modern general, who saw war as something to quickly and efficiently bring to a close, and how he’s perceived. His prewar stumbling in life, his alcoholism, rough manners, function over form sensibilities. There’s more of a practicality there when one examines Grant and his fellows at the head of the Union army. They were modern men fighting a modern war and struggling to deliver the complicated birth of modernity.

Spritz O’clock - Cansu Rossi , 2025.

Turkish , b. 1980s