Ulysses S. Grant met Robert E. Lee at Appomattox, as we all know, but you might learn more about them if you met them in their respective homes.

Arlington House in Virginia is Lee’s stately – heck, stately doesn’t do it justice – it is Lee’s grand home overlooking Washington, D.C. It is huge, big enough inside but made even grander in appearance by the massively columned porch in the front. From this prospect Lee could gaze down on the seat of the federal government, nearly a part of the city but a little removed. It’s a position that ultimately did not bode well for the union.

White Haven in St. Louis, Missouri, is Grant’s much more modest farm home. It was nice in its day – certainly large for a frontier home – but you could fit several of them into Arlington House and still have room for the Lee family's sewing room, guest chamber and parlor. Originally belonging to the family of Grant’s wife, White Haven ultimately became the retirement property that Grant himself never got to use.

Both of the homes were the result, in part, of slave labor. The NPS is more careful and insistent about this aspect at Arlington House, just as it is careful to say that the memorial is in honor of Lee’s service to the reconciliation of the nation after the war and, implicitly, not to his rebellion. Nevertheless, one suspects that a lot of visitors come to Arlington House because they are in awe of the daring Confederate general and not the quiet collegian that followed.

Having married into a branch of the family, Lee lived his life in the shadow of George Washington. Washington artifacts surrounded him at Arlington House – it was built as a kind of museum to the first president – and it’s easy to imagine that if some people are born to greatness, others absorb it like a kind of radiation. Taken together with his own family’s patriotic past, Lee must have felt the weight of decision upon him in 1861. You can sympathize with all this and still take issue when the narrative in the museum ends with the simple declarative sentence that when Lee joined the Confederacy “He had no other choice.”

The Missouri farm, on the other hand, has no sense of greatness about it. It’s wooded and removed even in modern St. Louis and would have been that much more isolated when Grant lived here in the 1850s. He struggled with the farm, didn’t particularly shine, and went on to try life elsewhere as a merchant. Humbled by the land, Grant faced a trial here that seems to have contributed to the one attribute most often connected to him: Tenacity. Knocked down, he got up again and shouldered – eventually soldiered – on.

Ultimately and in memory, the homes take on the mythic qualities we connect with the men: The aristocratic East versus the democratic West. Refinement versus plainness. The big plantation versus the smaller farm, and the surprising turn in the history of the nation that led one to triumph over the other.