General Gordon boasted that there was “no doubt but that Grant is retreating.” “You are mistaken,” Lee corrected him, “quite mistaken. Grant is not retreating; he is not a retreating man.”46 The thought was expressed more poetically by Walt Whitman, who ardently followed the Overland Campaign: “When did [Grant] ever turn back? He was not that sort; he could no more turn back than time! . . . Grant was one of the inevitables; he always arrived; he was invincible as a law: he never bragged—often seemed about to be defeated when he was in fact on the eve of a tremendous victory.”
