“We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.” - Maya Angelou

From “Lincoln 365,” by Arnold Kunst

October 20

There was a grim simplicity to Grant. In 1863 during the campaign to take Vicksburg, the last Confederate bastion on the Mississippi River, he and his 40,000 men cut themselves off from all outside contact, lived off the land, seemed endlessly to slog through Mississippi swamps – and after a number of spectacular victories including the capture of the capital of Mississippi, ended up attacking Vicksburg not from the river to the west but up through the swamps to the east. And he didn’t whine about the need for reinforcements – he just got on with the job at hand until he got that job done. It looked like Lincoln had finally found a general who knew that winning this thing was going to take bloody, relentless toil in the field against a vastly determined foe. Oysters and champagne on the Potomac weren’t going to cut it.

‘For each ecstatic instant / We must an anguish pay / In keen and quivering ratio / To the ecstasy.’ - Emily Dickinson