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I BelieveGovernance and Philosophy in America A Top 10 Apple Philosophy Podcast Author: Joel K. Douglas
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Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot?
Monday, 29 December, 2025
[SFX: Solo Guitar playing Auld Lang Syne]Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind? Should old acquaintance be forgot, and the days of long ago?We’ve forgotten the meaning of the song playing in the background when we toast on New Year’s Eve.Let’s remember.Back to Ulysses S. Grant. He couldn’t hear music. Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t. And the most important moment of his life would be defined by a song.Act I. The Man Who Couldn’t Hear MusicWashington, D.C., March 8, 1864.Ulysses S. Grant walks into Willard’s Hotel. Forty-one years old. Filthy from four days on a train. He is the most famous man in America, and nobody recognizes him.The hotel is famous. Senators swagger and generals preen across its thick, patterned carpet. Gas lamps throw a yellow light that doesn’t reach the corners, so faces drift in and out of shadow. Furniture packed in tight clusters. Little tables and chairs arranged for waiting, not resting, crowded by hats, gloves, and half-empty whiskey glasses.The desk clerk eyes Grant as he crosses the room. Mud-spattered coat. Rumpled uniform. No entourage. His boots are caked with Tennessee mud, red clay flaking onto the carpet. The clerk judges his station in life and says there’s nothing available but a cramped room in the garret. The attic.Grant takes it. He signs the register in a plain hand: U.S. Grant & Son, Galena, Illinois.The clerk reads the signature. His face goes white. Suddenly, the Presidential Suite, the rooms Abraham Lincoln occupied before his inauguration, is available after all.Grant declines. The garret is fine.This is Grant. No drama. No ceremony. And something even more peculiar.Ulysses S. Grant cannot hear music.It’s not that Grant “doesn’t like music.” Not that he “has no taste for music.”He can’t hear it.When a band plays, Grant hears only noise. A choir sings, Grant hears chaos. Marches. Hymns. Sentimental ballads. They all register the same way. Pots banging. Wagons rattling. Nothing more.He once described it this way: “I know only two tunes. One of them is ‘Yankee Doodle,’ and the other isn’t.”People took this as a joke. A curmudgeon’s quip. But Grant wasn’t joking. He could recognize “Yankee Doodle” because it came wrapped in parades and flags and ritual. He knew it by context, not by sound. Every other tune in the world was the same to him. Noise.Doctors today call it congenital amusia. The brain can’t process pitch. Each note disappears as soon as it sounds. The pattern never forms.In 1864, they had no name for it. Grant just lived with it. He never explained why music meant nothing to him. But other officers noticed he would leave the room when bands played. He didn’t grimace. He didn’t complain.He just drifted away.Back to Willard’s Hotel. That evening, Grant cleans up and goes down to dinner.He and his thirteen-year-old son Fred take a small table in the crowded dining room. He orders. Within minutes, someone recognizes him. A congressman stands and bellows across the room: “Ladies and gentlemen! The hero of Donelson, of Vicksburg, and of Chattanooga is among us! I propose the health of Lieutenant General Grant!”The chant begins. Grant. Grant. Grant.The diners surge toward his table. He stands awkwardly, bows, tries to eat, gives up. The mob presses closer. For three quarters of an hour, he shakes hands with strangers. Finally, he escapes to his room. He never finishes the meal.Later that night, politicians appear at his door. They rush him through the rain to the White House, where President Lincoln is holding his weekly reception. The East Room is packed. Hundreds of Washington society figures, all hoping to glimpse the western hero.The crowd parts. Grant walks through.Abraham Lincoln stands waiting. They have never met, though they are now the two most famous men in the country. Lincoln is a head taller, six foot four. Grant is five eight.Lincoln steps forward, smiling, and extends his hand. “Why, here is General Grant. I am most delighted to see you, General.”Grant answers with a nod and a few words so quiet Lincoln has to lean in.The Union Army of Grant’s time was saturated in music.More than 500 regimental bands. Drummers and fifers at every unit. Bugles structured the entire day. Reveille. Assembly. Mess call. Sick call. Taps. Music lifted spirits. Stiffened resolve. Gave orders.And Grant was deaf to all of it.He understood music strategically. He watched what it did to other people. Saw men weep at certain songs. Stiffen at others. The way someone colorblind might notice how others respond to a sunrise.After West Point, Grant was a young lieutenant in Mexico. His regiment’s band raised morale, but it needed funding. Bands were absurdly expensive, and politicians loved them. Congress would argue over rifles, but bands needed paid.So Grant ordered the unit’s daily rations in flour instead of bread, at significant savings. Then he rented a bakery. Hired bakers. Sold fresh bread through a contract he’d arranged with the army’s chief commissary. The profit went to music he could not hear.This is who Grant was. Practical. Unsentimental. Results-oriented.Sentiment in the Union Army was a liability.The next morning, Lincoln hands Grant his commission. Lieutenant General of the United States Army. The highest rank in the army.Grant is now in command of all Union forces. More than half a million men.The war is in its fourth year. Two hundred and fifty thousand Union soldiers are already dead or wounded, with little progress to show. Every general Lincoln has appointed to fight Robert E. Lee has failed. They engage. Suffer losses. Retreat north to regroup. Then they do it again.The reality is that the Civil War is a war of attrition. Wars of attrition aren’t clever. Force meets force until one side can no longer continue.To achieve the nation’s ends, Lincoln needs someone different. Someone who doesn’t retreat.Days after the ceremony, Lincoln’s assistant asks what kind of general Grant will be. Lincoln thinks for a moment.“Grant is the first general I’ve had. He doesn’t ask me to approve his plans and take responsibility for them. He hasn’t told me what his plans are. I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. I’m glad to find a man who can go ahead without me.”Lincoln pauses, then adds.“Wherever he is, Grant makes things git.”The Army medical corps had made it official. They called it nostalgia.Not nostalgia like we use the word today, a warm feeling about the past. Nostalgia as a diagnosis. A disease. A killer.Union surgeons wrote down thousands of cases. Men who wasted away, moaning for home. The symptoms look like what we would now call severe depression. Insomnia. Loss of appetite. Withdrawal. Despair. In the worst cases, they just stopped. Refused food. Refused nursing. Died.The army identified a trigger. Music.Sentimental songs did it. Ballads about home. Mothers. Sweethearts left behind. The most dangerous song in camp was “Home, Sweet Home.” Men heard it and broke. So officers barred bands from playing it.Songs like “Auld Lang Syne” carried the same danger. Remembering friends from long ago. Remembering home. Memory as a weapon turned inward. The song that made you weep for the past was the song that could kill you in the present.Grant would have understood that logic perfectly.Now Grant is in Washington, his new commission in hand. Culpeper, Virginia waits, his headquarters with the Army of the Potomac. Robert E. Lee waits, fifty miles south.Grant lays out his philosophy in a single sentence: “The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.”No sentiment. No retreat. Attrition.Act II: The Overland CampaignThe Wilderness, Virginia. May 5, 1864.Grant crosses the Rapidan River at midnight. Sixty thousand men. Pontoon bridges sway in the dark. By dawn, the Army of the Potomac is deep inside a seventy square mile tangle of vines and second growth so dense the soldiers call it, simply, ‘the Wilderness.’The Union Army was routed here one year earlier. Lee’s bold flanking maneuver sent them running. The bones of the dead from that battle lie in the undergrowth. Skulls grin up at passing troops. The new soldiers try not to look.Grant’s plan is simple: move fast and get through the forest before Lee can react. Fight in open country where Union artillery and superior numbers can be decisive.Lee reacts faster.By midmorning, the Wilderness becomes a killing ground that neutralizes every Union advantage.Soldiers couldn’t see twenty yards in any direction. Brush so thick you lose sight of the man next to you. Smoke from musket fire fills the gaps between trees. You only see the enemy by the muzzle flash when he shoots at you.There is no battle line. No coordination. No grand strategy. Only chaos. Small groups of men stumbling through the brush, firing at sounds, bayoneting shapes.Then the forest catches fire.Muzzle flashes ignite the dry leaves. Flames race through the underbrush. Men who are wounded and cannot crawl burn alive. Screams rise above the gunfire. The smoke turns black.The fighting goes on for two days. When it ends, 18,000 Union soldiers are dead, wounded, or missing. Nobody knows how many Confederates. The forest is eerily quiet.To this point, every Union army that faced Robert E. Lee followed the same pattern. Engage. Suffer terrible losses. Retreat north to regroup. Lick wounds. Try again in a few months.Grant’s men expect the same. They’ve been through this before with other commanders. They assume their next march will take them back toward the Rapidan. Back toward Washington. Back toward safety.That night, the army begins to move.The columns form up and start marching. At first, the men don’t know which direction they’re heading. The road winds through the forest. It’s dark. They’re exhausted.Slowly, as the stars wheel overhead, they begin to realize something.They are not marching north.They are marching south.Toward the enemy. Toward Richmond. Toward more fighting.A soldier in the lead regiment described the moment the realization spread: “Wild cheers echoed through the forest. Men waved their hats. They pounded each other on the back. We were going forward.”For four years, too many men had died to give up ground they had seized. They would move forward. Not to glory, but to finality.Grant sits on horseback by the side of the road, watching his army pass. He is smoking a cigar. He says nothing.Spotsylvania Court House. May 8–21, 1864.Grant races Lee to the crossroads. Lee wins. His men dig in before the Union forces arrive. They throw up earthen walls and trenches the soldiers call the Mule Shoe.For two weeks, Grant hammers at those works. He cannot break through. Each assault costs thousands of men. But he keeps attacking. Probing. Looking for weakness.On May 12, he finds one.Before dawn, Union troops mass for the assault. They surge out of the fog, overwhelm the Confederate line, and capture thousands of prisoners, nearly splitting Lee’s army in half.But Confederate reinforcements pour in. The two armies crash together along a trench line barely twenty feet wide. For eighteen hours, they fight hand to hand in the mud.Men bayonet each other over the earthen wall. Stab blindly in the rain. Grab rifles by the barrel and swing them like clubs. The trench fills with bodies.Behind the Confederate line stands an oak tree, nearly two feet thick. By morning, it is gone, cut down entirely by rifle fire. The bullets come so thick and so fast they saw through the trunk.Another 18,000 Union casualties.Grant’s army marches south.Cold Harbor, Virginia. June 3, 1864.The armies face each other across open ground. Lee’s men have spent days digging in. Trenches. Felled trees with branches sharpened and pointed outward, a wooden trap meant to tear apart anyone who tried to charge through. Overlapping fields of fire. As strong a defensive position as any in this war.Grant orders a frontal assault.The night before, Union soldiers know what’s coming. An officer observes something he has never seen. Men throughout the ranks are writing their names and addresses on slips of paper and pinning them to the backs of their uniforms.So they won’t die as unknowns.At 0430, the Union line advances.They cross three hundred yards of open ground under murderous fire. The Confederate line erupts in flame. Men fall in waves, whole regiments cut down before they can close the distance. In some places, the attack lasts twenty minutes. In others, less than ten. It fails.Several thousand men fall in half an hour.The survivors lie in the dirt, pinned down, unable to advance or retreat. The sun rises. It will be a hot day. The wounded begin to cry out for water.Grant and Lee cannot agree on truce terms to retrieve the bodies. For three days, the dead lie where they fell. The wounded die of thirst. The stench reaches both camps.By mid June 1864, Grant has lost fifty-five thousand men in forty days. The casualty lists fill entire pages of Northern newspapers. Mothers read the columns looking for their sons’ names. Wives scan for husbands. The country recoils.The papers call him “Butcher Grant.”Attrition. The worst of humanity. The Union can replace its dead. The Confederacy cannot. Every battle, no matter how costly, weakens Lee more than it weakens Grant.Eventually, the math catches up.Grant never answers the editorials or the accusations. His army keeps marching south.The newspapers won’t write the truth. The Union is winning. Stay the course. Lee is outnumbered and outgunned. He is falling back to prepared positions, killing Union soldiers from behind earthworks, and waiting for the North to lose its nerve.Every previous commander lost his nerve. Saw the bodies. Imagined the grief. Calculated the political cost. Decided the price was too high.Grant marches forward.He knows the alternative is worse.A war that drags on another year. Another two years. Another hundred thousand dead with nothing to show for it. A negotiated peace that leaves slavery in place. A nation permanently fractured.No. Forward is the only way through.[SFX: Solo Guitar playing Auld Lang Syne]And the men who follow him? The men who charge the trenches, pin their names to their coats, and die in the Wilderness fire?They hear the music Grant can’t hear. They carry melodies in their heads. Home, Sweet Home. Lorena. Auld Lang Syne. They sing around campfires. They hum on the march.They are dying of nostalgia, and marching south anyway.Somewhere is the end of it. Appomattox.Interlude: The RappahannockWinter, 1862.Union and Confederate pickets face each other across the Rappahannock. Close enough to shout. Close enough to hear.Informal truces. Coffee traded for tobacco in tiny sailboats floated across the current. Jokes shouted across the water.At night, a fiddle starts up on the Confederate bank: Dixie answered by Yankee Doodle from the Union side. Then, together: Home, Sweet Home. Auld Lang Syne.Melodies that turn enemies back into men.Should auld acquaintance be forgot?Grant wasn’t there.But the men who would follow him to Appomattox were.Act III: The SilenceAppomattox Court House. April 9, 1865.Grant arrives at Wilmer McLean’s house in a mud-spattered uniform. Lee waits in his finest dress coat, sword at his side. They both served in the Mexican War, though Lee would not remember the junior quartermaster who now stands as his conqueror.The Union has won. The terms are generous. Officers keep their sidearms. Men who own horses may keep them for spring planting. No trials. No reprisals. Go home.Lee signs. Mounts Traveller. Rides away.Union artillery batteries begin firing salutes. Soldiers cheer. After four years, they’ve won.Grant hears the guns, the one military sound he can’t misinterpret, and sends immediate orders to stop.“The war is over. The rebels are our countrymen again, and the best sign of rejoicing after the victory will be to abstain from all demonstrations in the field.”A heavy silence falls. Thousands of men who have been trying to kill each other for four years stand in the mud, not knowing what to feel. Near the McLean House stands the 198th Pennsylvania Regiment. Their band includes a young German immigrant named Justus Altmiller. He arrived in America ten years ago. He plays cornet.Altmiller lifts his instrument.The band plays Auld Lang Syne.Should auld acquaintance be forgot?We two have run about the hills, and pulled the daisies fine. We were boys together once, but broad seas between us have roared since the days of long ago.Here’s my hand, my trusty friend. Give me your hand too.Curtain. The Cup[SFX: Guitar playing Auld Lang Syne.]Every New Year’s Eve, we sing and toast. Champagne more bitter than it looks. Words to an old song we barely understand, in a dialect we can’t quite pronounce.Because of the people we were. The friends we had. The country we shared, and still share. The wars we survived.These deserve a toast.We don’t toast “to” the past. We toast “for” each other. The lyrics mean “for the sake of” old times. So don’t raise a glass to what is gone. We raise a glass for the people standing next to us right now. We honor what “was” by showing up for who’s here. Happy New Year.Hear, hear.May God bless the United States of America. 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