Confederate General Good. Union Generals Bad.

Great Debates
1

Perhaps not surprisingly, I often hear this line of thinking during my visits to Richmond and points south: the Union generals were bunglers whereas the Confederate generals were, on average, superior strategists and tacticians. The North prevailed only because of its superiority in size and supplies.

Whereas some of these Union detractors will allow for Gen. W.T. Sherman’s skills, many dismiss Grant as a hopeless drunkard who, again, prevailed only because of a large, well-equipped army.

Such caricatures don’t sit well with me. What’s your take?

2

I’m not sure I agree with that, either. I mean, quite a few of both the Federal and Confederate high-ranking officers were at West Point together as young men, so I am assuming that they all learned the same stuff about how to fight a war. I think that there were an equal number of good strategists/tacticians on both sides.

However, I will grant you (pardon the pun) that, in my opinion, the North did ultimately win because the South simply ran out of men and materiel. They might have had a better chance for victory if France and England had been able to assist them. The two countries were originally supposed to have aided the South during the War Between the States in exchange for exclusive rights to Southern cotton when (not if, mind you) the South won; but I guess the Blockade kinda killed that.

3

Like everything, it’s an oversimplification. There were some really bad Confederate generals. Braxton Bragg and Leonidius Polk come to mind. There were also some really good Union ones. In addition to Sherman, there was Sheridan, Thomas, Grant (who doesn’t get the credit he deserves), and Meade, who, in spite of failing to follow up his victory at Gettysburg and not being very aggressive strategically, was a very good, in my opinion, tactical general.

4

I agree with Amazing, there were some good Union generals and some poor Southern ones but on appearance, it did seem that the South had better ones.

HOWEVER, it is much. much easier to defend then to attack and the South almost always defended. Remember, Lee himself invaded the North twice and acted very incompetent on both occasions.

Lee probably would have sucked as a Northern general.

The South also had very, very good cavalry at the start of the war and it was very difficult to attack against superior cavalry. Imagine today trying to attack against an enemy that has very good tanks and yours are inferior in quality and training.

Blink

5

Hmm, I’ve always been something of a low-grade Civil War buff. Even wrote a ten page paper on this very topic (relative competency of military leadership for north and south) . . . which, naturally, is nowhere to be found. Anyway. . .

In and of itself, the assertion that the North only won because of superior resources and manpower is accurate. The American Civil War was truly a total war, in which whomever could replace men and material the most efficiently and for the longest stretch of time would win. Barring a failure of will in the north to prosecute the war, a military victory for the CSA was realistically impossible.

Needless to say, however, it does not follow from this that the southern armies were better led. The CSA had certain advantages that help to explain the seeming abundance of improbable southern victories in the war’s first two years. (1) They were generally on the defensive, both strategically and tactically. Given Civil War-era tactical doctrine, this was preferable to the offense in most regards. (2) They were fighting on known ground, whereas the Union armies were relatively ignorant of the terrain. When Southern armies ventured north, they were usually defeated. (3) They had the benefit of interior lines. While coming up with supplies in the first place may have been more difficult for the south, moving them (and troops) around was frequently easier for them than for the north. (4) In the eastern theater, where Lee’s Army achieved the south’s most salient victories, the terrain is dominated by several east-west rivers that are a constant impediment to the attacker (in this case, the Union). In the west, where the rivers ran primarily north-south (thereby providing a valuable means of transportation of both men and material to an attacker), the north fared considerably better.

Then again, one would be hard-pressed to prove that the north didn’t have a glut of losers in high command positions. Halleck? Banks? Butler? All without a redeeming quality (militarily speaking). McClellan was a mixed bag; an excellent tactician and a walking boon to morale, he was hampered by a pathological, irrational, and counter-factual fear of superior Confederate numbers, causing him to be unbearably slow and indecisive. Longstreet would insist after the war that McClellan could have “taken Lee’s army and everything in it” at Antietam had he not held two whole corps in reserve. A cursory examination of the battle bears this out.

I maintain that the south’s surprising victories in the early part of the war were (A) heavily influenced by the four inherent advantages mentioned above and (B) largely an accident of superior organization in one specific theater. The Army of Northern Virginia was organized into just two (and, after Chancelorsville, three) corps. To command these corps, the thoroughly competent Lee chose the thoroughly competent Longstreet and the thoroughly brilliant Jackson. Lee could afford to trust his subordinates to carry out vague orders to the best of their ability and understanding of the battlefield. The Army of the Potomac, in contrast, had a constantly changing structure and command heirarchy that featured up to and including a dozen corps. By all indicators, finding competent corp commanders was incredibly difficult. Lee had only to find two. McClellan et al had to find a dozen; add to this a few unfortunate (mostly political) appointemts, as well as the inherent difficulty of managing so large a bureaucracy (particularly in the abscence of electricity), and you begin to get a sense of what The Army of the Potomac had to overcome, all while destroying an enemy army, invading a large nation, and finally conquering it. That they eventually did all of this is a testament to their ultimate competency.

Of course, in the west, (the meddlings of Halleck and the incompetency of Rosecrans aside) the southern generals were no macth for Grant, Sherman, and Thomas. Anyone who argues that southern generals were “better” than Union generals ought to take a long, hard look at Braxton Bragg.

Finally, even if we allow that the CSA Army and corps command was superior in the eastern theater to USA army and corps command, that has to be tempered by all other levels of military leadership. Lincoln was far preferable to Davis (yes, this mattered). More importantly, I would argue that Confederate military talent was relatively front-loaded. That is, the average competency of commanders below all but the highest of levels were not as skilled as their superiors, and that the CSA had a very difficult time finding young talent to replace losses among generals. Many southern generals proved to be increasingly incompetent with each successive promotion. John Bell Hood was an excellent division commander, a barely adequate corps commander, and a horrible army commander. Ewell and A.P. Hill made very good division commanders, but fared merely adequately in their first battle as corps commanders (Gettysburg), at least as compared to the standards set by Jackson.

The Union, by contrast, had several very young, very intelligent officers in surprisingly high level positions by the end of the war. Towards the end, they had weeded out the better part of their deadwood in division and corps level command. The ascendency of Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Thomas, Meade and Hancock (to name a few) was the death knell for the CSA. Lincoln, at long last, had found men who would fight (and well). So:

– Much of the (perceived) CSA superiority had to do with terrain and other factors beyond anyone’s control.
– If there was a southern leadership advantage, it was exclusively in the east.
– If there was this advantage, it was primarily an advantage of only a handful of men over another handful.
– If there was then this advantage, it was temporary.
– Regardless, the North had a demonstrable advantage in the west (which was, strategically, more important than the east).
– Regardless, mean competency for generals of all stripes favored the Union by the end of the war (though this is admittedly hard to measure due to increasingly poor supply for the CSA).

Conclusion: On balance, over time, on average, a marginal-moderate Union advantage in competency of military leadership.
– Jer

6

I think the problem lies in this: both Northerners and SOutherners proceed from a wrongheaded assumption. Both sides assume that the North was so powerful that the South’s cause was doomed from Day One. IF you accept this notion, it seems rather remarkable that the South held out as long as it did… which leads some to assume that the South’s generals must have been brilliant (witness the deification of Robert E. Lee in the South) and the North’s generals must have been cowardly bumblers (George McClellan, in particular, has been treated very badly and very unfairly by historians).

Southern apologists are predisposed to romanticize the South, and to glorify the South’s leaders. You’ll rarely hear a Southerner question Robert E. Lee’s decisions, however disastrous (no, some other poor sap, like Longstreet, always takes the rap for Southern blunders- Lee remains sacrosanct and above reproach).

On the other hand, Northern generals take unfair heat, because too many people assume that, since the North had the money, the manpower, and a virtuous cause, they SHOULD have just marched right into Richmond and squelched the rebellion.

The U.S. had never had a large standing army before, and it was bound to take time to build the kind of military machine needed to defeat the Confederacy. Winfield Scott knew that, and his “Anaconda” plan called for a huge army, and gradual choking off of key points in the South. Abraham Lincoln didn’t have the patience (or sensed that the American people didn’t have the patience) for such a plan, so he tried to fight the war with 90 day volunteers.

In the early days of the war, the North’s generals were given a near-impossible assignment. And they’ve been judged harshly for their inability to do the impossible.

7

Another thing to keep in mind is that, for various reasons, the officer corps of the Regular Army had a high percentage of Southerners. This left the Union with a leadership crisis when the war started, so they were forced to rely more heavily on militia officers and brevet promotions. It could be a factor.

8

As a Virginian, I’ve had to swallow this sort of crap my whole life. However, there are compelling explanations for the myth. They might be worth considering. Note that this applies only to the Army of Northern Virginia and the fighting in and around that vicinity.

Confederate strategy throughout the war focused very heavily upon the protection of the (second) capital of the Confederacy, Richmond. Furthermore, Lee’s status as a commander quickly grew to near-legendary status. It didn’t hurt that he visited the President and the war offices quite often due to his proximity to the capital. The Army of Northern Virginia was accorded the highest priority as far as supply and manpower went.

The result, as Douglas Southall Freeman makes clear, is that Lee had first pick among available generals. Everyone wanted to serve under Lee. Furthermore, Lee had a habit of “promoting elsewhere,” or encouraging such promotion, those generals who failed to meet his standards. There is a long and somewhat ignominious list of those generals, too.

Attrition in the ANV was high. Of Lee’s Lieutenant Generals only one, “Fightin’ Dick” Anderson, escaped death or severe injury during the course of the war. The talent pool never ran completely dry, and very good, very young generals had the chance to excercise high command. For example, John B. Gordon ended the war commanding II Corps. He was thirty-three years old.

A side effect of the high turnover was the opportunity for a large number generals to distinguish themselves.

Then, there is the curious habit of certain people tending to forget the little things that lost the Confederates the war. “Old Bald Head” Ewell operated seamlessly and with amazing battlefield finesse when working alongside Jackson in the Valley Campaign. However, after he lost a leg, he appears to have become increasingly indecisive, notably making a very costly, possibly war-losing, mistake on the first day at Gettysburg. A.P. Hill saved the day at Antietam Creek, but as a Corps commander he was often accused of dilatoriness and disorganization.

And, of course, being a Confederate general in Virginia got you all kinds of glory, because they were defending the capital of the nation against desperate odds.

There was really only one way to win a large victory on the open battlefield, and that was to tenaciously defend while preparing a flanking counterattack. This the Army of Northern Virginia did time after time, at Antietam, Chancellorsville, Second Manassas, the Wilderness, etc. For whatever reason, Northern generals in Virginia rarely had the chance to do the same.

The most important thing to remember is that all the glory in the world couldn’t stop a gritty, prototypical modern general. Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan proved that. That those geniuses sometimes fail to be accorded the same flashy adulation that Lee, Jackson, and Stuart regularly receive is probably due in part to their no-nonsense approach to fighting. Hey, they won. That’s what counts.

I think that it’s worth pointing out that there is only one high-ranking Virginia general who never lost an engagement when commanding independently during the Civil War. That was George H. Thomas, who fought for the Union, and whose statue should have a place of honor along Monument Ave. in Richmond. Not only did he never lose, he was one of the few fighting for the right side.

9

There is an excellent book out that explores a wide range of questions about the American Civil War, military, political, economic and social, in what seems to me to be a pretty evenhanded manner. The book is Weigley, Russell F., A Great Civil War, A Military and Political History, Indiana University Press (2000). I have seen it a Barnes and Noble, Borderers and Amazon. It can be ordered from the publisher at iuporder@indiana.edu. Weigley is professor emeritus at Temple University. The book is well written, thoughtful and logical, without a trace of flag waiving.

The thread question has a fairly simple answer. The hallmark of good generalship has always been controlled audacity. If nothing else, Lee was audacious and required the same trait in his subordinates. This is why the Army of Northern Virginia was successful when other Southern armies were not. Southern commanders in the West were either overly conservative and cautious, such as Bragg, or reckless, as in the case of Hood. There were exceptions to this pattern. Forrest certainly combined audacity and an ability to recognize what objectives were obtainable and what ones were not. Whether Forrest was up to the task of commanding a large force of all arms is unknowable, since he never had the chance.

With the possible exception of Sheridan, the North never had an army commander who came close to matching Lee’s capacity to take a calculated risk. Grant and Sherman certainly operated within the established conventions. Both achieved their most dramatic results when they abandoned conventions by cutting lose from their supply lines. In the case of Grant in the Vicksburg Campaign; in Sherman’s case when he marched from Atlanta to Savanna with Hood lose in his rear. Both took a huge chance, and ran the risk of being cut off and having their army starve to death.

It is no accident that Lee alone among Southern was a successful commander. His approach, however, recognized that a long war would be a disaster for the South. Ultimately, the success of the Army of Northern Virginia was bought a price so high that Lee lost the ability to be audacious after Gettysburg. His attempts at risky maneuver in late 1863 and 1864 failed because he simply did not have the manpower to pull it off.

It is not a matter of the South having good generals and the North bad ones. It is a matter of Lee being a superb general and the North having good generals. As long as Lee had sufficient soldiers and was required to meet one threat at a time he was the superior general. While the North tried to mount multiple operations any number of times, it never managed to place Lee in a position that he had to confront simultaneous, coordinated threats until the last weeks of the war.

10

U.S. Grant is my all-time favourite general, so I’m obliged to weigh in on his defense. He’s generally portrayed in the South as a drunk and a fool for the following reasons:

  1. He beat Lee.
  2. He was never any good at anything besides being a soldier.
  3. He supported the rights of black people.

It is certainly true that Grant was a failure at everything he ever did outside the Army, save writing his memoirs, which were a big commercial success. He blew more business ventures than a pyramid scam devotee. He was not a good President, on the whole, and was easily taken in by people, as he lacked a prudent degree of skepticism and care in dealing with others. He was quiet and shy by nature and was depressed when he was away from his wife. Grant didn’t like violence and was sickened by the sight of blood. His alleged drunkenness is almost certainly nonsense, though; Grant liked his drink, like most guys do, but he wasn’t a drunk.

As a soldier, however, Grant was in his element. He was a hero of the Mexican War and a brilliant leader. I would argue without hesitation that Grant, not Lee, is the greatest general in American history.

Grant was one of the few people who was blessed with an abundance of both physical and moral bravery. His physical bravery was legendary and proven in battle in the Mexican wars, and he was certainly a capable physical soldier - Grant was one of the finest horsemen in the United States - but he had a level of moral bravery as well. That’s what separates Grant from McClellan; McClellan was a smart man but did not have the courage of his own convictions with respect to command. Grant never lacked that. And you certinly cannot argue with Grant’s long string of military victories, often against forces as powerful as his own.

Norman Dixon argues in On the Psychology of Military Incompetence that the military tends to attract incompetent commanders by encouraging personality traits that are conducive to military bungling, specifically:

  • Authoritarian personality complexes
  • Love of “bullshit” and military detail at the expense of tackling real problems (this is a psychological defence mechanism against the stress of making real decisions)
  • Sexual hangups
  • Resistance of creativity or change
  • Indecisiveness
  • Disregard of the abilities of one’s enemy, which tends to be expressed as bigotry
  • Unwillingness to listen to information or intelligence, especially when it is bad news
  • Tendency to ascribe events to “Fate”, superstition, hidden conspiracies, or other externally projected sources

If you run through that list for any number of colossally inept generals, you will find they match the list quite well. But Grant matches NONE of these things:

  • He did not display authoritarian personality traits (note that “authoritarian” doesn’t mean autocratic. Grant WAS autocratic, which is a good trait to have in a general.)
  • He disliked things military and had no interest in drill or any of that crap
  • He didn’t have any sexual hangups I’m aware of
  • He was open to creative solutions
  • He was extremely decisive and firm in his decisions and was famously good at giving clear, concise and timely orders
  • He did not underestimate his enemy and was remarkably un-bigoted for his time
  • He insisted on good intelligence
  • As near as I can tell he was not prone to blaming events beyond his control for his failures

As good a tactical thinker as Lee was, Grant understood warfare on a strategic level I don’t think many others did. The generals of the time were prone to thinking of warfare as a succession of set-peice battles; you moved your aqrmy somewhere important and then engaged the enemy in a tactical chess match. Lee, who was tactically brilliant but failed to see the importance of the war being fought beyond Virginia and environs, is a good example. Grant did not suffer from that failure; he understood the strategic implications of warfare and pursued total war on a grand scale. It’s fine to say the Union had a huge advantage in men and material, and they did, but Grant and generals like Sherman understood that that advantage had to be exploited on a large scale.

11

Rick Jay
What would you say about Grant’s tactics during the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, or Cold Harbor?

Why do you think Grant earned the reputation of being a butcher?

12

Just a few words in defense of Grant’s approach in the spring of 1864, any number of Union Commanders had tried to destroy Lee’s army in a great Napoleonic battle. For one reason or another having to do with bad coordination, hesitance to totally commit to a maneuver, the resiliency of the Army of Northern Virginia and the difficulty in staging a war ending battle, it never worked. Grant early recognized that in order to win the war the Union Army in the Eastern Theater (essentially, in Virginia) had to keep Lee’s army tied up so that it could not attempt a grand maneuver. Grant also recognized that the Union advantage in manpower was such that the Army of the Potomac could afford to take large losses, provided in imposed comparable losses on the Army of Northern Virginia. With the exception of a single general assault at Cold Harbor, Grant managed to do just that. The crude analogy is a fist fight between a slugger and a boxer. If the slugger can get in close and pound the boxer, all of the boxer’s skill will not keep the slugger from prevailing.

The strategy Grant chose was to pound Lee in Virginia while Sherman and others tore the heart out of the Confederacy while Lee was occupied. It was not pretty and it imposed unprecedented casualties on Grant’s army, but it worked.

All you have to do is look at Grant’s performance at Vicksburg and Chattanooga to refute any contention that Grant was a mere butcher. Rather, he was the Union commander who had the moral courage to commit the Army of the Potomac to a strategy that would win the war, and the grit not to lose resolve when confronting Lee.

13

It’s an interesting question, which I think hinges upon two main factors.

#1) Political need.

For the Confederacy, there was little political need to offer patronage to politicians by offering them commands in the army. Most of the states that joined the Confederacy did so out of fervor and overwhelming desire; there was little need to shore up support by giving politically motivated appointments as there was little internal move against fighting for independence.

Conversely, for the Union, there was a great need for such patronage. Several of the states which remained in the Union did so half-heartedly (or had to be forced to stay in the Union). There was a large segment of the population which felt that if the South wanted to go, just let 'em go. In order to rally some support for the war, Lincoln had to parcel out a great deal of commands to people who had political pull but no real skill- Nathaniel Banks (Democrat and former Speaker of the House who would get knocked about by Jackson in WV, then go off in a disasterous campaign in LA two years later); Ben Butler (Democrat and keynote speaker at the convention which nominated Douglass in '60 who would screw up Grant’s last chance at a quick victory against Lee in '64); John C. Fremont (Republican candidate for President in '56 who would screw up command in Missouri and was removed for issuing edicts against slavery which led thousands to join the Confederate army); not to mention corps officers like Sigel and Schimmelpfenning who great at encouraging German-born immigrants to join the Union Army but miserable at actually commanding troops in the field.

In addition, the nearness of the Army of the Potomac to Washington led generals to make political allies in Congress and play back-biting games: McClellan would become the darling of the Democrats and anti-abolitionists, and couldn’t politically be fired until the Republicans had won enough seats in Congress that Lincoln could risk it; his successors Hooker and Burnside spent most of their pre-command time making friends amongst the high command and politicians and even after being disgraced as an Army commander managed to regain positions as Corp commanders (which Hooker, at least, was good at; Burnside was miserable at nearly every matter he tried).

So while the Confederate high ranks were mostly free of incompetent appointees and idiots shielded by political friends (with exceptions, of course- Bragg was pathetic but loved by Davis, and Joe Johnston was very competent but loathed and left out to dry), the Union suffered continually from it.
#2) Timeliness.

The ANV was always well-led; Joe Johnston and Lee both were strong commanders. Conversely, the AoP didn’t see even competent commanders until mid-'63 and Meade.

The AT was mediocrely led, save for the brief period between Vicksburg and Atlanta when Joe Johnston was in charge; conversely, the AoT and AoC saw equal or worse commanders until Grant took charge in early '63 and Sherman took charge in early '64.

And in the West, Fremont the incompetent was replaced by Curtis the mediocre just as Van Dorn the incompetent was being replaced by the good E.K. Smith.

So while the Union had probably just as many- if not more- strong and competent army commanders than the Confederacy (Grant, Sherman, Thomas vs. Lee and J. Johnston), they didn’t get into place until much later in the war. Thus, the impression was given that the Confederacy was better led, because it was in terms of total time, if not in terms of aggregate quality.

14

We should probably note also that the generals were fighting the American Civil War.

Lee and his corps and division commanders were, generally, highly competent, if not brilliant, men. Unfortunately, they were all on the wrong side to display their brilliance. The Confederacy did not need to, and, barring a level of incompetence that the Union never quite managed to display, could not win the war. They needed not to lose the war, a facet of grand strategy common to the needs of every rebellion, but which Davis and Lee never grasped (Johnston did, and was essentially rusticated in command of what Davis incorrectly supposed would be a secondary front). Lee’s failure to figure this out lead to Gettysburg; had he not decided on this campaign, the South might be fighting yet. Hood was reckless, true, but Jackson was insanely aggressive. He merely happened to be up against opposition where he could get away with it.

Grant certainly did not the flash and brilliance displayed by some of the Confederate generals. If we judge that the mark of excellence in a general is the ability to take any imaginable army across any imaginable terrain, and fight and wim battles and wars with it against any imaginable opponent, then I think we must concede that Grant was at best mediocre by that standard. If, however, the standard that we judging by is the ability to take the conditions and beat the opponent actually at hand, then Grant shows very well indeed. He did, after all, more or less win the war (the “more or less” only to note that others did have a part in it).

An interesting Gedankenexperiment would be: have the North and South switch officer corps, leave everything else the same, and see the results. My guess: Lee’s aggressiveness combined with the Union’s greater material resources would win the war militarily in two years; if he failed to do that, however, it would bog down into a head-butting match which would drag on for the rest of the 1860s, until the Union gave it up as a bad job, and conceded the Confederacy de facto, and probably de jure, independence.

15

Grant earned the reputation of being a butcher because the Union took high casualties during the Wilderness campaign and that’s what the press called him at the time. Grant ALSO earned the reputation of being drunk on the job, which wasn’t true, either.

That said, Grant’s army did take high casualties at times; of course, so did Lee’s. It would certainly be hard to characterize Gettysburg as being anything other than a bloody disaster for Lee. Massive full-scale wars tend to do that. Cold Harbor was an aberration in an otherwise awesome string of victories.

As S.G. points out, however, Grant had a strategic grasp of the war Lee lacked. When what was needed was tactical brilliance, Grant certainly had that, as his western victories attest. But Grant understood that the war had to be won through a campaign of ceaseless, devastating battle. His was the strategic advantage, and it had to be pressed at all times, and that’s what he did. While the McLellans and Hookers wanted to carefully maneuver their way to winning Austerlitz II - a big, war-winning battle in one day - Grant understood that the destruction of the Confederacy required that the rebel army be mercilessly pursued and destroyed, not defeated in a chess match.

And it worked. Lee didn’t know how to deal with that, allowing his army to bleed itself white in pyrrhic victories and devastating losses. Perhaps Grant’s army suffered more casualties than it would have under McLellan, but McLellan would have lost the war, and far more evil would have come of that.

16

Oh, what the hell, I’ll chime in as well. Normally I’m reluctant to engage Civil War buffs - They tend to be both staggeringly well-read and absolutely zealous about their opinions :wink: . So I reserve the right to flee with my tail between my legs if the heat gets to be too much :smiley: .

First off, in regard to the OP, I agree with VarlosZ :slight_smile: .

Second - In my opinion both Grant and Lee were flawed ( if highly skilled )commanders:

I’ll disagree with both Spavined Gelding and ( presumably ) RickJay - Grant’s campaigns in 1864 were an utter waste. Grant didn’t need to engage Lee. He just had to fix him in place. With the enormous superiority Grant had in men and material by that point, all that would have required was skirmish and manoeuvre, all while presenting a strong threat to Richmond ( which the Confederacy could never afford to lose, no more so than at this late point, whereas D.C.'s value as a target had diminished due to Union success and inertia ). Lee no longer had the strength to be a creditable offensive threat, at least not in any meaningful way. Sure Lee could have tried a “Battle of the Bulge”-style tactical move and attempted to break out. But given Grant’s competence ( he certainly was that, at the very least ) and Lee’s own lack of resources, it would likely would have had about the same results as Hitler’s little ( stupid ) gamble.

Nope, Grant, if he had truly been a brilliant commander, he should have had the strategic vision to see that all he had to do was pin Lee down, while Sherman dismantled the Confederacy from the rear. Grant may have won the war a little more quickly ( but Sherman was winning it and would have done so eventually ), but he did so at staggering and, IMHO, unnecessary cost. He deserved his title of “butcher”, despite his well-deserved plaudits for the Vicksburg campaign.

However I will grant ( snicker :stuck_out_tongue: ) that political pressure may have been brought to bear by the short-sighted, if he had been viewed as just dithering.

As for Lee - He too had a failure of strategic vision. Despite his tactical virtuosity, he always seemed convinced that, absent a political solution, in order to win he had to destroy the enemy army. Both of his forays North were a disaster because he insisted in engaging the Union in a slugging match ( however well orchestrated - And at Antietam it wasn’t even that ). The Confederacy simply lacked the manpower and resources to carry out that sort of approach, no matter how impressive Lee’s battlefield acumen was ( and really, he should have got his clocked cleaned at Antietam a lot more thoroughly than he did - the Union muffed it ). Jackson was the superior commander in my estimation, because in addition to his tactical ability, he had the foresight to realize that the only way to beat the North in a fight, was to not engage them, but rather force them onto the “horns of a dilemma” and threaten the North in such a way as to put them on the strategic defensive ( and thus shatter morale in the North and win the war via public opinion ). This probably would have only have worked in the earlier stages of the war - But Jackson, as I recall, had an opportunity to do just that, but Grant and Davis refused to release the troops necessary for Jackson’s ( admittedly audacious ) gambit.

All of which is not to take away Grant and Lee’s standing as superior generals. They certainly were, especially compared to a lot of the compeitition. They just could have been better :smiley: .

  • Tamerlane
17

That’s what I get for being such a horrendously slow and easily distracted typist :smiley: . Yes indeedy, it does in fact appear as though I disagree with RickJay :slight_smile: .

RickJay: I think the difference in our positions might be summed up as you regard Grant’s assaults as necessary to hold Lee in place, while I don’t. Sound right?

I suppose you could be right - But I’m sceptical. As I stated in that earlier post, I just don’t think Lee had the muscle to present anything but a solid defense at that point. I doubt he could have pulled a rabbit out of his hat against Grant, while facing that sort of disadvantage. And he sure as hell couldn’t afford to abandon Richmond.

Nah, I’m standing by my original post for now :slight_smile: .

  • Tamerlane
18

Come on people.

Grant…I have many more men than you. I can lose many more than you can. So lets have at it.

It’s that simple.

Y’all try something…look for official northern casualty lists from the time of the battles. You won’t find any. They weren’t allowed to mention them. Because of the uproar they would have caused in the north. I gotta admit his strategy worked.

He would hit at Lee…lose a ton of men…kill a few (comparatively) of rebs…back off a bit…instead of retreating…move a bit to the left and do it again. That is not a brillant war, that is war of attrition. I can stand to lose more than you. Let’s have at it. Where is the brillance at that?

As for the early Union Generals. Perhaps they cared for their men? Grant sure as hell didn’t. Not that that’s new in warfare. But don’t give Grant more credit than he deserves.

19

Rickjay…

As for Lee not fighting beyond the environs of Virginia…

Lee was fighting for Virginia. Even his excursion into Pa. was meant to take pressure off of Va.

20

Reeder opines:

The brilliance is knowing that you can (in all senses of “can”) do that, instead of being impelled to a fancy, flashy failure in a campaign of manuever (the loser in a campaign of manuever usually loses big time).

And, as I noted above, Grant won the war. Lee might have been Hell on wheels, if only he’d been facing Darius III, or Vercingetorix, or somebody who could be fooled by razzle-dazzle, but his style wasn’t suited to the American Civil War.