I’m not saying pacifist leaders. I’m saying that the combination of Grant and Sherman was unique among the Union generals for their strategic and tactical vision, their willingness to take casualties to achieve it, and in the case of Sherman, the sheer audacity to target the CSA economy and infrastructure as a war aim by marching through Georgia without guaranteed supply chains.
If Grant and Sherman die in mid 1864, they won’t be replaced by pacifist generals, but who amongst the Union generals would have been so competent and driven?
Lincoln had already gone through six commanders of the main Union Army in the east, who were too cautious like McClellan or too aggressive like Pope. He was unlikely to find the equal of Grant or Sherman in his other commanders.
I was thinking particularly of McClellan and the comment attributed to Lincoln: “If General McClellan isn’t planning on using the army, I wonder if I could borrow it for a while?”
Too aggressive could be as bad as too cautious. Pope wanted to prove how aggressive he could be compared to previous commanders, but his bravado exceeded his strategic abilities.
I feel Grant and Sherman were fighting the war at a different level than other American generals (and other Confederate generals, including Lee). Other generals were fighting the war at an operational level - they were trying to win battles. Grant and Sherman were fighting at a strategic level - they were trying to win the war.
Scott may have been working at that level but he seems to have been unable to execute the plans he made. And there may have been other generals at lower ranks who had the potential to do this but never had the opportunity.
Grant understood that the key to victory was to destroy Lee’s army, not to capture Richmond. Lee was forced to remain between Grant and Richmond, so Grant could continue to target him. Even though the Union lost more casualties than the Confederates in each of the battles of the Overland Campaign, Grant could replace them while Lee could not.
McClellan’s failure to pursue Lee after Antietam, and Meade’s failure after Gettysburg, left him free to fight another day.
I wouldn’t say it’s a key attribute. Sometimes a general can be helped by luck, but the best ones make their own luck. Sometimes a general’s luck is due to having an idiot as an adversary.
Examples? Being bullheaded and tenacious can be good attributes, but not when you are pursuing a stupid course. Grant’s worst battle during the Overland Campaign was at Cold Harbor when he repeatedly had his troops assault entrenched Confederates, a strategy that had been disastrous in other battles; he confessed that he wished the second fruitless assault had never been made. (My great-great grandfather was in those suicide charges at Cold Harbor.)
I think Grant’s biggest insight that led to American victory was that the Americans outnumbered the Confederates and he could incorporate this into his plans. Previous generals had essentially made no coordinated plans between the various fronts. Each local commander conducted his operations on a schedule that was determined by local conditions. This allowed the Confederates, who had the advantage of interior lines, to shift forces around to where they were immediately needed.
Grant coordinated attacks along all of the fronts to occur at the same time. He knew that the Confederates might be able to concentrate their forces and stop one attack but they couldn’t stop attacks everywhere.
To coin a phrase, war is hell. Generals have to make decisions that cause other people, including their own troops, to suffer and die. They have to balance the pain caused by their decisions against the pain caused by the prolongation of a war.
The policy happened largely because the Confederates utterly refused to exchange African-American PoW’s, more or less considering them all slaves in revolt even if they had been born free. The Davis administration, adamant about never giving an inch no matter the advantage to doing so, willing consigned its own soldiers to languish in prison and its armies to shrivel for the sake of pride.
Edit: Gen. Grant noted one of the advantages of the no-exchange policy, and many people assume that he made the decision exclusively, and on that basis. In reality, Grant was noting a salutary strategic advantage derived from the policy, not a reason for its adoption.
If I remember correctly (and I’m at work so I can’t research right now) at some point the Confederacy changed tier policy and agreed to resume the exchange prisoners including African American ones, but General Grant said ‘no.’
Interesting thread. It seems that the question boils down to “what terms could the CSA have gotten if the Democrats had won the 1864 election?”. And, having recently become an expert in the subject via Wikipedia, it seems like that’s hard to answer because the Democrats were all over the place, which probably also goes far towards explaining why they lost. Like, it’s never a good sign when the election has basically one issue and your Presidential candidate is loudly denouncing the Party’s official position on that issue.
Some Democrats were out-and-out traitors who would have been happy to give the South whatever they wanted. But it looks like the furthest the majority of the Party would have been willing to go would have been to restore the antebellum status quo, which obviously wouldn’t have satisfied the Confeds, or they wouldn’t have started the war in the first place. They might have preserved slavery a few more generations, but as a minority in a democracy where a steadily growing majority was hostile to their way of life, the writing would have been on the wall. And that’s IMO the absolute best case scenario for them.
Another thing I learned was that John C. Fremont was running as a third party “Lincoln isn’t anti-slavery enough” candidate until dropping out in September. So the prospect of a split in the anti-slavery vote would have been another factor contributing to Republican pessimism in the early summer of 1864.
They would never have gotten that deal from Lincoln if they’d waited until 1864; he would have had to back down from the Emancipation Proclamation. MAYBE if the Democrats had won the 1864 election.
I haven’t seen mention of one of the standard alt-hist tropes which is relevant to the topic: European powers are induced to formally recognize the CSA as a distinct sovereign nation and begin applying pressure to end what is now a disruptive conflict between two equals.
Back when this thread still had its original topic. I was wondering about what kind of peace would have existed if the Civil War had been ended by a treaty in 1864 or 1865. My thoughts were that by that point in the war, the United States was already in control of large portions of what had been Confederate territory and that even if the United States had been willing to end the war and recognize Confederate independence, I didn’t feel they would be willing to give back territory that was already occupied.
I don’t feel European recognition would have changed this issue much. The British and French position was more anti-American than pro-Confederate. They weren’t going to commit too much to the cause of Confederate territorial claims.