Tonight on PBS the American Experience series will debut a new documentary on Robert E. Lee subtitle “At War with his Country… and himself“. In my area it will be on at 9pm.
I’ve recently re-watched the Ken Burns series on the Civil Years from 20 years ago and I was amazed at how hard it worked to continue the mythical fiction of the great ‘Marse Robert’. I wonder if tonight’s take will be any better.
From where I stand, Lee is an extremely over-rated figure in American history. He is the benificiary of the myth of the Lost Cause and that Confederate need to create an icon of ‘honor’ to paper over an effort that was firmly rooted in white supremacy and the expansion of slavery. Lee was and is that icon. TNC a few month’s ago had a great post knocking down the myth of Lee’s opposition to slavery. One hopes that Booby Lee’s full embrace of the dark moral history of the Confederacy will be explored.
As for his leadership as a General, that is another area where the Lost Cause hucksters have stepped up to polish the marble and give it a shine. These carny barkers spun Lee’s early luck in facing a series of incompetent Union Generals–McClellan, Burnside, Hooker, etc.–into a myth of Lee’s military genius and super-duper exceptional skills in all things. Like everything to do with Lost Cause mythology, Lee’s military record does not live up to the hype.
Serious military historians who have examined his record have called it into question, but the myth of his shiny marble is strong. In the early part of the last century, British military historian J. F. C. Fuller wrote on the myths about Grant and Lee. In one book he wrote: “This, then, is their difference: Grant understood the meaning of grand strategy, Lee did not.”
Many others have ‘gone there’ as well. One is Civil War historian and author Edward H. Bonekemper who has been researching the military record of these two Generals for decades. This article, Why Grant Won and Lee Lost (excerpted from a recent book), lays out the basic case to call Lee’s Generalship into question. I wonder if these or any criticisms of Lee’s military accomplishments will be explore or even mentioned. I expect that the marble is just way too polished for that.
And as for Lee’s post-war honor, I think that one only has to look at the way that Lee hung Longstreet out to dry to call that myth into question. When Lost Causers were attacking Longstreet in the Reconstruction years Longstreet wrote Lee and asked him to publicly set the record straight, Lee kept silent and let the attacks continue. An honorable man would have gotten his old comrade’s back, Lee let him dangle.
Lee is a complicated figure. To be sure, he was the South’s best General, but he was never the Nation’s best General–and never will be. He is a man who committed treason. He is a man who fought for slavery and white supremacy. He is a man with the blood of tens of thousands of dead men splattered upon his hands, his honor and his name. Hero is the wrong word for such a figure in history.
Over the years he has been made into a demi-God of white supremacists. His myth has been effectively packaged and sold. And while Lee did have some skill, some great days, and a lot of luck in his early opponents, he was not the best American General ever or even of his time–that honor would have to go to Grant.
It will be interesting to see if his myth is examined in the documentary tonight or whether old Master Robert’s marble legend gets yet another polish.
Cheers
dengre
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I wonder if Longstreet still thought of Lee as a dear friend, like John Kerry apparently does John McCain (and I like John Kerry, a lot, I’m just always stunned and frustrated at the way establishment Dems internalize Beltway myths to their own detriment).
stuckinred
The NYT gave it a horrible review.
Linda Featheringill
Oh my. You know you are committing blasphemy with this post. You might get off easier if you dissed the Diety.
Dennis G.
@Linda Featheringill:
I would be better off with a post support atheists and making fun of the Pope, God and the Church.
Lee is sacred and I expect pointing out his clay feet will raise an eyebrow here and there.
So it goes.
El Cid
“magical genus”? twice?
Bill Murray
The best thing about Lee and the Civil War is that his wife’s estate became Arlington National Cemetery
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-Battle-of-Arlington.html
JR
They carved his face into the rock atop which crosses burned. That freedom rings from there today is a result of better men acting with greater honor for righteous causes that he would have taken up arms to quell.
He’s quite likely the greatest traitor in American history. So why do people vilify Benedict Arnold and the Rosenbergs with so much vigor and treat him like a man worthy of more, when his hands are drenched in more American blood than anyone else’s?
General Stuck
The Ghost of Gen George Pickett is not impressed
that
manmofo destroyed my divisionTriassic Sands
But, but, but…he was a gentleman. And not just any old gentleman, but a Southern Gentleman. There is no higher praise possible. Is there?
Eric U.
why does this post remind me of the mythbusters episode that explored the question of whether you can actually polish a turd? It’s too bad that Lee seems to be almost universally admired.
Warren Terra
For some reason, Grant is remembered as a butcher in war and a drunk incompetent before and after the war – not as the man who won the war and was President for the Reconstruction (which ended essentially when he handed over the reigns to Hayes).
I actually don’t know much about Grant’s Presidency – I haven’t read much about it and its only legacy to popular culture seems to be inane jokes about his tomb and a character on Wild Wild West – but if you look at the Presidents between Jefferson and Roosevelt you see a list dominated by nonentities, buffoons, and the malign (other than the obvious exception of Lincoln one could make a case for Monroe and Garfield being excepted). Was Grant really so much worse? At least in his time Congress was doing some good …
But its the memory of his generalship that really amazes me. It’s worth remembering that despite the persisting reputation Grant wasn’t actually some early equivalent of Douglas Haig – he actually had a plan, he carried it out, and Union losses were consistently lower than Confederate losses. Despite this, for some reason his victory is often remembered as being an inglorious crushing of the noble Confederacy beneath the heel of superior numbers. I just don’t get it.
Chris
Remember the huge controversy when it turned out Sitting Bull was one of Obama’s heroes? My immediate thought was “we’ve been deifying Robert E. Lee for a hundred and fifty years, I think we can afford another ‘noble enemy’ type even if he’s not white.”
Dennis G.
@El Cid:
Repeating myself. A correction has been made. Thanks
alwhite
It was a mistake to not hang that useless son of a bitch for treason.
when the starving Dakota stole food and killed a few settlers in Mn in 1862 we had no problem hanging 38 people why would it bother them to hang a few hundred for the deaths of 10s of thousands for treason?
freelancer
Wow did I read this title post wrong. I thought, “Wow, the asian guy from Madtv is getting his own PBS special? This makes little sense.” However, it’s because I’m listening to this podcast interview with the comic at the moment.
Mr Stagger Lee
I can tell you this, the neo-confederates at Lew Rockwell.com will be checking the bona fides of the historians, if they are from the North, they will tear the documentary into another politically correct Yankee “revisionism”. I bet Fox will then attack NPR for tearing down a great hero, then Joe Wilson will call for total defunding of NPR. The last time America heard such howling was when Tecumseh Sherman did his part in the great urban renewal project of Georgia and South Carolina.
SFAW
Dennis –
What’s yore dayum problem? Next you’ll be selling us a load of BS that Nathan Bedford Forrest – hero to Shelby Foote and a raft of other Southern Gentlemen – was anything other than the Greatest General The World Has Evah Known And Not A Racist Nosirree Bob.
I don’t know nearly as much about Grant as I should, but even a dimwit such as I knows he won War for the North.
Jeff
I think there’s a pretty strong case that George Henry Thomas was actually a much better general (and person) than Grant. Born and raised in the South, he stuck with the Union during the war (despite being offered a prominent post in Virginia’s army), won the first major Union victory of the war (Mill Springs) performed exceedingly well at the battles of Chickamunga and Chattanooga and ultimately destroyed Hood’s army at Nashville.
He also did a pretty darn good job during reconstruction, repeatedly turned down promotions he felt were undeserved or inappropriate, and, unfortunately, died before writing an account of his role in the war, leaving unchallenged for many years the accounts of Grant and others who didn’t particularly like him and so minimized his accomplishments.
maya
There’s a review at Bull Runnings
Jamie
Lee always won because of the Minie ball which made the tactics used to defend a position at the time unusually effective and throughout the war Lee was always defending a position. Antietam and Gettysburg are notable as these were the only times that Lee was attacking. Technological advances also made artillery and small arms more deadly.
more here…
http://www.civilwarhome.com/weapons.htm
Keith G
For better or worse, we (our greater society) seemed to want to take to heart Lincoln’s notion of a quick and blame free post war period. After Lincoln’s murder, things didn’t go as he had planned, yet his ideal were still a touch stone. They let the Rebs have their bedtime stories of honor. For a while, it was all they had. Plus, while many (not all) in the North were anti-slavery, most did not want to share a society with former slaves.
I am glad Lee was their leader. A better man might have put enough hurt on the Union Armies early on to cause a negotiated settlement.
Tokyokie
I wouldn’t call Lee the South’s best general. That’d probably be Stonewall Jackson. And, sad to say, it was Nathan Bedford Forrest who developed the cavalry tactics that the U.S. would up using against the Plains Indians. Lee was a skilled battlefield tactician, but in his two advances north, he demonstrated an inability to think in terms of campaign strategy and was ill-prepared to face the Union armies he met at Antietam and Gettysburg. (And had McClellan not been so indecisive — and Burnside not such a boob — the Army of Northern Virginia would have been destroyed at Antietam.) Lee’s forces “won” most of the battles of the Wilderness Campaign, with Lee executing a number of brilliant tactical retreats, but in the end, Grant exploited his advantages in personnel and materiel and forced Lee into the siege of Petersburg, which basically ended the war.
Sharl
Dennis, how do you rate the late Shelby Foote as a(n) historian? And how do you think he is regarded in the Civil War historian community (if you have any feel for that)?
Just based on his frequent commentary throughout Ken Burn’s series, I held him in high regard (disclaimer: IANAH). Some comments of his – particularly the comment starting at about 7m30s* in this Best of Shelby Foote youtube, have always stayed with me. [*If curious, this link goes right to that point in the video, which runs for a total of just under 10 minutes.]
If he had any major criticisms of Lee, I don’t remember hearing them in Foote’s commentary that made it through Burn’s final edit. It’s possible he held his punches, since he likely wouldn’t want to be run out of his native south by voicing any criticisms he may have had.
Foote – or maybe it was one of the other historians (can’t remember) – did note that Lee had become a “Marble Man”, an inanimate thing to be worshiped, rather than discussed as the flesh-and-blood flawed human he was. That’s about as much criticism regarding Lee I can recall, and that really wasn’t so much criticism of Lee himself, as it was of the Lee cult following that has existed ever since that war.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal
Grant was easily the best general of the Civil War. Whether he was the best general in American history is debatable. Nathaniel Greene was pretty damned good, albeit in a much smaller war. If you expand the definition beyond just the operational elements of generalship to include organizational and logistical elements, Pershing, Marshall and Eisenhower have to be in the conversation. Eisenhower may not have been a brilliant operational commander, but he had to negotiate a diplomatic needle unlike any that the others faced.
Joseph Nobles
The last word in the introduction at the PBS site is given to Fredrick Douglass, so perhaps there will be a few more warts allowed on this portrait.
Travis
Longstreet was disillusioned by Lee’s incompetence at Gettysburg. My understanding is that it was this apostasy that led to Longstreet’s difficulties with his ex-comrades. Rather than hanging him out to dry, perhaps Lee actively supported the campaign against him in the background.
Lee always struck me as combining charisma and luck. At Gettysburg, he ran out of luck, though his charisma managed to deflect the blame for the debacle from him personally. Longstreet excepted, the Confederate elite were not very high on brains.
General Stuck
Grant’s genius was first recognizing that a war of attrition would win, and then having the nads to carry out such a war. The south’s resources, or lack thereof, as compared to the north was the nail in their coffin. Grant was just willing to drive it in.
Mr Stagger Lee
@Keith G: I wonder if Albert Sidney Johnston had lived after Shiloh, he would have great victories in the West, it would have been possible for an earlier settlement?
Jamie
@alwhite:
and the Sioux killed in Minnesota were the Santee Sioux not Lakota Sioux. The Santee were much more non hostile than the Lakota Sioux but the Indian agents wouldn’t produce the records that the treaty had promised so they went rogue.
Roger Moore
@Warren Terra:
This. The Vicksburg campaign was a model of generalship, with the possible exception of the attempt to assault the city. Grant just plain outmaneuvered his opponents, keeping his forces concentrated and defeating the Confederates in detail. Even his much maligned Overland campaign was a major strategic success. The only way to understand his reputation is to realize that he’s been deliberately smeared by generations of Lost Causers.
giovanni da procida
@Jeff:
I agree that Thomas was clearly an excellent human being and general. He seems to be mostly overlooked in contemporary discussions about the Civil War, but was an excellent commander.
Jamie
@Keith G:
Yep and then we might have had slavery into the twentieth century. Makes me so proud to be an American. Yeesh!
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal
@Keith G:
One of the things we’ll always have to wonder is just how Lincoln meant these sentiments. I suspect that, had he lived, there would have been less reconciliation that happened in reality. He was always good at talking about compromise without giving in. Witness the way that the war started, for instance. (God damn Stanton and his literal showboating.)
We can argue whether or not he’s any good at it, but I’m pretty sure that this is a trait of Lincoln’s that Obama consciously tries to model.
Jamie
Grant wasn’t brilliant but he was single minded enough to pin Lee down, which did the trick.
General Stuck
I’m not quite finished with Grant’s memoir, but what was different about him, seems to me, for a General, was a near utter lack of pretentiousness, and an ability to focus, regardless of the situation, on what mattered, and making a decision, then sticking to it doggedly.
JAHILL10
McClellan was a complete boob. If Lincoln had replaced that idiot with Grant sooner God knows how many lives could have been saved and the war would have ended at least two years quicker than it did.
alwhite
@Jamie:
You are correct & I screwed up – thanks!
alwhite
@Jamie:
You are correct & I screwed up – thanks!
AxelFoley
@Triassic Sands:
I say there is no higher praise in all of Gawd’s creation, good suh (or madame, as the case may be).
Tokyokie
@SFAW:
The amusing thing about that sentiment is that Forrest was treated with contempt by most of his brethren in the South’s officer corps. Keep in mind, the South’s officer corps was highly patrician, with many gaining rank by raising and equipping their commands. He was self-educated, entered the army as an enlisted man and rose through the ranks to lieutenant general, but, worst of all, was no gentleman, because he was a slave trader before the war. Sure, slavery needed assholes like Forrest to function, but that was not a profession that antebellum “gentlemen” pursued, and it was left for poorly educated rabble like Forrest.
The cavalry, especially, was the realm of romantic “gentleman” soldiers. And probably because Forrest was a hard-nosed, nasty bastard, he saw that the cavalry would be more effective functioning essentially as mounted infantry than merely slashing foot soldiers with their sabers. He was a nasty piece of work, and even revisionists who admire his military brilliance, would have a tough time making him into a “gentleman.”
Jamie
well getting Mark Twain to help with his memoirs was nice polish for Grant’s reputation.
maya
Hey! If you’re free and in the area on March 26th, do attend this Civil War kickass event. Notice, especially, where the ball is being held. Any member of the A L care to explain this? Oh, that’s right – the AL rents themselves out as wallpaper for any of Dick Cheney’s glorious speeches.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal
@General Stuck:
This is a picture of Grant that underrates him. Roger Moore mentions the Vicksburg campaign, which demonstrated his operational acumen. There were others, including Forts Henry and Donalson. He made a big mistake in becoming exposed at Shiloh, but then demonstrated great tactical skill in surviving the first day to allow Buell to reinforce him.
Grant did more than recognize he could win a war of attrition. He was good at maneuvering his opponent into an unfavorable position to wage that fight. It didn’t work as well in the East, but that’s largely because the frontage was so small that it was impossible to maneuver properly. He wanted to stay in the West, and use a preponderance of Union forces to win there, while mostly standing on the defensive in Virginia. It probably would have been a much better strate3gy.
Raenelle
My own family history was a tad impacted by Lee’s mythology. I’m distantly related to George Pickett of Picket’s Charge infamy. My family was always ashamed of that relation; George Pickett, even in our family, got the blame for the disaster. Of course, he was just following orders from Lee, but St. Bobby Lee couldn’t be blamed.
bemused senior
I think this is the lecture I listened to a while back, given at the Custis-Lee Mansion at Arlington.
http://www.vahistorical.org/news/lectures_pryor.htm
The lecture is by Elizabeth Brown Pryor, who wrote/edited “Reading the Man”, a portrait of Robert E. Lee through his private letters. It is definitely not hagiography; it made me order the book.
Roger Moore
@Jamie:
Not true. Lee’s forces were also attacking during the Seven Days Battles, where they won a major victory at the cost of high casualties. Lee appears to have preferred the offensive when he had the forces to sustain it. It’s just that he kept sustaining such brutal losses from his offensives that he had switch back to the defensive from lack of resources.
FWIW, one of the things I noticed when reading Grant’s memoirs is that his attacks were often more successful when carried out in apparently inhospitable terrain. He commented several times that his attacks succeeded despite fighting through thick brush. It occurred to me that he was misreading the situation. Those attacks succeeded because of the terrain, not despite it. The dense brush provided the attackers with cover until they were very close to the defenders’ lines, while attacks in the open had a tendency to be stopped by the defenders’ devastating rifle fire.
alwhite
@Sharl:
Shelby said there were two geniuses in the Civil War, Lincoln & NB Forrest. Since Forrest was the scum sucking piece of shit responsible for Ft Pillow I can’t imagine he thought Lee was that great.
It has been a long time since I read his ACW books but I don’t recall any hero worship from him.
Dennis G.
@Sharl:
Foote is a novelist and not a historian, but he did do a hell of a lot of research for his well regarded Civil War novels.
He is a pro-Confederate fellow. All one had to do is watch him sing the praises of war criminal Nathan Bedford Forrest and equate the founder of the KKK with Lincoln as the only two real geniuses that the war produced.
Forrest should have hanged for the war crime at Fort Pillow and other butchery during the War. Foote’s celebration of this psychopath is disturbing.
And now I’m off to watch the marble man shine…
Russ
History is a tricky thing, but as a big fan of poet Wendell Barry, I’d lean towards his thinking. He believed Lee should have been faithful to his countrymen in his home state, and writes that Lee knew the evil of slavery, and knew the South hadn’t much hope, and yet did the right thing.
“though I recognize no no necessity for this state of things, and would have forborne and pleaded to the end for a redress of grievances, real or supposed, yet in my own person I had to meet the question whether I should take part against my native state.”
He refused to turn his abilities against his own people, “and there have been few acts of as much integrity since.”
Recollected Essays 1965-1980
Jamie
@Roger Moore:
aah, my bad.
trollhattan
Aaaaaarrrgh, Rebs is takin’ ovah mah Pee Bee Ess! They’re evidently having a begathon and instead of American Experience they’re showing “Yanni: A Living Legacy.”
Ah wish ah wuz kiddin’.
Michael
Lee played insurgent invader most of the time, a murderous, pillaging, rapacious campaign designed not so much to achieve any strategic goals, but instead to terrorize the Mid Atlantic states so badly that the Union would quit fighting back.
Jamie
@Roger Moore:
also good point there. A tech shift changed the face of war, making it even more bloody.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal
@Tokyokie:
This really was commonly accepted by the time of the Civil War. It was certainly Union doctrine to dismount the cavalry any time they were forced into serious combat. The most famous example was Devin’s and Buford’s divisions on the first day of Gettysburg. The Confederacy was probably still more caught up in the romanticism of the cavalry, but even there it is overstating things to say that Forrest innovated.
Even fifty years earlier, during the Napoleonic era, it was recognized that the day of the mounted cavalry charge was over. The problem was that, until the development of the magazine carbine, cavalry couldn’t deploy small arms firepower that would allow it to stand against infantry.
Cacti
For all of the nob-polishing done over Lee’s tactical prowess, his ordering of Pickett’s Charge was probably the greatest tactical blunder of the entire war, and ended any further thought of the south mounting offensive campaigns in the north.
Omnes Omnibus
@trollhattan: I have the Inauguration of Scott Walker as Governor of WI on my PBS stations. I would rather watch Yanni.
Jamie
@Cacti:
agreed.
Suffern ACE
@Russ: Thomas could have done the same…and was then left without a constituency to plant his statues after the war. A lot of what passes for honor and integrity in this case ignores that perhaps the choice was not that hard.
Sharl
@Dennis G. & @alwhite:
Thanks.
Nellcote
Speaking of American Experience in the south, I’m looking foreward to this film (set to be broadcast in May) about the Freedom Riders. With all the talk of celebrations of the Civil War this year, a re-creation of the Freedom Riders path should be interesting,
Quaker in a Basement
@Warren Terra: You oughta look into the new Twain autobiography. Among the very first items in a grab-bag collection of Twain snippets are some accounts of his acquaintance with Grant. Twain speaks quite well of the general and president.
Murc
You know, I’ll go out on a limb here.
I actually do think Lee was, if not THE best tactical General of the war, one of the best.
Sure, he had his share of fuckups, Gettysburg probably being the most famous, but if I had to pick any single Civil War General to command a single battle against any OTHER Civil War General, it would be Lee (possibly Jackson).
Key word in that paragraph; any SINGLE battle.
Lee as an theater commander, a STRATEGIST, was distinctly inferior to many on Confederate side and to basically all of the top-tier Union Generals. McClellan, who regularly got his ass handed to him on battlefields because of other factors, could conceive of and attempt to execute theater-level strategy at a far higher level than Lee could. MEADE, the General that history forgot, was probably a better strategist than Lee was.
I’ve heard the argument advanced that Lee was hobbled by a lack of resources and the idiosyncracies of the CSAs governance and logistics chains. To which I usually respond; suck it up, Grant and Sherman had to deal with superiors who fucking hated them, a hostile press, a Congress that was obsessed with the Army of the Potomac to the detriment of other theaters, and jackholes like Fremont.
I give the devil his due, tho; the traitorous slaveholder was, IMO, actually a really, really good General.
Roger Moore
@General Stuck:
Grant did a hell of a lot more than win a war of attrition. His campaign against Vicksburg was genuinely brilliant, and he was a master at logistics and intel. The Overland Campaign, which is the one that gets him the reputation as a butcher, was actually a series of effective outflanking maneuvers that forced Lee to retreat again and again.
Chris
@Tokyokie:
The KKK’s founder was looked down upon as white trash by his gentleman “betters”? Hmm. I detect a trend.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal
@Warren Terra:
In fairness, Douglas Haig wasn’t really the equivalent of the mythical Douglas Haig, either. He had a much better idea of what he was doing than is commonly supposed. He wasn’t a great general, and made plenty of mistakes (such as continuing Third Ypres in the rain), but he wasn’t a clueless idiot. In fact, it was under his leadership that the British figured out how to solve the problem of trench warfare.
Quaker in a Basement
Now a modest proposition:
Revise the history of the confederacy so that they were fighting to establish a monarchy rather than preserve the agrarian, slaveholding economy.
Fast forward to today. Would deadenders still hold the same reverence for Lee, et al?
Cacti
Robert E. Lee, also opposed voting rights for the newly freed slaves after the war.
Another fact that gets omitted by his hagiographers.
Tokyokie
@JAHILL10:
McClellan was awful, but Burnside’s incompetence is breathtaking. I knew Burnside was a terrible general, but it wasn’t until I visited the Antietam battlefield that I appreciated just how terrible he was.
I’ve visited a few Civil War battlefields, Gettysburg and Chickamauga, among others, and what struck me about Antietam is how compact the area is. From the West Woods to Burnside Bridge is only about a mile and a half. Anyway, until A.P Hill arrived on the scene from Harper’s Ferry, the right flank of the Confederate forces was extremely thin, with a couple of hundred guys in reinforced positions holding the bridge through most of the day. Burnside was ordered early in the day to take the bridge, but he took most of the morning even finding it because he got lost in the woods. (Here’s a clue, Ambrose: The bridge is probably over the creek, and the creek is probably at the bottom of the damn hill.) Had Burnside captured the bridge early in the day, the Union forces would have turned the Confederates’ flank and cut off their retreat. But Burnside couldn’t find the damn bridge. Yikes.
chris
Dennis, I’d be interested in your take on Lee versus Erwin Rommel. I suppose Rommel was a better general, and never (to my knowledge) hung any of his comrades out to dry. Otherwise, though, they seem to occupy a similar historical niche.
General Stuck
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal:
I don’t disagree with this. But the reason he won, and the north won, was a willingness to fight, and cause the south to deplete it’s resources, as well as some personal attributes i mentioned. I have simply enormous respect for US Grant as a general. I don’t think he was particularly great in any one area, but all of his abilities together made for a truly great General in the Civil War. I personally like the dude, as well. And that is not normal for me with military generals.
agrippa
The best thing that Lee had going for him were the poor Union Generals prior to Grant. Grant knew what he had to with the Union army in VA: wage a war of attrition. Grant and Sherman worked well together; Sherman waged a war of movement; Grant waged a war of attrition.
And, the South did not fully realize that war would be lost in the West. The South had to win at Shiloh.
Thomas did a good job in the war. Sherman seemed to have thought well of Thomas; more so, it seems than Grant.
General Stuck
@Roger Moore:
Point taken. I shouldn’t have used the word “genius” in my comment about willingness to fight a war of attrition. And agree he was a terrific tactician as well.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal
@Murc:
Despite the gross incompetence of Lee’s early opponents, he never managed to force one to surrender. They were always able to maneuver themselves out of danger. Lee was good, but not good enough to ever win a decisive victory.
Grant did it twice. There were only two occasions in the war when an army was so badly outmaneuvered that it gave up and surrendered en masse. Grant was the victor both times. That tells me that Grant was a hell of an operational commander, as well as a good strategist.
Thomas’ destruction of Hood was also brilliant, but not in the sense of forcing a surrender. Hood’s army was shattered and melted away.
Roger Moore
@chris:
The difference between Lee and Rommel is that Rommel figured out that Hitler was bad for Germany. He wound up implicated in the plot against Hitler and had to commit suicide to protect his family. Lee was a dead ender who fought through to the last and never realized he was on the wrong side the whole time.
pjcamp
The south’s best general was Jackson. Lee won until Jackson was killed and then lost.
Lee and Grant were not the great military strategists on either side. Jackson and Sherman were. They both understood the nature of modern war, and the Civil War was the first modern war. Grant and Lee were foggy on the concept.
Grant and Lee were great battlefield commanders, with nerves of steel, but the critical event was the loss of Jackson and the survival of Sherman. That did the South in.
Mr Stagger Lee
There was on interesting general on the Confederate side, was Patrick Cleburne, an Irishman who called for the arming of the slaves in exchange for freedom, a proposal shot down by Howell Cobb, whose words spoke the truth of the Confederacy
General Cleburne died at the battle of Franklin on Nov 30th 1864
New Yorker
Longstreet: he’s the Confederate general that I respect: you know, the one who worked for African-American civil rights after the war and was of course demonized by the lost causers afterward.
Plus, Longstreet was the one who tried to stop Pickett’s charge. Lee was all too happy to send thousands of his boys to be ripped to shreds as easily as Douglas Haig and Robert Nivelle sent their boys to the same fate on the Western Front half a century later, and yet Lee is praised as a genius, while Haig and Nivelle are demonized by history.
chris
@Roger Moore:
I have two nits to pick with that:
1. There was no messianic figure in the Confederacy to compare to Hitler. Overthrowing Davis was never going to change anything.
2. We can’t know whether Lee would have chosen suicide to protect his family had it been necessary.
IOW, Rommel may have made the best of a morally reprehensible situation, but I’m not sure that Lee ever had a comparable chance at any sort of redemption. I’m not well-read on Lee and the Civil War, though. Maybe he had chances I don’t know about.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal
@chris:
Well, Rommel never had the opportunity to sell out his comrades. Had he lived, though, I suspect that he would have been an enthusiastic participant in the web of lies the German generals captured by the Western Allies wove.
There are a lot of similarities between them. Rommel was a better tactician, and an operational genius. Both, though, shared a complete cluelessness when it came to strategy and no sense of logistics whatsoever. Montgomery wasn’t nearly the general that Grant was, but he was the perfect choice to crush Rommel in Africa. Anyone who could force Rommel into a set piece battle was going to be at an advantage.
martha
@Omnes Omnibus: You should have heard the shriek I uttered when I turned the TV on and saw that jerk. My husband just said he’d rather watch Suzi Orman, which means it’s really, really bad. It’s going to be a long 4 years. I will be much more productive and watch less useless TV news…
David Fud
@Jeff: This.
According to Benson Bobrick, author of Master of War, the Battle of Nashville is “judged one of the two most perfect battles ever fought – the other being Napoleon’s victory at Austerlitz.”
Bobrick argued that Sherman took the battle to civilians in his march to the sea, which was a diversion. Not a pretty picture in the first modern war.
Bobrick argued that Grant wasn’t capable of the battlefield feats that General Thomas could fairly routinely manage. I don’t recall him directly calling Grant a butcher, but left no doubt as to who he felt could have won with less butchery. Bobrick also felt Grant wasn’t very honorable in his treatment of General Thomas during and after the war.
Either way, I think Grant gets credit for winning, but certainly not as much for the sheer capability that Thomas clearly exhibited in Chickamauga, Chattanooga, and his crowning achievement (with newly trained troops) in Nashville.
Tokyokie
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal:
Certainly the introduction of magazine carbines, or at least breech-loading rifles, changed cavalry tactics. Hell, even the replacement of single-shot pistols with revolvers did. However, sabers tended to be preferred by southern cavalrymen fighting in the east during the Civil War. But in the west, where commands such as Forrest’s were smaller and far more irregular than those in the east, they came to prefer different weaponry. The Sharp’s breech-loading carbine did see widespread use during the Civil War, and the South was able to produce various knockoffs of it. Although the troops in Forrest’s command initially were armed mostly with revolvers and sawed-off shotguns at the outset of the war, I always assumed that they scavenged or otherwise acquired breech-loaders as the war dragged on.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal
@Roger Moore:
There is little evidence that Rommel was an active participant in the plot. It is clear that he knew about it and didn’t warn anyone, but that was likely true of Himmler, too.
Rommel’s relationship with Hitler was complicated, all the way to the end. He got his big boost as the first commander of Hitler’s official bodyguard, the unit that eventually became the 1st SS Panzer Division. He certainly admired Hitler as late as 1943, and never said anything explicit to indicate that he’d changed his mind. He certainly argued that they needed to make peace, but tended to fall into the camp that Hitler’s cronies were keeping the true state of affairs from him.
Very complicated man. Then again, I have a soft spot for anyone with a brother like Pfirsich Rommel.
Roger Moore
@General Stuck:
It wasn’t just a willingness to fight; he was deeply committed to the strategic offensive. A big point I get from reading his memoir is that he saw the strategic offensive as the only practical course because it allowed him to keep his forces concentrated and force the action on his place and terms. He clearly felt that the best defense was a good offense because denying his opponent the initiative prevented attacks more surely than the stoutest defense.
Of course he benefited from circumstances that were favorable to his style of warfare. He was on the side that needed to attack and had the resources to do so. But part of being a great general is being in the right place at the right time. I think that’s what made Grant a better general than George Thomas. Grant wasn’t necessarily a better general than Thomas in some abstract sense, but he was the general the Union needed as its top commander while Thomas was most appropriate as a subordinate.
Omnes Omnibus
@martha: I had to be on the Square around the time of the actual event. Grrrr.
El Cruzado
While I agree with most of the sentiments expressed in the thread, it has to be said that what would have been the best option for the Confederacy, a defensive war of attrition, just wasn’t possible with the political command of the Confederacy.
They had to have their battlefield glory, mostly at the expense of other folks.
Roger Moore
@chris:
Lee had plenty of chances at redemption. At any time during the war, he could have recognized he was on the wrong side and resigned his commission. After the war he could have recognized that former slaves deserved to be treated as full and equal citizens and advocated on their behalf. I have a hell of a lot of respect for Longstreet for doing exactly that.
negative 1
I grew up in Maryland, which as a slaveholding state still did sympathize with the confederacy after the fact. Accordingly, they also deified Robert Lee and basically romanticized the idea of him as the general that gave it the honorable all in the face of overwhelming opposition, yada yada.
The only thing anyone needs to remember about the man is this: no man in history has killed as many Americans as Robert E. Lee. Not bin Laden, not Saddam Hussein, not Hitler, nobody.
jl
Regarding the strategy of attrition, it was Winfield Scott who proposed that strategy at the outset, in his Anaconda Plan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaconda_Plan
By accident, or luck, I think that something like the Anaconda plan developed as the war progressed.
But I agree that Grant has been underrated, though I don’t know much about military history.
joe in oklahoma
the slave states have retaken the Republic in Nov 2008, so resurrecting their heroes is the order of the day
Murc
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal:
Oh, to be sure, to be sure. I agree with absolutely everything you say about Grant there; he was an excellent operational commander as well as a fine strategic mind. I would still rate Lee above him, tho. Not ‘ZOMG LEE!’ above him, but… above him. Grant’s campaign to Richmond and then Appomattox in the east (a campaign that, for the record, I deem ill-advised; the war was going to be won in the west, and all Grant had to do was pin Lee in place to prevent him from pulling another Chickamauga, rather than trying to go for the kill) was a huge strategic victory filled with individual battles that were tactical draws or slight Confederate wins (Cold Harbor.) I think that speaks quite favorably of Lees skills vis a vis Grants skills.
That takes nothing away from Grant, who almost certainly wins ‘best overall.’ But I’m just saying.
Re: Thomas… I think incredibly highly of Thomas battlefield acumen, but Grant, for whatever reason, did not. He thought him highly competent, but a bit of a plodder. Grant, in his memoirs, threads the very difficult needle of simultaneously praising Thomas to the heavens but still disparaging his conduct leading up to the Battle of Nashville.
Tom Levenson
Well, that’s an ugly wrap. I’m watching now at the Appomatox section and the show is both hagiographic and dull as it is possible to be.
Oy.
Jules
I’ve always thought the fact that Grant spent his last days finishing his memoirs, in what had to have been horrible pain from cancer, so his family would have money after his death to be a true measure of the kind of man he was.
(that is of course if this is the truth and not a myth)
Bill Murray
@Mr Stagger Lee: I was going to post nearly the same thing. Cleburne was one of the top CSA generals and wasn’t big on the Know-Nothings either. Of course he was Irish-Catholic so he would not have been part of the Know-Nothings anyway.
William J. Hardee, Cleburne’s former corps commander and writer of the book on tactics, had this to say when he learned of his loss: “Where this division defended, no odds broke its line; where it attacked, no numbers resisted its onslaught, save only once; and there is the grave of Cleburne.”
Cleburne has two counties and a city named after him.
martha
@Omnes Omnibus:You have my greatest sympathies. I will see them more often than I want and I haven’t figured out how I’ll manage to be polite yet. I suppose my mother’s training will kick in…
Jules
True fact….here in Arkansas Lee’s birthday is a state holiday and it is on MLK day.
Yeah.
policomic
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal:
Yes, yes, yes. Why do so many people always assume that a skilled politician’s words can be taken at face value, when so much of political skill lies in not always revealing everything you are thinking? I’ll put in another plug here for Eric Foner’s new Lincoln book, for fans of 19th-century 11-dimensional chess.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal
@Murc:
Except that it shouldn’t. Grant didn’t want to fight that campaign, either. He agreed with you that the war would be won in the West and that it was best to make the Virginia campaign as irrelevant as possible. He was there because of politics. The northern press had become so focused on the Army of Northern Virginia that leaving the main effort in Tennessee wasn’t possible. So Grant came East.
bostondreams
@Jules:
I teach history at a small rural school in Florida as the resident Massachusetts Yankee, which is an experience in and of itself (anyone that says that dirty liberals have taken God out of schools has never been in one of our faculty meetings. Open with a prayer). Anyway, my first year, I coached JV baseball and told the team that they had MLK Day off from practice. When I told my pitching coach (the father of one of my players), he informed me quite bluntly that they didn’t celebrate ‘that day.’ It was Robert E. Lee day. I just said, okay, well, they still have it off. As a first year teacher and a Yankee to boot, I had to bite my tongue in fear of losing my job. I am still disappointed in myself.
Dennis G.
@chris:
What Roger said:
@Roger Moore:
handy
@Jules:
Sadly that doesn’t surprise me. My grandmother retired a decade ago and moved back to Ft. Smith, and in the past ten years has gone full metal wingnut. I think she’s soaked up all the idiocy in the air there. Keep in mind this was a lady in the 1980s thought Reagan was a fraud.
ETA: not trying to indict all the good people in Arkansas. Just sayin’ I don’t think my grandmother’s increasingly crazy politics since her move back there from CA isn’t an accident.
Dennis G.
@El Cruzado:
Much like the reality-free leaders of the modern confederate Party–the fight is more important than the results.
Texas Dem
I just watched the American Experience documentary about Lee, and was impressed. Among other things, they pointed out Lee’s support for slavery, something that was often whitewashed (if you’ll pardon the pun) by the Lost Causers. I await the cries of anguish from the Sons of the Confederate Veterans and their GOP allies. Fairly gutsy move by PBS to air the documentary, given the current political climate.
Moses2317
Meanwhile, the WaPo is actually hosting a debate about whether Southern treason (sorry, “secession”) was correct.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/house-divided/2011/01/waite_rawls_was_president_jame.html
It actually includes the following ridiculous paragraph:
WTF?
Winning Progressive
handy
@freelancer:
Heh. I thought the same thing.
Texas Dem
While we’re on the subject of the Civil War, it’s a pity that more rednecks, Lost Causers, and Confederate apologists don’t seem to know that the organizational genius behind the Confederate war effort was not Robert E. Lee but a Jew, Judah P. Benjamin.
Dennis G.
@Tom Levenson:
It was a lot of marble polishing.
Odd things and details were never mentioned at all.
Harpers Ferry and John Brown were edited out as was Longstreet and the post-war attacks on his character that Lee sanctioned with is silence.
Any critique of Lee’s military strategy was left on the cutting room floor as was any assessment of his role as a National General. At best, Lee was an excellent regional General in Virginia, but when it came to managing a 1,000 mile front and a war with multiple theaters and battle fields he failed in epic ways. Once you moved beyond the borders of old Virginia, Lee had nothing and did nothing of any note.
Grant, OTOH, fought and could visualize the fight, on every front. It is why he was hands down the best General in that War. Best General ever is debatable. If one is truly honest that would have to go to Chinggis Khaan (or as he is known in the west, Genghis Khan)–but that is another discussion.
Roger Moore
@Murc:
I think you’re deeply wrong about the Overland campaign. The casualty figures may have leaned in Lee’s favor, but that’s never been how one counts victories in warfare. Every step of the way, Lee was forced into a tactical retreat to avoid being encircled by Grant’s army, which is a sign that the battles were tactical successes for Grant. The plain fact is that when they went toe to toe, Grant was able to control the campaign and force Lee to retreat into a siege and unable to send any troops to help against Sherman. That tells you who won the encounter.
Dennis G.
@Roger Moore:
And Grant’s move to Petersburg caught Lee off-guard and with more imaginative subordinates might have captured the city before Lee could get there.
When Lee faced competent opposition he always lost ground. And yet, his myth is strong. Magic has he in the spin of the SCV.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal
@Moses2317:
I think it could have, but that depends upon whether you think Lincoln was playing 11-dimensional chess. Looking at his actions, I think it was his intention to do absolutely nothing about secession while not yielding an inch rhetorically. The goal was to wait the Confederates out, seeing as how their economy was problematic at that point, with only the first wave of secessions.
My guess is that he wanted Anderson to surrender Fort Sumter without a shot. Let the South create whatever situation on the ground it wanted, without ever conceding that they had any right to do so. Do nothing to provoke them, and burn no bridges. Just wait until the sheer idiocy of what they were doing caught up with them.
Of course, like any good game of 11-dimensional chess, he *couldn’t* say that that was his plan. He had to act like he was opposed to everything that the Confederates were doing. I think that there is a very good chance that that would have defused the crisis at a much, much lower cost in lives.
Then Stanton decided on his own authority to send a resupply fleet to Charleston, and provoked a shooting war. Fucked the whole thing up.
Michael Finn
America’s best general at anytime was Winfield Scott (June 13, 1786 – May 29, 1866).
He figured civil war strategy before it began. He trained a majority of the civil war generals, including Lee. He joined the military in 1807. He served 14 different administrations and was a general for 52 years.
NobodySpecial
I’ve gotta vote for Sherman over Grant as well. His work at Chickamauga alone prevented complete disaster. Had he not held off Bragg (another underrated general), The Army of the Tennessee probably would have made it all the way to Cincinnati with some of the most insubordinate subordinates in either army.
I’ve heard it said that Grant and Lee had one similar ability that made them great…the ability to capitalize on other’s mistakes. Fort Donelson and Vicksburg show that.
Tom Levenson
@Dennis G.: Yup. I have to confess that I had no expectation that the show would be good as history. As a sometime PBS guy, I wondered if the show would be any good just from a purely formal point of view.
Nope. It sucked…in fact it looked to me like a program from a couple of decades ago, the era of bad Ken Burns knock offs.
A crater by any criteria.
giovanni da procida
@NobodySpecial:
You mean Thomas rather than Sherman, right?
PTirebiter
TNC got an advance copy from PBS and favorably reviewed it last month.
here’s a couple of excerpts:
NobodySpecial
@giovanni da procida: Yeah, meant Thomas, sorry. Tired. Plus, the Rock was the guy who first had the idea of the march to the sea, but he was ordered to go back to Nashville because Sherman sucked at defending.
celticdragonchick
@Tokyokie:
But that is not what you want cavalry to do, since it destroys their mobility advantage. Cavalry functions as the eyes of the army, and should not be pinned down into a static fight without very good reason. General John Buford’s deision to dismount his division and fight at Gettysburg in order to delay the rebel advance and secure advantages defensive positions for Mead is a rare example of when cavalry should be used as infantry.
The British/Australians in WW I did use mounted infantry called “Light Horsemen” against the Turks. Also, the Tory Legion in the the Carolinas during the Revolutionary War functioned as a mixed dragoon/mounted infantry unit under the infamous “Bloody Ban” Tarleton.
PTirebiter
I thought I’d provided a link to the whole piece.
Guess not. http://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2010/12/toward-a-complete-general-lee/67819/
asiangrrlMN
You know, before I started reading TNC’s posts about the Civil War and your own, dengre, I had a very rudimentary knowledge of said war. So, had I read this post, say, ten years ago, I would have been stunned by what I was reading. What little I had learned about the Civil War was permeated with the myth that Robert E. Lee was a terrific general and a great man who happened to be on the wrong side of the war. Now, however, reading your post just reminds me how myths last a damn long time, no matter the facts to the contrary.
Omnes Omnibus
@NobodySpecial: There is a story about Bragg from the Mexican War. He was a harsh disciplinarian and a perfectionist. He drove his troops so hard that one night someone rolled a shell with a lit fuse into his tent. The fuse was cut too long, allowing Bragg to snuff it out. Bragg was, of course, outraged. He woke up his entire battery and had them spend the rest of the night practicing cutting fuses to the proper length as a punishment for their incompetence (and as teaching moment).
Tom M
@Bill Murray:
Well, Lee’s family sued to get the estate back after the war and took it to the Supreme Court. They won and eventually sold the ground to the country for $150,000.
celticdragonchick
@chris:
Rommel is the only German general who never violated the laws of land warfare, and he also actively protected Jewish civilians in Morrocco from the depredations of the SS, as well as protecting French Foreign Legion POW’s who happened to be German recruits and had been ordered executed by Hitler personally.
I am unaware of any instance where Lee went out of his way to protect slaves or black federal troops who were captured.
Tom M
@Jamie:
Really? Chancellorsville was a defense?
Doug
I agree with all the tribute to Grant and disparagement of the political reputation of Lee. I think though somewhere in the comparison of the generals in the overland campaign some mention ought to be made of the armies they were fighting with.
A large part of the admiration of Lee was how well he did with how relatively little he had. He was constantly facing a larger army, avoided destruction, was able to go on the offensive and scored some remarkable victories and near victories.
For all my respect of Grant it is hard to imagine him or anyone doing as well in the same circumstances.
Still, how stupid and treasonous and awful the whole enterprise was, makes it really hard to call any feeling towards Lee admiration.
PTirebiter
@Tom M: I was completely unaware of that. Did the Lee family threaten to disinter all the dead folks in their front yard?
mclaren
@Tokyokie:
That’s J. F. C. Fuller’s point. Lee was a brilliant tactician but unable to think in terms of grand strategy. He seemed focused on winning individual battles rather than winning the war by stretching out the war beyond the Union’s endurance.
In fairness, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could have won the war for the South. They were outmanned 4 to 1 and at the start of the war the South had only one working cannon foundry, the Tredegar iron works. The North not only had more manpower, but almost all of America’s heavy industry and technology.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal
@celticdragonchick:
Rommel was also just about the only German WWII general who never fought the Red Army. This had just about everything to do with why he was never implicated in war crimes. If you limit them to just fighting the Western Allies, you can find lots of German generals who never violated the laws of war. There’s no reason to think he would have been any more scrupulous than the rest had he served in Russia.
Desert Rat
I highly recommend JFC Fuller’s The Generalship of Ulysses S Grant. He cuts through a lot of crap, and really shows Grant’s genius.
The Vicksburg Campaign, pretty closely modeled on Winfield Scott’s Invasion of Mexico after the landing at Veracruz, was a masterstroke of improvisation. In a whirlwind campaign, he slipped gunboats past the Vicksburg guns, then used them to cross the river below the town. Cut off from reliable resupply, he simply marched his army across the state of Mississippi, and then back, torching towns, defeating scattered Confederate armies, and moving so fast that the mass of Confederate troops never could concentrate to deal him the hammer blows.
It’s worth noting that the Gettysburg Campaign was a reaction to Vicksburg. By the time Lee marched North into Pennsylvania, Vicksburg was already cut off, and doomed. Lee hastened it by not reinforcing Mississippi.
I’d suggest that Grant and Sherman were both superior to Lee. Sherman for sheer tactical brilliance (the drive on Atlanta, and the March to the Sea, for starters), Grant for being the only General, on either side, other than Winfield Scott, who had a concept of grand strategy in terms of defeating the Confederacy.
Of course, I’d also suggest that rather than acting as apologists for Lee, perhaps its time Virginia celebrate its real Civil War hero, the Rock of Chickamauga, George Thomas. This, of course, is why most of my Southern-born, cracker relatives, don’t talk to me much.
Murc
@Roger Moore:
You are far from the first person to tell me that, Roger.
Basically, I take this view; if during a battle you manage to hold your ground, take your objective, or otherwise repulse the enemy army in some way, you have, at the very least, achieved a tactical draw, if not an outright win. That tactical draw has no bearing whatsoever on whether it was stupid to engage at all, whether you sustained such heavy losses in the engagement as to entirely prevent you from achieving later strategic objectives, whether you lack the resources to follow through on that tactical success for further strategic gains, etc. It’s a very possible to win a lot of battles and lose a war.
I realize this is a DEEPLY idiosyncratic view; I no longer take the opinion that I’m wrong (or stupid) for holding it personally. Nontheless, I feel its sufficiently supported by the facts and my own biases to be worth holding.
In regards to the Overland campaign specifically… I take the view that it was a series of inspired strategic choices by Grant and a series of well-fought draws and narrow wins in individual battles by Lee. I have met people who say that this means that Lee could have cleaned Grant’s clock if he had the resources to exploit things like Cold Harbor or the Wilderness properly; to that I say that if Lee had had said resources, Grant would never have engaged him in the entire campaign the way he did in the first place.
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal:
I’m unclear as to what you meant by ‘it shouldn’t have.’ It seems like you’re disputing my assertion that Lee’s performance in individual battles against Grant spoke well of his abilities by asserting that it has no bearing whatsoever on the larger campaign or the reasons Grant fought it. That’s… true, but its sort of apples to oranges? I think?
Desert Rat
@Doug:
A large part of the admiration of Lee was how well he did with how relatively little he had. He was constantly facing a larger army, avoided destruction, was able to go on the offensive and scored some remarkable victories and near victories.
Lee went on the counteroffensive numerous times, with mixed results. The Battles of the Seven Days (at least the portion Lee was mixed up in), were tactically, a series of battles that amounted to bloody stalemates, which became a strategic victory only because McLellan let it become one.
Clearly, as counteroffensives, Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg, Second Manassas, were clear tactical victories. The Wilderness, Lee’s last real counteroffensive on any sort of scale, was a tactical draw, but strategic loss.
Lee’s only real offensives, Antietam and Gettysburg, were tactical and strategic defeats. Yes, Lee was the subject of bad luck at Antietam.
Invading Gettysburg, instead of sending Longstreet west to relieve Vicksburg, for the all the hype it gets, mostly courtesy of the Michael Shaara novel and subsequent film adaptation, was probably the second biggest strategic blunder of 19th Century Warfare (the first being a coin flip between Napoleon’s Invasions of Spain and Russia)
Lee’s flaw is that he was a classical general in the mold of Frederick the Great or Napoleon Bonaparte. He was basically perfectly conditioned and equipped to fight classical, pre-Industrial Revolution European warfare…that is, a war where the invasion of enemy territory is a precursor to the one big, decisive battle, preferably on relatively level terrain, where each army can basically decimate the other until one of them breaks.
The Civil War wasn’t that kind of war, and Industrial countries were capable of maintaining armies in the field long enough to recover from that one big defeat. It was a war of attrition, first and foremost. Economic attrition, and manpower attrition. Grant saw that. Lincoln saw that. Both knew on some gut level, that to defeat the Confederacy, you had to destroy its industrial capacity to maintain its armies in the field.
Lee didn’t see it, and Davis didn’t either. If they had, Lee wouldn’t have been given free rein to blunder into defeats at Antietam and Gettysburg, and he sure as hell wouldn’t have been able to denude the Western and Tennessee fronts to keep throwing his men into the meatgrinder campaigns in Virginia.
I’ll side with Dennis G here. Lee was a solid tactician, but utterly useless as a strategist. He’d have made a great Army commander. As a general of armies, he was a mediocrity.
Rex
The timeline is a little dicey here, re: Longstreet and Lee.
Longstreet’s first great heresy was criticizing Lee’s generalship in any capacity, especially so soon after Appamatox.
Longstreet’s second great heresy was embracing Republicanism and having his citizenship restored. This was in 1868.
The Lost Cause began targeting Longstreet in 1872, 2 years after Lee’s death.
The facts just don’t seem to add up. I’d like to see a citation of this letter from Longstreet to Lee. Furthermore, couldn’t equal argument be made against Longstreet that he was not necessarily acting in good faith toward his friend Lee with his criticisms of Lee’s tactics while the wounds were still quite fresh? Why is Lee obliged one direction while Longstreet given a pass in the other? It just doesn’t add up. And, as cited, the Lost Cause didn’t seize upon Longstreet until 2 years after Lee’s death. And the Lost Causers attacks on Longstreet were at least in some part a response to Longstreet’s criticisms of Lee (scalawagging aside).
No criticisms of Longstreet intended–he was a brilliant tactician who foresaw the direction warfare would take in the 20th century and deserves mention as one of the great generals of the war and he was a good and decent man to boot.
celticdragonchick
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal:
I belive he did fight against the Tsarist Russians in WW I as a lietenant. He was also in the Greece/Yugoslavia theatre in anti partisan operations before the North African campaign, and he has not been accused of any Geneva violations there…and the Germans were not all scrupulous about legal nicities when dealing with partisans. Survivors in Greece after the war said he was a tough opponent, but nobody thought he did anything unethical or illegal in terms of warfighting.
I don’t think your point holds any water. He had ample opportunity to be a bastard, and he did not take it. He stuck his neck out pretty damned far when he told the SS to fuck off and get out of his area of operations and leave the Jewish population alone. No other German field officer did that.
Andy K
@Roger Moore:
Yeah, that was some, uhm, masterful intel at Chattanooga, not figuring out that Missionary Ridge had a little valley near its eastern edge.
I will say it until I turn blue in the face: Thomas was the far better general. He was better at gathering intel, he was better at logistics (look at what he did to quickly rebuild his force that annihilated Hood at Nashville, after being left by Sherman with the inferior force), he was better at defeating- absolutely destroying– large Confederate forces while minimizing his own casualties.
That said, Bobby Lee was lost without Stonewall Jackson. Jackson and Longstreet complimented each other.
Omnes Omnibus
@Desert Rat: IIRC Lee subscribed to Jomini’s theories. Maneuver to bring maximum force to bear on the decisive point, use geometric principles, and defeat the enemy in one big battle. (I simplify, of course) Time and technology had moved beyond that. Clausewitz has stood the test of time better.
Desert Rat
@Jeff:
I don’t think you can make this case.
Thomas was a solid commander. Utterly unshakable in defense, but slow to move the attack. His actions as a corps commander at Chickamauga were the reason Grant arrived on the scene with an army still there to save. Ditto for his charge up Missionary Ridge.
However, there is no defending his inactions with regard to John Belle Hood’s Tennessee invasion in late 1864. If Thomas had dared to move South to reinforce Schofield at Franklin, there would have been no need for a battle at Nashville.
As for Nashville itself, Thomas waited far too long before going on the offensive against the remains of Hood’s Army. By the time Nashville actually occurred, it was quite clear that Thomas had let himself be taken out of action for months by a ghost of any army. Nashville was a sledgehammer cracking an eggshell that came about two months too late.
EDIT: Thomas, of course, gets bonus points, along with his fellow Virginian, Winfield Scott, for staying loyal to the Union. He was a true hero. Nobody can take that from him.
Desert Rat
@Omnes Omnibus:
Agreed. He was straight out of the Jomini school…who drew his inspiration from the Napoleonic model. Von Clausewitz has definitely stood the test of time better at this point.
The Bobs
Robert E. Lee was a traitor. He betrayed the oath he swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America, and he did so for the most ignoble of causes.
There is nothing to add to this.
Sasha
I always enjoyed this quote that pretty much captures the essence of Grant’s single-mindedness:
“He habitually wears an expression as if he had determined to drive his head through a brick wall, and was about to do it.”
Andy K
@mclaren:
While I believe Lee was overrated, I disagree with this.
Lee did have a grand strategy, but it wasn’t as all-encompassing as Grant’s (if you can really credit Grant as being the first or only Union general to see that the goal wasn’t points on the map, but destruction of the Confederate fighting forces) grand strategy. Lee’s strategy was to cut off Washington, DC from the rest of the Union, causing so much anti-war sentiment in the North that Republicans would be swept from office in 1862 (after what became known as the Antietam Campaign) or 1863 (following the Gettysburg Campaign).
It’s amazing how close he was to pulling this off in 1862. McClellan was all spread out. Lee was ready to pick him apart. Then Lee’s plans feel into McClellan’s hands.
celticdragonchick
@Desert Rat:
An over abundance of caution seemed to be strewn throughout most of the Union Army leadership. The war should have ended at Antietam.
celticdragonchick
@Andy K:
Nice analysis.
Sasha
Good entry, but the tag isn’t snarky enough. May I recommend “Reconstruction Unreconstructed”?
Andy K
@Desert Rat:
Whoa, whoa, whoa!
Sherman left Thomas with shit as the former took the majority of the force that had fought the Atlanta Campaign- including nearly all of the cavalry mounts, and all of the best infantry units- and went pillaging, unopposed, through Georgia. Hood outnumbered Thomas, whose force was mostly spread from Atlanta via Chattanooga back to Nashville, guarding the supply lines. Thomas chose the field on which to fight, and essentially funneled Hood to Nashville, then hammered the Confederates with the cavalry force- mounted infantry, really- that he worked tirelessly to scrounge up in an area that had been picked over for mounts too much in the preceding 3 1/2 years.
It’s amazing that people still buy into the Grant/Sherman/Schofield narrative of post-Chickamauga Thomas. Do they not realize how well-connected those three were in Washington? They got damned near everything they wanted, thank you very much, Senator Sherman.
Ash Can
I just want to say that this is an outstanding thread.
General Stuck
@Ash Can:
Isn’t it though. BJ still maintains the smartest commentariat on the blogs, imho.
Andy K
@celticdragonchick:
Thomas wasn’t overly cautious. Take a look at the cables from before the Atlanta Campaign, while Sherman was practicing the March to the Sea with a march across Mississippi: Thomas saw a golden opportunity to outflank Johnston at Dalton by taking the Army of the Cumberland through Snake Creek Gap. Sherman said no, wait.
When Sherman finally did employ Snake Creek Gap, during the Battle of Rocky Face Ridge, he sent McPherson with a much smaller force than Thomas had proposed using weeks earlier, and by the time McPherson got through the gap to Resaca, he found it had been fortified and manned in the weeks following Thomas’ proposed action.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal
@celticdragonchick:
I said that he didn’t fight against the Red Army for a reason. There is no comparison between the First World War in Russia and the Second. This is an irrelevant comment.
Uhm, what? Rommel arrived in North Africa in February, 1941. The Germans didn’t invade Yugoslavia until April. Rommel never served there.
Which was pretty easy for him to accomplish, since he never fought partisans.
As is often the case, you have no idea what you are talking about. I repeat, there is no reason at all to think that Rommel would have behaved any differently in Russia than any of the other German generals did. Given the nature of the Partisan Order and the Commissar Order, as well as the fact that the entire plan for Barbarossa depended upon starving the Russian cities, it wouldn’t have been possible for a German general to serve there without being guilty of war crimes. Everything about the campaign hinged on it.
Unless you want to argue that Rommel would have refused an order to serve on the Eastern Front, he would have been implicated. You’re cracked.
Murc
I will point out, in possibly a futile effort to cool things down a little, that the dueling narratives of whether Thomas was rope-a-doping Hood in order to crush him wholly and forever, or whether he was a plodder whose hesitancy and overabundance of caution led to him being tied down by a hollow, broken shell of a Confederate army for two months is one of THE huge debates in Civil War scholarship, the subject of many thousands of pages of paper of dueling historical articles, essays, books, etc.
The waters are muddied further by Grant and Sherman’s memoirs, and also by the fact that Grant and Sherman commanded large constituencies after the war, where Thomas, a man reviled by his family and his state, did not. Additionally, Thomas, in what in my view was a great historical crime, had all of his personal papers and correspondence destroyed. So no help there.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal
@Andy K:
Bullshit. Again, Grant twice forced the entire army opposing him to surrender. No one else in the war managed it once. No one was better at it than he was.
mclaren
@Andy K:
Actually, I think your example provides evidence of why Lee failed as a master strategist.
Attempting to cut off Washington D.C. might have succeeded for a short time, but the Army of Northern Virginia could not possibly have maintained itself in position with such an extended supply line for any length of time. Lee’s army was bound to get pushed back by numerically superior Union forces, and threatening Washington D.C. merely guaranteed that he would stir up war fever in the Union to white heat.
Thus, Lee’s “strategy” had no more chance of succeeding than the Japanese abortive effort to attack Pearl Harbor pre-emptively or Al Qaeda’s pointless and counterproductive destruction of the Twin Towers in 2001. All these grand gestures only served to provoke real fury in opponents who until then had not had a great deal of reason to shift into all-out total war mode.
A much better grand strategy for Lee would have been to harrass and decimate Union forces with unpredictable attacks, then fade back and come at them from a different direction while Jefferson Davis pursued a negotiated solution. These were essentially the tactics used by George Washington in the Revolutionary War. Lee’s only real hope was to draw out the war long enough for the North to get sick of it and settle for some compromise that let the South maintain slavery in some limited way.
Andy K
@Russ:
Hagiography on Lee’s part. You should read the Pryor book, the one written a few years ago, after the author was given access to Lee’s letters- ALL of Lee’s letters. I won’t go so far as calling Marse Robert a sadist, but the guy was certainly pro-stick/anti-carrot when it came to the treatment of the family’s “property”.
Follow Dennis’ link to TNC. That post links, iirc, to video of the author on C-Span.
Look for more of TNC’s Civil War posts, which started just before Dennis’ Civil War posts here. If, after going through those posts you still hold the view that Lee or any of the other southern “gentlemen” stayed loyal to their states out of loyalty’s sake, you should have your head examined for a brain.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal
@Andy K:
Wrong. Thomas outnumbered Hood 60,000 to 40,000. He had a bad tactical position to start with, but not nearly as hopeless as you indicate. You also omit any discussion of Sherman’s operational thinking. He took the best parts of the army because he was doing something dangerous: he deliberately severed his own line of communication in order to achieve his strategic goals. Once he started, there was no chance of being reinforced or resupplied. He and his army were on their own. Thomas was not. He was able to do exactly what he did: retire back on his own LOC and stretch out Hood’s.
I don’t say this to denigrate Thomas. It was a very well fought campaign, even if he was dilatory at ending it. At that point, unlike earlier in the war, there wasn’t much cost to taking his time. So he made sure to do it right. A good general doesn’t fight a closely matched battle if he has the option to fight one with overwhelming superiority, which is what Thomas did.
Hell, the tightest bit of fighting in the campaign was by Schofield, in managing to withdraw from Hood.
You seem to be of the opinion that praising Sherman and Grant must mean cutting down Thomas. That simply isn’t the case. Thomas was a fine general. It’s possible that he could have been as great as Sherman or Grant, but he never had the opportunity to answer that question one way or the other. That’s life. Deal with it.
celticdragonchick
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal:
My bad. I got the time line screwed up. Rommel was in Greece in 1943. Greece and Yugoslavia are adjaicent countries that both had significant partisan campaigns, so I tend to lump them together as a single theatre of opration…but that is a personal quirk. I don’t expect everybody to agree by any means.
I’m not the one here who is presenting a counter historical speculation as fact. To wit:
Unless you want to argue that Rommel would have refused an order to serve on the Eastern Front, he would have been implicated.
It didn’t happen, and you are presenting it as historical inevitability. Bullshit.
…Especially since there is growing evidence he was preparing to surrender the entire Western Front after his conversations with the Mayor of Stuttgart and his subsequent discovery of mass murders of Jews in 1944. (Astonishingly, it appears Rommel only learned of the Holocaust in 1944)
His record stands on it’s own, and you only have counter historical speculation to prop up your…well, whatever.
Andy K
@mclaren:
Do you realize how tenuous support for the war was in the North following Second Bull Run, then again following Chancellorsville? Can you imagine how much more tenuous it would have become had the Army of the Potomac been defeated, the federal government basically held hostage by the Army of Northern Virginia? Do you realize how long it would have taken to gather an effective fighting force from the Carolina Coast and the Western Theater? Do you realize the tenuous position the Western Theater would have been in in late 1862 had corps been pulled to liberate DC?
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal
@mclaren:
Well, his other option for winning was to succeed the same way that Washington did: get the French (or British, in his case) to intervene on his side and force the Union to the table. This played a role in his decision to go after Washington. The thinking was, win a big splashy victory like Saratoga, and you might get intervention.
I have no idea whether it would have worked.
Andy K
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal:
Thomas had 26,000 inexperienced troops scattered along the supply line. He faced Hood with an effective force of 34,000- with barely any cavalry.
Sherman took off for Savannah after Hood had gone north and west. He faced almost no opposition in Georgia, and he knew it. And since the part of Georgia he passed through on the March hadn’t been spoiled as had northern Virginia, Tennessee and Mississippi, the pickings- at harvest time- were really good. The only question he faced was taking Savannah, but since his force didn’t fire too many shots in anger along the way (and since Savannah was undermanned), Hardee withdrew.
The success of the March to the Sea hinged upon the success of Thomas keeping Hood from moving up to the Ohio River. Had Hood bypassed Thomas, Grant and Sherman would quite probably be bigger goats than Thomas- it was their plan, after all, to split their forces rather than keep them together in order to destroy the Army of Tennessee. This is why Grant was so goddamned nervous about Thomas (well, he’d pretty much hated Thomas since ’62, when Thomas told Halleck and Stanton that Grant should have his Army of the Tennessee back, as ironic as that seems) not attacking sooner at Nashville. He knew that the March to the Sea ended not at Savannah, but with Hood’s defeat.
Andy K
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal:
Uh, no, it was done by Schofield’s corps commanders.
If there’s one thing certain about Schofield, it’s that he won no respect from his underlings. When the fighting began, he was useless. Utterly useless. The only reason he was there was because he was politically connected to Grant and Sherman, and he worked as their spy in Thomas’ camp. He sent telegram after telegram back to Washington and City Point making complaints that Thomas wouldn’t budge- in the midst of an ice storm!
celticdragonchick
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal:
BTW..I’v been looking in some resouces and it does appear that Rommel was in and around the Balkans…including Yugoslavia and Northern Italy…during Operation Achse and witnessed retribution activities by the SS for the first time (directed at Tito’s partisans).
celticdragonchick
@Andy K:
Maybe he needs to stick to accountancy.
mclaren
@Andy K:
You make good points about the softness of the Union’s initial support for the war. They were shocked by the casualties at Bull Run. Plus, the Northern press had confidently proclaimed that the war would be over within 6 months with minimal casualties.
Holding Washington D.C. hostage, however, was never a realistic possibility. Lincoln and company could always have retreated from Washington to a provisional seat of government farther north. This would have left Lee in charge of a meaningless piece of land he couldn’t hold, as Napoleon was left in charge with Moscow.
Cutting off Washington is an entirely different matter from “defeating the army of the Potomac.” In fact, the two goals seem mutually exclusive. You’re talking about Lee putting Lincoln in a position where it would take some time and difficulty to break through Lee’s forces. That’s not at all the same as destroying the army of the Potomac. On the contrary, I’d argue that cutting off D.C. would have required Lee to outmaneuver the army of the Potomac. If he’d taken the time and effort to try to destroy the army of the Potomac, it would’ve cost him so many casualties that he would surely not have been able to cut off D.C.
I agree with That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal that one of Lee’s brightest hopes involved European recognition of the Confederacy. But that always seems to have been a forlorn hope. The European powers appeared loath to interfere in an internal conflict in a distant country in which they had little economic or political stake. The South’s biggest bargaining was its cotton exports, IIRC, and the North’s blockade soon put an end to that ploy. Perhaps if a great European power like France or Germany had still owned a large part of the American continent in 1861 or 1862 the Confederacy could reasonably have hoped for official recognition. But barring that, realpolitik dictated no advantage for the European power to alienate the American government by recognizing the Confederacy, and a good deal of risk in loss of trade from the North’s textile mills etc. For the European powers in the 1860s, the risk/reward ratio of recognizing the Confederacy simply wasn’t there — especially when the Confederacy’s chances of military victory seemed so remote.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal
@celticdragonchick:
He commanded Army Group E, which had the responsibility for coastal defense rather than anti-partisan duties, for TWO DAYS. He arrived in Greece on July 23, 1944, and was recalled to Germany on the 25th, after Mussolini was overthrown. Color me unimpressed with the evidence that this provides.
Not quite. I said that it was impossible for someone of general rank to serve on the Eastern Front without being complicit in war crimes, and that, unless you are prepared to argue that Rommel would have refused orders to deploy there, *then* it would have been inevitable that he’d have been guilty. The entire nature of the war on the Eastern Front was inseparable from war crimes. There is no evidence whatsoever that Rommel would have refused to go there. It’s possible, I suppose, but the chances are pretty remote.
Had he fought there, he’d have been as covered in guilt as the rest of his cohort.
Your source isn’t even consistent with itself (was Rommel an active part of the conspiracy or not? It says both yes and no.) You still manage to misrepresent it, as it doesn’t present the order to surrender as related to this discovery at all. It says that he was worried about Germany’s ultimate defeat.
Beyond that, I’m skeptical of the source. The author cites a book, Mythos Rommel (also a TV program) that, as far as I can tell, is only available in German. I can’t even find a review of it in English. Given how many really crappy books there are on the various German generals, often intent on proving that they were really honorable, I’m less than convinced. All of the evidence that I have actually seen suggests that the article is correct the first time: Rommel knew about the plot, but was not an active part of it. My guess, based upon everything I know, is that the article leaves out some important information, probably that Rommel’s plan to surrender the Western Front was entirely contingent upon the coup succeeding. Given how busy the German officer corps was to exonerate itself after the war, I have trouble believing it would have taken a discovery of documents fifty years after the fact to reveal this.
My last comment on this is that, if he really didn’t learn about the Holocaust until 1944, it was a case of of deliberately avoiding the knowledge. Had he had any curiosity whatsoever, he’d have known. That’s true for pretty much any German, but in particular for someone of his rank. Generals are highly sensitive to train schedules, and the German ones in 1942 and 1943 were heavily complicated by the use of trains to ship Jews to Poland. I find it extremely hard to believe that he didn’t know that that was underway. From there, only a willful act of ignorance could avoid the obvious conclusion. That’s aside from the fact that many of the massacres were an open secret among Wehrmacht generals. The work of the Einsatzgruppen was open. In fact, it wasn’t just the SS; army units were used in the operations. Unless you think that no one in the officer corps talked to him, despite the fact that it was a topic of much conversation (particularly if you think that he was in on the conspiracy; participants such as Henning von Tresckow made it a focus of discussion well prior to this supposed discovery), then the claim of a lack of knowledge is quite narrow: he knew that the Nazis were slaughtering Jews in Russia, but he didn’t know that they were also murdering German Jews.
Yes, it does. That record says that he never fought on the Eastern Front in WWII. Your case rests on a huge number of unsupported suppositions. In addition to what I said above, it presumes that the only German general that would have refused to be a part of war crimes just happened to be the only German general that never served in the theater where the vast majority happened. Again, Rommel wasn’t the only German general who refused to be involved in war crimes in other theaters. There were a number of them, including Erwin von Witzleben and Hans Speidel. So saying that he refused to do so elsewhere really doesn’t shed much light on whether he would have done so in Russia, because it was not uncommon to have that split. Among the Germans, the fight against Soviet Russia was a completely different type of war than the one against the UK and USA and France.
So, sure, it’s possible that Rommel wouldn’t have engaged in war crimes. I just find it highly implausible, given all of the other history surrounding that question. You are factually correct that he wasn’t complicit, but entirely unconvincing that that was due to his character rather than his situation. It relies upon supposition and and extraordinary coincidence to think otherwise.
And, above all, anyone in Germany knew the nature of the regime even if they didn’t know the specifics. I think a pretty good case that fighting for Germany AT ALL demonstrates a weakness of character. It is exactly the same as fighting for the Confederacy; those who did so deliberately made the choice to fight for a great moral evil.
Andy K
@celticdragonchick:
I’ll flame at my home base, but not here. I respect the commenters at BJ too much to do that in anything other than a manner that’s obviously playful.
The Confederates weren’t the only successful revisionist historians after the war. Sherman, Schofield and Grant all wrote successful memoirs that pushed their own versions of history. The three memoirs pretty much all jibed with each other, but when Sherman and Schofield were called out on the more questionable statements in their memoirs, they failed to back themselves up (Grant, of course, died right after finishing his memoir).
If you go back and read the telegraphs from the war, however, you can catch them- especially Sherman and Schofield- telling obvious falsehoods.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal
@Andy K:
Sort of. When the campaign started, that was the size and quality of the force directly under Thomas. That number omits the sizable number of units that were also in the theater. Once they gathered at Nashville, Thomas outnumbered Hood substantially.
You have to omit key facts to arrive at your conclusion.
And? That’s no guarantee that Hood wouldn’t turn back around and come after him. The moment he cut his own line of communications, Sherman had to be prepared for any contingency. Again, the Union could ship reinforcements to Thomas. They couldn’t send a thing to Sherman until he got to Savannah and could supply him by sea.
It was the sort of decision you can’t turn back from.
That’s great, but you have to understand the necessary conditions for foraging. It requires an army to spread out. If it faces serious opposition, then it has to concentrate. This is what happened to Lee in the Gettysburg campaign. His whole plan depended upon living off the land. Once Meade ran him down, that became inoperable. Lee had two choices: he could withdraw back to Virginia without a fight (handing a huge propaganda victory to the North), or he could concentrate and fight a major battle *quickly*, at a place of Meade’s choosing. That’s why it was such a dumb idea to invade the north in the first place. It suffered all of the problems of the operational offensive while still leaving the initiative in his enemy’s hands.
That’s what Sherman needed to avoid. He had to make sure that he took an army that the Confederates couldn’t beat in similar circumstances. Unlike Lee, he wouldn’t have had a line to retreat on. He didn’t need a stronger force than the Confederates could muster. He needed an overwhelming force.
On the other hand, that’s exactly what he left Thomas: the ability to choose his field and to withdraw back on an LOC. Thomas took advantage of it. More power to him. It doesn’t mean what you argue it means, though. Still, once Thomas concentrated, there was zero chance that the Confederates would defeat him. Yes, Sherman’s plan relied upon not losing the Ohio River line. There also wasn’t any serious chance that it would happen. The idea that Hood would have bypassed Thomas is, no matter what anyone worried about at the time, ludicrous. Thomas’ next move would have been simple: follow right behind Hood, sitting on his LOC. Given the absolute Union naval superiority, he had a much broader set of options for supply than Hood had. Hood standing across his land based LOC wouldn’t have mattered very much. None other than Ulysses S. Grant had demonstrated 16 months earlier how valuable control of the rivers was.
Thomas fought brilliantly to produce a victory at Nashville. To avoid defeat, though, hardly called for brilliance. He had more than sufficient resources for that. Sherman left him more than enough resources for that.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal
@celticdragonchick:
Cite them, please. His command in Greece lasted two days.
Bill Murray
@Tom M: yes that’s covered in the article linked to
@PTirebiter: The land was confiscated for non-payment of an insurrection tax in 1862. Mrs. Lee tried to pay the tax, but couldn’t go in person, the payment was not accepted and the land was sold at auction. This sale was deemed to be an unconstitutional takings on a 5-4 Supreme Court decision in 1882. The elder Lee’s might have tried to retake possession but both were long gone by 1882.
I think it probably killed Lee that there was a Freedman’s village that was on the grounds following the Emancipation Proclamation, although the SCOTUS decision eventually ended the village’s existence when the whole area was given to the military in 1887 and fully closed by 1900.
http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/freedman-100104.htm
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal
@Andy K:
I’m not questioning this. They, like just about everyone in history, were less than completely honest in their memoirs. What a surprise. I’ll even agree that Thomas was treated shamefully after the war.
However, saying that is not the same thing as saying that your interpretation of what transpired at Nashville is even vaguely correct. Grant could be wrong in his retelling without you being right, and that definitely appears to be the case. You go equally too far in writing a hagiography of Thomas, while performing a hatchet job on Sherman. It’s embarrassing, because Thomas was good enough not to need one.
Chuck Butcher
Debates about “best General in history” are silly and pointless. History of military actions involves moving targets of terrain, equipment, forces, and politics. Comparing Grant or Lee to a WWII General is foolish in the respect that virtually nothing is in common, much less to go backwards from their times. The Civil War was essentially the dawning of trench and mechanised warfare and fits poorly with any other conditions, though WWI certainly failed to learn those lessons.
Grant’s story was has been seriously fucked over, drunkeness was not one of his failures, post CA posting. Much has been made of Grant’s graduation standing at WP, what gets forgotten was that he shined in mathematics and was a logistian with little compare. Grant forced those he fought to fight on his terms, in the short run and particularly in the long. Yes he was called a butcher, if you attack defended positions that is the outcome and he did what he could to minimize that and grieved over it.
If you want to compare Lee and Grant, then the results speak for themselves and against all Grant’s predecessors. He contained, manuevered, and pinned the “genius” Lee. He used Sherman to cut the South in half.
If you want to talk about character, Grant ferociously defended Sherman who was the subject of a fierce campaign by media and politicos and he did it to his own disadvantage in both arenas.
I despise Lee as a traitor and a slaver and laugh at his deification by the unreconstructed and worse by common wisdom. Lee beat some incompetents and got handed his head every time he ran up against somebody with a clue and by rights should have been smashed after Gettysburg. He was lucky in foes and that doesn’t make for a good ending, you do run out of idjits after awhile.
This is scarcely the place to make a case for a true reckoning of Grant, but expect in the course of some more decades to see Grant’s star shine brighter as slurs and false attributions of fault lose ground both from the war and his Presidency as documented history replaces inuendo.
Tehanu
@El Cruzado:
Well, that makes sense, because their culture was based on making everything the expense of other folks. Slavery, after the cruelty and injustice, is theft — stealing other people’s work for your own benefit.
cmorenc
The biggest flaw by far in Lee’s generalship was that he too often lost sight of a crucial strategic objective: it was NOT necessary for his army to win the war! All they needed to accomplish was to prevent the northern armies from winning the war for long enough to wear patience and support for the war within the northern states thin enough to make continuance of the war politically unsustainable.
Chuck Butcher
@cmorenc: He couldn’t do that because Grant wouldn’t let him do it. (neither would Lincoln)
Andy K
McClellan had absolutely no idea how Lee had deployed his forces. Lee had planned to move north and cut a main support artery- the railroad bridge at Harrisburg, PA- after cutting the B&O bridge at Harper’s Ferry and maneuvering through Maryland, then to move on to Philadelphia, Baltimore or Washington. Lee issues Special Order 191 in Frederick, MD (northwest of DC, between DC and Harrisburg), on 9/9/1862. By 9/12/1862, as McClellan is finally consolidating at Frederick, Jackson is in front of Harper’s Ferry (to the southwest), and Longstreet was approaching Hagerstown (northwest)…
And McClellan being who he was, figured them both to be 75K-100K strong. He’s in a quandary. Does he split his forces and go after Thomas and Longstreet separately? Can’t do that- McClellan thinks he’d be outnumbered greatly. Go after one then the other? Well, he still thinks he’d be outnumbered, and the Confederate force that he leaves be can threaten Washington (if he let’s Jackson go), or Baltimore or Philly (if he leaves Longstreet alone). The only thing he can do is dig in around all three of those cities, supplement with (heehee) militia, and watch Bobby Lee pick him apart piece by piece as Lee is cutting off DC by shooting nearly his entire force at Philly and/or Baltimore.
Luckily for McClellan, he finds a copy of Special Order 191 on 9/13/1862 in Frederick, and he shoots straight to the heart, threatening to sever what he still thinks is a larger force than his own. But without Lee’s plans he’s a chicken with his head cut off.
Chuck Butcher
@Andy K:
Yeah and McClelland was the guy who thought he ought to replace Lincoln, amongst his other stupidities. He does get credit for having turned that army into a fighting force (that he didn’t use…)
Chuck Butcher
Jumpin JC on a crutch, that arrogant prick Lee found out at Gettysburg that trained Union soldiers under competent to extraordinary commanders not only would stand and fight, but would tear him a brand new asshole given the chance. He gave them the chances, GAVE them the chance to do so. Gettysburg showed Lee for what he was, at the time and by his actions afterwards and Grant made him pay in spades when he got ahold of him. The Union soldiers and the subordinate commanders at Gettysburg were not what Lee had faced before and his arrogance and tactical “brilliance” led him to think those positions were assailable without a 7:1/10:1 advantage because they were held by Union soldiers. He survived that because they were commanded by another of those Union commanding Generals.
NobodySpecial
The key to understanding Sherman’s March is to understand that it’s the kind of campaign that’s impossible to do unless the enemy is helpless. Really, think about it, sending 60k men off into enemy territory with no supplies, and their only hope of getting supplies being to beseige a city 300 miles away is the height of madness…unless the opponent can’t do a damn thing to stop you.
As far as Hood goes, he was under orders by Davis to make that march. He wasn’t turning back around, because Davis was making speeches about Hood going to the Ohio. As it was, Hood damned near destroyed Schofield’s army before he got to Nashville, and he actually had numbers on Thomas’s army for several days after he made contact with them.
J. Michael Neal
@NobodySpecial: Hood had numbers on Thomas briefly, but never by a large enough margin to overcome the problem that Thomas’ forces at Nashville were in fortifications. Overcoming that would have required either substantially greater forces than he had, or the ability to conduct a siege, which Union control of the rivers prevented.
Andy K
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal:
Those being…?
Hence the 34,000 effectives facing Hoods 39,000, no? What happens if Hood decides to leave Florence, with Thomas/Schofield to the northwest, and double back on Sherman, rather than sit at Florence for a few weeks?
Seeing that the only thing resembling what Lee faced at Gettysburg was Hood- who, rather than shadowing Sherman (as the AotP shadowed the AoNVA), marched away– it would have been a better idea to give Thomas a greater part of the force in order to quickly put Hood down, no? As it was, the next time Sherman faced anything like a sizable force, it was months later- because it took that long for Johnston to put the Army of the Carolinas together.
And let me ask you this: Why do you think that Sherman didn’t have Thomas lead the March to the Sea, while Billy hisself fell back to Nashville, where Sherman could devise a plan to smash Hood?
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal:
Dude….Writing about the overlooked aspects of Thomas’ career during the war is NOT hagiography. How about one of the best Grant biographers, Bruce Catton?
…It appears from this, and from all the rest of the record, that Thomas got his reputation on the wrong basis. He was supposed to be the immovable man, the soldier who was indomitable and who stolidly dug in his heels and refused to be moved, and at places like Chickamauga he earned that reputation beyond question. When Rosecrans was driven back to Chattanooga, it was Thomas who stayed, formed a new line out of broken remnants of beaten men, held the line in spite of everything, and reduced the battle from an overwhelming disaster to a mere setback. Yet he was not primarily a defensive fighter. On the contrary he was aggressive and mobile, and he struck some of the most devastating offensive blows in all the war; and the legend that portrays him simply as a man who could hold the line when things went badly is a pronounced bit of miscasting. (Slow Trot?)…
…Thomas shared one thing with Rosecrans: he was never quite able to hit it off with General Grant. In Rosecrans’ case the trouble is fairly easy to see, but with Thomas it is more obscure. Somehow the two men just did not see eye to eye. Grant obviously respected Thomas’ ability more than he respected Rosecrans’, but the end result was about the same: when he became general in chief, Grant never had the confidence in Thomas which he had in men like Sherman, McPherson, and Sheridan, and as a result Thomas missed the full measure of credit which he had earned…
…So Thomas’ case is not quite like that of Rosecrans. Rosecrans did well but had one bad day which tarnished his fame. Thomas never had a bad day. With Rosecrans, one has the feeling: This man could have been the best of them all, except for that one mishap. With Thomas, one gets the haunting feeling: Perhaps this man actually was the best of them all, but it took his country the better part of a century to realize it….
…Perhaps Chickamauga did part of the damage. At Chickamauga Thomas fought as good a defensive battle as any man ever fought, and he was “the Rock of Chickamauga” forever after, immovable, imperturbable, and indomitable. Grant is supposed to have remarked once that Thomas was “too slow to move and too brave to run away.” If Grant said that, he was wrong. There was nothing slow about Thomas. He liked to make sure that everything was ready before he moved, but when he did move, somebody had to get out of the way….
And Sherman gets nothing but love from the general public, but the fact is that for all of the success of the March to the Sea there was the fact that he didn’t prepare defenses at Shiloh, there’s a reason that part of Missionary Ridge became known as Billy the Goat Hill after the Battle of Chattanooga, and there’s a reason that his orders to attack at Rocky Face Ridge, Kenesaw Mountain…Well, during the whole Atlanta Campaign, really…Are questioned by a large segment of people with decent knowledge of the Civil War. Neither Sherman nor Grant were saints, but to point out their faults and failures doesn’t make one a devil. Sherman certainly had his faults on the printed page, too, and it can be proved.
Andy K
@Chuck Butcher:
On the afternoon of July 2, 1863 Sickles’ Third Corps, having advanced from this line to the Emmitsburg Road, eight companies of the First Minnesota Regiment, numbering 262 men were sent to this place to support a battery upon Sickles repulse.
As his men were passing here in confused retreat, two Confederate brigades in pursuit were crossing the swale. To gain time to bring up the reserves & save this position, Gen Hancock in person ordered the eight companies to charge the rapidly advancing enemy.
The order was instantly repeated by Col Wm Colvill. And the charge as instantly made down the slope at full speed through the concentrated fire of the two brigades breaking with the bayonet the enemy’s front line as it was crossing the small brook in the low ground there the remnant of the eight companies, nearly surrounded by the enemy held its entire force at bay for a considerable time & till it retired on the approach of the reserve the charge successfully accomplished its object. It saved this position & probably the battlefield. The loss of the eight companies in the charge was 215 killed & wounded. More than 83% percent. 47 men were still in line & no man missing. In self sacrificing desperate valor this charge has no parallel in any war. Among the severely wounded were Col Wm Colvill, Lt Col Chas P Adams & Maj Mark W. Downie. Among the killed Capt Joseph Periam, Capt Louis Muller & Lt Waldo Farrar. The next day the regiment participated in repelling Pickett’s charge losing 17 more men killed & wounded
God bless the First Minnesota.
Tom M
@celticdragonchick:
You were right but in the wrong war. Rommel earned his first medals in the 10th battle on the Isonzo when German troops were sent to bolster the Austro-Hungarian army. See The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front by Mark Thompson.
Mino
As he tells it, Sherman’s objective was to make the Deep South as sick of the war as the North had become. By the time he was finished with Georgia, Georgians were encouraging him to punish South Carolina even worse. Johnston had a heck of a job amassing his army of the Carolinas because of desertions and refusals.
AuldBlackJack
Well, the supremacy of some whites anyway.
As bemused senior (comment 45) points out Elizabeth Brown Pryor has some interesting things to point out about Lee’s post-war mindset. During the Q&A of another lecture she gave at Arlington National Cemetery the week before the lecture bemused senior references Pryor notes that Lee kept his mouth shut publicly after the war only because he was basically under house arrest until 1868 when he got his citizenship back. Lee’s private writings from that time reflect a bitter SOB who is angry at the North, hates the concept of majority rule, is filled with racial anger and to top it all off is still an unrepentant Galtian overlord;
Fuck Bobby Lee. He was an asshole.
rickstersherpa
@Jeff: A real interesting American Experience would have been a dual look at Lee and Thomas. It would have looked at why two men with such similar backgrounds made such different choices. Thomas is probaby the least appreciated and remembered of the great Union Generals of the Civil War. Albert Castel’s “Decision in the West” and Winston Grooms “Shrouds of Glory.” I think the biography that is featured on Amazon about him is kind of silly. Castel, who is also pro-Thomas and very critical of Sherman, is far more nuance.
Thomas, who lived through the Nat Turner slave revolt in Southhampton County, Virginia, married a northern woman. The short bios said that he had distaste for slavery and he certainly lacked the prejudice that many senior northern officers, most notoriously Sherman, had about using Black troops, most famously using full division to launch the crucial attack in tthe Battle of Nashville.
That the decision to stay loyal was difficult and costly, and seeing what it cost Thomas, it does make it somewhat more understandable about what Lee did, but it was certainly at the time a less courageous decision than Thomas’s. From both his siblings and friends, Thomas faced the following for remaining loyal.
“Remaining with the Union: At the outbreak of the Civil War, 19 of the 36 officers in the 2nd U.S. Cavalry resigned, including three of Thomas’s superiors—Albert Sidney Johnston, Robert E. Lee, and William J. Hardee.[16] Many Southern-born officers were torn between loyalty to their states and loyalty to their country. Thomas struggled with the decision but opted to remain with the United States. His Northern-born wife and his dislike of slavery probably helped influence his decision. In response, his family turned his picture against the wall, destroyed his letters, and never spoke to him again. (During the economic hard times in the South after the war, Thomas sent some money to his sisters, who angrily refused to accept it, declaring they had no brother.)[17]
Nevertheless, Thomas stayed in the Union Army with some degree of suspicion surrounding him. On January 18, 1861, a few months before Fort Sumter, he had applied for a job as the commandant of cadets at the Virginia Military Institute.[18] Any real tendency to the secessionist cause, however, could be refuted when he turned down Virginia Governor John Letcher’s offer to become chief of ordnance for the Virginia Provisional Army.[19] On June 18, his former student and fellow Virginian, Confederate Col. J.E.B. Stuart, wrote to his wife, “Old George H. Thomas is in command of the cavalry of the enemy. I would like to hang, hang him as a traitor to his native state.”[20]”
Jeff
@Desert Rat:
I see I’m far too late back to the thread to contribute much to the ongoing conversation, save to note that, in my opinion, Thomas’ decision to resist pressure from his superiors to attack and instead to wait at Nashville while Hood’s army suffered through an ice storm in the field, was one of the canniest moves by any general in the war, and probably did a lot to reduce Union casualties in the subsequent battle.
debbie
My PBS channel followed American Experence with a program commemorating the horses at Gettysburg. It was far more meaningful,
DBrown
Nathan Bedford Forrest was no Grant and few Generals in all history ever exceeded Grant in military genius.
Still, Forest was a genius in Calvary matters and was at fault for the slaughter at Fort Pillow. He founded the KKK but quite a few years after when it became too violent even for him!? Weird considering the man’s nature and his hatred for Blacks.
Yet the greatest war criminal by far was Lee – the huge mass murder of thousands of helpless Union soldiers in the Battle of the Crater (majority of the murdered in cold blood were Black soldiers) was well known by him and he did nothing about it nor tried to stop it – he did go and admired the handiwork.
As such, Lee as commander is responsible for it (through not ordered, but not clear Forest ordered the mass murder done by his troops at Pillow, either.)
Besides being a major war criminal, Lee was the ultimate trader to his country – he made an oath to stand and uphold the constitution of the US and like the coward he was and remained through life, he ran away and used the weak ass excuse to protect a State (yet which part?) The Western section clearly said it would break away if Virginia left the Union – yet the coward Lee attacked and killed fellow Virginians in that area of HIS OWN STATE! So, he once more lied about being loyal to fellow Virginians.
Lee’s first love and only love was for money and slavery was the source of all his income – he married for money and was a brutal task master over his slaves and had no problem sending men to die in a hopeless cause – that is, when Grant had him pinned down, he feed men into the fire and steel like a any good Nazi did for hilter.
Paul in KY
@Jeff: The Rock of Chickamauga. Fort Thomas Kentucky is named after him.
Great American.
Dennis G.
@celticdragonchick:
I had an Aunt who was a widow with a young child in Morocco during the War. My Uncle met her there, married her and brought her and my cousin back to the States. Years later we learn that she had grown up Jewish and somehow managed to escape being rounded up. I had not known about this aspect of Rommel but perhaps my family owes him a debt for the glorious years we were able to spend with my Aunt.
Cheers
ChrisB
@Jamie:
Don’t know if others have responded earlier but this is not correct. Lee attacked repeatedly during the Seven Days Battles and at Chancellorsville, to name a couple that immediately come to mind.
Paul in KY
@Raenelle: Gen. Pickett (IMO) should have done some vociferous complaining when he realized what Lee wanted his division to do.
When someone sends your division out to commit suicide, you just don’t say ‘right away, sir’. At least you don’t if you’re a general.
Dennis G.
@Rex:
Your timeline is wrong. The attacks on Longstreet began almost immediately and increased as he took his oath to the United States of America seriously after the war.
He wrote letters to Lee asking for Bobby Lee to push back on the lies. You can look these up if you wish and read them.
Cheers
GOPhuckYourself
@Jamie:
I disagree about Antietam. Lee fought the entire battle from a defensive position with his back against a river. He won that battle for three reasons — 1) most importantly, he was fighting McClellan, 2) he had interior lines of defense and could move troops effectively to counter McClellan’s bumbling assaults, and 3) A.P. Hill arriving to block the advance of the Federal left.
I think a better example, in line with what you are saying, is Malvern Hill.
Tom
Dennis: I don’t know if Lee was even the South’s best general. Longstreet wanted to fight a defensive war,dragging it out much in the way Washington fought the English. Such a strategy might have sapped the will of the Northern electorate to continue had the war stretched on a couple more years. I always have thought Longstreet thought strategically while Lee thought tactically. Seems like Lee was still fighting with de Jomini principles. Grant certainly was not and he changed the face of war.
Anniecat45
What do you mean, Lee didn’t turn his abilities against his own people? What about all those other Americans he was perfectly willing to turn his abilities against?
Anniecat45
I saw the Lee documentary last night; I don’t think it did enough to tear down the myth of Lee, but it certainly did not burnish it.
There is a program on Ulysses Grant scheduled for next Monday, January 10.
Ol'Froth
On the times Lee was on the offensive/defensive, the thing to remember is that during the Antietam and Gettysburg campaigns, Lee was on the strategic offensive, he was forced into the tactical defensive at Antietam. (and should have been destroyed if McClellan had thrown the 1/3 of the AoP that was unengaged across the bridge once Burnside took it).
At the Seven Days and Chancellorsville, Lee was on the tactical offensive, but the strategic defensive. Chancellorsville was another battle where he should have been destroyed, but Hooker inexplicidly ceded the tactical offensive to Lee (and still might have won the battle had his orders to the XI Corps to refuse the right been heeded).
celticdragonchick
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal:
Erwin Rommel: Operation Achse
On August 23rd, the first large scale air raid took place in Berlin causing moderate destruction, and on the 25th, Rommel’s hometown of Wiener Neustadt was bombed because of its aircraft industry. On September 3rd, Anglo-American forces started landing in southern Italy, at Reggio, opposite Messina. On September 8th, the announcement of an armistice between Italy and the Allies was made over Rome radio, and that same day, Operation Achse was begun. On September 9th, the Allies began to land forces in the bay of Lerno, south of Naples. In northern Italy Rommel had eight divisions in Army Group B. His plans for Achse had been laid thoroughly and were soon swinging into action. Within two days, the Italians were found to be fighting on the Allied side. By September 19th, the Germans had captured 82 Italian generals, 13, 000 officers, and 402,600 soldiers and sent them to concentration camps under the Achse plan. The plan was a complete success. Six German divisions made every attempt to push the Allies into the sea, but the Salerno beachhead proved stout and survived the assaults. By September 16th, the Germans were retreating to more desirable positions. In mid-September, Rommel developed appendicitis and went through a successful operation. Hitler decided to fight South of Rome despite Rommel’s protests. Meanwhile, partisan activity increased in both Italy and the Balkans. The Balkan Tito was incredibly elusive and escaped every attack imposed on him. During these uprisings, Rommel, for the first time, witnessed the ruthless SS at work. A large scale drowning was ordered in Lake Garda in which many Jews were victim. Partisans were dealt with harshly, and the SS were at work on the Italian black market, buying and selling items that they had “confiscated.”
ThresherK
@debbie: I haven’t read all the thread yet. But I, too, want to brag on my local: CPTV followed up 90 minutes of more supplication to the myth of the Lost Cause, with 90 minutes on New England’s role leading up to, and during, the Civil War.
Finally got to see “fairness” and “both sides” work in the favor of real-world knowledge rather than more turd polishing.
celticdragonchick
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal:
I agree with that. There are a number of anecdotal conversations to the effect that when “politics” was brought up, Rommel refused to engage and said he had no interest in outside matters. He really had to have evidence of the Holocaust out right in front of his nose before he accepted it was real and that Hitler was directing it.
Smurfhole
@Dennis G.:
Isn’t it possible for Forrest to have been a military genius AND a piece of shit as a human being? That wouldn’t exactly be unheard of. Most generals were assholes- Julius Caesar, Napoleon, most of Hitler’s generals, Patton, etc. Why is it so bad to concede technical genius to a horrible human being?
Hawes
Lee was always the rising star in the army. Commandant of West Point and probably the most impressive officer to come out of the Mexican War. His forays to find a path through the Pedregal were really impressive feats of endurance and ability.
In comparing Grant and Lee, Grant comes off better not because he won. The North SHOULD have won. Given their tremendous advantages in men and material, they should have won a lot sooner than 1865.
Lee probably should have followed Longstreet’s advice of a defensive war.
I can’t speak authoritatively on Lee’s opinions on race – but I think them hardly different from 80% of Americans in the 1860s. Lincoln thought them less than whites in many ways.
But Lee was remarkably bloodthirsty. The lie to his “Southern Gentleman” legacy is that he sought out for and yearned for a fight. It’s why he was much more inclined to side with borderline psychopath Jackson over professional soldier Longstreet.
As for the Union’s best soldier, I have to go with Sherman.
If we’re going to condemn Lee for Pickett’s Charge, we have to condemn Grant for Cold Harbor. Sherman, for all the waste he laid to the South, never seemed to engage in the profligate waste of life that Lee and Grant could engage in at times.
Cermet
@Hawes:Your right about one thing, you know little – to claim that ‘of course North (hence Grant) should have won’ is a stupid statement; throughout history vastly inferior armies defeat vastly larger armies (case in point, in the Philippine campaign by the US against Japan, a few US escort destroyers and a few jeep carriers (with only surface bombs, no antiarmor) were completely caught by surprised but defeated, in a running battle that lasted hours, the massed Japanese Imperial navy that included both their super battleships (20 inch guns), numerous heavy and light cruisers and many, many times their number of both heavy and light destroyers. Without a doubt the greatest one-sided modern victory by an inferior force.)
Lee was an asswipe who could not see past his stupid claim that since god was on his side, he’d win. Grant actually created many of the modern concepts of national campaign warfare and brilliant use of maneuver to their true conclusion long before anyone else.
Your lack of knowledge on Lee’s ownership and attitude towards blacks is strange – his brutal behavior towards his slaves is well documented and VERY FEW PEOPLE AT ALL in this country at the time owned slaves, much less so mistreated them like that pig, Lee did – Lee was a total ass licker and shit eating traitor who murdered more Americans than anyone in our history – try reading some history before you post statements that are so silly and borderline on hero worship of a lowlife piece of shit like lee.
Ol'Froth
IIRC, Cold Harbor was the only time Grant overruled Meade on a tactical (rather than a strategic) decision, and he never did so again.
Andy K
@Hawes:
As Ta-Nehisi Coates has pointed out, there were not two, but three sets of belligerents, each with different goals, in the Civil War:
The Confederates, who were fighting to protect the institution of slavery.
The Unionists, who were fighting to preserve the Union.
The Abolitionists, who fought alongside the Unionists, whose largest component, by far, were African Americans.
Man, I can’t wait for TNC’s book. He hasn’t come straight out and said it yet (not that I’m aware of, anyway), but I think he’s going to be focusing on that third group- especially the United States Colored Troops.
Smurfhole
I think a number of Union generals were better than Grant, personally- Sherman and Thomas being the two that spring immediately to mind. Cold Harbor is difficult to forgive; when the men are stitching their names into their jackets so that their bodies will be identifiable after they’re dead, but their commanding officer is oblivious to what’s about to happen, something is wrong.
On the Confederate side, Lee is overrated. But recently, I’ve discovered that Stonewall Jackson was overrated, too- for example, at the battle of Kernstown, he lost to some mediocre nonentity political apparatchik named General Shields whose only prior claim to fame was that he’d challenged Abraham Lincoln to a duel one time. Jackson was a homicidal maniac who had some brilliant underlings- Jubal Early, for example, and Ashby before Ashby got himself killed through gross indifference to death (in fairness, Ashby glubbed Kernstown a little bit). General Hood is more than overrated- why in God’s name is a fort named after that lunatic? Patrick Cleburne was a great general, and seems like not a bad man. Longstreet was a great general, and a good man.
I’ve always been a fan of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, personally. Not necessarily the greatest general of the war, but he did save the Union army at Little Round Top on the second day of Gettysburg.
Smurfhole
@Andy K:
Frederick Douglass said that Lincoln was the only Abolitionist he’d met (and he met pretty much all the major ones) who treated him like one white man treated another white man. Lincoln was probably the least-racist person of his age, arguably even less racist than Douglass himself (given Douglass’s extreme anti-Irish bigotry).
Original Lee
Love love love the thread! I am really learning a lot. I never had Civil War history in school (damn arena scheduling), so I am writing down the books mentioned here so I can check them out of the library.
I am gradually starting to study this period on my own, not just because of the current political climate but also because my cousin has hired a professional genealogist and is sharing the info as it comes in.
So far, I know of 2 several-great grandfathers who fought in the war on the Union side. One was at Vicksburg and the other was at Bull Run. Plus another one was the brother who drew the short straw and stayed home on the farm while the others joined up and were at Andersonville. I suspect there were a couple on the Confederate side, as some of the families were living in Kentucky at the time, but maybe someday I’ll know for sure.
Tom M
Re: Union Generals
There’s this from LGM
Read the comments from Sept. 2010. I liked this one re: Thomas
your hero is underrated/overlooked for one simple reason: he has no last name, just three first names. Like Lee Harvey Oswald, people with three first names are not to be trusted.
celticdragonchick
@Cermet:
Musashi and Yamato were mounted with 18 inch guns, which were the largest navel ordnance ever put to sea. The turrets alone weighed as much as a typical WW II destroyer. There were proposals for three additional battleships that would mount 20 inch guns, but no orders were placed.
Also…what is a heavy destroyer? The Gearing and Sumner classes mounted considerable firepower and were also a substantial step up in displacement from the Fletcher class…but I have never heard of them being called heavy destroyers. The French had the Le Fantasque super destroyers at the start of WW II (also the fastest flotilla vessels afloat during their operational lives). The surviving class types were re-rated as light cruisers in 1944.
The Mitscher class destroyers in 1953-1954 desplaced around 4,000 tonnes, which was quite a bit more than previous classes and they were rated as frigates. Th term “frigate” is now a designate for escorts (smaller than destroyers) that are mostly purposed for ASW operations.
Andy K
@Original Lee:
Just in case no one else mentioned it, James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom is a, if not the must read.
Kirk Spencer
@General Stuck: I’m sorry I missed this discussion, but no, Grant wasn’t the first to recognize the war of attrition issue.
Google General Winfield Scott and the Anaconda plan. Scott said a quick victory by northern forces was difficult to unlikely and instead proposed the plan that Grant ultimately executed. He was ridiculed for believing the South would not fall to a swift and overwhelming attack (shock and awe, anyone?), and the plan was called the anaconda plan by critics.
Oh, and for what it’s worth, Winfield Scott is one of my candidates for best general the US ever had. But he’s also representative of another problem we have in the US — our most competent generals tend to be less recognized. As a rule they were not flamboyant, not focused on attention instead of war.
Bob L
@Kirk Spencer:
That’s because of politics. Scott had a very public feud with President Polk and was eyeing the presidency so the Democrats hated him. See “So Far From God The U.S. War With Mexico, 1846-1848 ” by Eisenhower.