Originally Posted by
Olympic Fan
I appreciate your attitude and I thank you for your service, but have a few quibbles with your points.
I am sure you know slaveholders were in the tiny minority
Part of the myth that keeps getting repeated. The percentage of whites that owned slaves varied from state to state, but according to 1860 census data, 37 percent of the white families in the seven states that first seceded owned slaves ... 25 percent of the white families in the remaining four states own slaves ... overall, over 30 percent of the white families in the South owned slaves -- a minority, true, but not a tiny minority. And that minority were the power brokers in the South, If you look at the legislators in the various states, the great, GREAT majority of them -- the men who took the South to war -- almost all were slave owners.
The real goat of Gettsburgh was Richard Ewell, who allowed the Yankees to fortify the round tops while he sat and watched, after being ordered to take those hills.
Right man, wrong location. Ewell was at the other end of the line, not near the round tops. He was ordered by Lee to take Culp's Hill "if practical". Ewell refused to move, but Lee also refused to follow up on the order -- Ewell didn't launch his attack until the night of the second day of the battle. Stuart also deserves some of the blame -- he was off chasing headlines instead of doing his job screening the army and scouting the Union positions. But they weren't Republicans after the war, so Longstreet, who was right in almost every key point in the battle, was scapegoated. Also, Ewell and Stuart's stupidity doesn't absolve Lee, who fought a terrible battle.
on the way to Appomattox, Lee out maneuvered Grant again and again, pinning loss after loss on him.
Lee did perform well in the Overland campaign -- but he LOST battle after battle as Grant maneuvered him into what amounted were an immobile, fortified position around Petersburg and Richmond. When Grant systematically cut Lee's last lines of communications, Lee was forced to abandon his lines and flee West. Grant acted quickly and trapped Lee at Appomattox. In the Overland campaign, Lee did inflict slightly more casualties than he suffered -- but that's not surprising in a situation where on army is on the defensive and the other is forced to attack. And the margin wasn't that great -- the fact that it was so close was a disaster for the South.
Over the course of the war, Grant's troops suffered 15 percent casualties (according to Whiney and Jamison's Attack and Die, the authoritative study of Civil War casualties). He did do better in the West, where he had a 10.7 percent loss rate, than in the East, where his loss rate was 17.6 percent. Lee's loss rate for the war was over 20 percent (again .. talking killed and wounded ... not missing, which were much higher on the Southern side late in the war as more and more men deserted)
Yes, Grant made some overly aggressive mistakes -- a useless charge at Vicksburg, a bloody charge at Cold Harbor ... but those are small potatoes compared to Lee's devastating frontal assaults at Malvern Hill, Antietam (although on the defensive, some of his counterattacks in that battle were insane) and especially Gettysburg.
Yet when the north saw the war wasn't going well for them, they changed tactics. Attack the helpless. Burn farms and homes, even whole towns. Make the southern soldiers desert, and they did, draining manpower from the army. It was a brilliant decision, just wage total war. Many in the north even called for the extermination of southern whites.
That was the strategy that Grant proposed when he was brought East in March 1864 and appointed overall commander of the Union armies. It was -- as you say -- a brilliant decision and it cut the heart out of the confederacy. Sherman and Sheridan did most of the dirty work while Grant kept Lee's army engaged and prevented the dispatch of reinforcements to Johnson or Bragg. I should note that Grant resisted the calls to exterminate Southern whites -- murder was never part of the campaign (just destruction of property). Technically, that's why it was "hard" war and not "total" war.
Grant better than Lee? Give me a break. Give Lee another 30,000 men, Grant never sees Richmond
It would have been interesting to see them matched up evenly (interesting, but bloody). I will point out that most military historians consider Grant's Vicksburg campaign to be the military masterpiece of the war -- a brilliant campaign against three confederate armies that outnumbered him 3-to-2. I would also argue that most professional military historians -- who are not Lost Cause apologists -- consider Grant the superior general. He consistently won with fewer losses than Lee. And he had a strategic sense that Lee lacked -- his focus on the front in Virginia to the total exclusion of all else, cost the Confederacy badly. On the other hand, once Grant was given command in the spring of 1864, he ended three years of frustration and strategic stalemate, winning the war in 13 months.
Grant was far and away the most successful general on either side in the war. As a junior general in early 1862, he turned the tide of the war in the west with his victories at Ft. Henry and Ft. Donaldson -- trapping a confederate army in the latter and accepting the first major surrender of the war. In July of 1863, he forced the surrender of Pemberton's Army at Vicksburg. Then in the spring of 1865, he accepted the surrender of Lee's Army at Appomattox. At that point, he was the only general on either side to capture an opposing army -- and he did it three times. After Appomatox, there were a number of other surrenders -- Sherman actually presided over the largest surrender in the war at Bennett Place, about five miles from the Duke campus.