Lee never won a battle outside VA. Along with Grant and Sherman, Sheridan was a helluva cavalry commander.

Yep. Sheridan was a mean little bastard who didn't give a wet fart about looking all glam, and just wanted to whip TF out of whoever was standing across from him In modern times, he'd be Audie Murphy. Smallish dude who nobody in the division would so much as look cross-eyed at

Don't forget General Meade. He commanded the army of the Potomac during the final stretch.

Sometimes you gotta listen for the bell and see who’s smiling and dancing around the ring to figure out who’s better.

Growing up in the south you get a lot of "the Union won, but the South had..." where "..." was everything from better generals, culture, sweet tea (true!). This was in text books!

I mean - I like sweet tea but its not gonna win any wars. Except maybe the race to diabetes.

By 1864 Grant understood what was needed to defeat his opponent and he executed his plans with ruthless efficiency. Well done, Hiram.

Fortunately, they had to head to head match up. We can just point to the scoreboard.

I mean given that Grant won, I’d assume the answer is Grant

I like Sherman.

I’m not in favor of de-extinction for mammoths and stuff but I’d be up for bringing Lee back just to have him put back in the ground.

I wish to god people didn’t somehow conflate Bobby Lee with Hannibal.

It's a good test Q to identify likely traitors to the Constitution. Can we give Smedley Butler an honorable mention?

Sherman had the correct idea

Tangentially, Grant grew-up poor on the frontier whereas Lee was Virginia royalty, the son of a Revolutionary War hero he never met. His signature of surrender is beautiful penmanship.

By “hero” I mean in contemporary society. Henry Lee had slaves too and also fought his war to profit better from them.

Feels like this was pretty conclusively decided by the whole winning the war thing?

Also the question of which was a better person. Which can be complicated historical question in some cases, but is usually the “the one doing less military advocacy directly for the purpose of upholding chattel slavery”

Also one of them freed his one (1) slave, the other fought to keep enslaved those his father-in-law freed in his will🤷🏻.

Oh gee is it..... the one who won the war?????

It was the one who actually achieved the rank of general in a real army.

it’s the one who was actually a general

Right? The fights about this are always so pathetic. Usually with some implication that Grant "cheated" in some vague way that's unexplained. Like Lee lost like a gentleman or something. Sure ok. Losers. Lost Cause shit makes me angry in deep don't insult my intelligence kind of way.

He cheated by representing the side with superior logistics and manpower and industrial base (though not internal supply lines) and that didn't have one third of its population actively sabotaging the war effort because, you know, they were enslaved?? Ah yeah you're right, totally not cricket

Everyone who claims Lee was the better general is mistaking the role of of generals for roles of colonels and commanders. Lees operational and battlefield maneuvering was often very impressive, but the job of generals is to win strategic campaigns rather than engagements, which he was terrible at.

Bad war takes so often reduce to tactics vs. strategy

And more subtle yet, failing to distinguish between individual battles, mid level operations and operational goals or approaches, and high-level stuff like strategic approach and mastering the way that the war is integrated into high level politics. That’s what made Washington so good, for example!

Famously so!

the best tactics in the world can’t make up for a sufficiently large strategic or logistical deficit and it’s not like Grant was a tactical slouch either

North Vietnam is often invoked to subvert this but it had a measurable logistical and strategic advantage and made callously successful use of it. Vietnam is a great example to show what those examples don’t mean.

He also didn’t over perform for the resources he had. He did the Confederacy’s war on easy mode with the best logistics against enemies Bragg and Hood would have also beaten.

Winning battles v. winning the war. Grant knew logistics.

Grant is the Tim Duncan of generals, and you can't change my mind.

Explain the metaphor a little?

Tim Duncan is one of the best NBA players of all time, like firmly in the top 10 imo, but because the way he played was neither particularly flashy nor particularly innovative and he as a person also wasn't those things people tend to underrate him. His nickname was The Big Fundamental, for ref.

Oh, yeah Carlos Beltran had this issue, he was just really good at everything, not extraordinary at anything Hell, Trout was like that at first

Beltran is probably a hall of famer (ignoring a few things) but I can’t stand him

The thing about Tim was he *was* extraordinary, but in a way that really was just what if we trained a robot to play basketball perfectly. There is nothing charismatic about him. He has negative aura. But god damn was he great.

I like this, but I feel like it is too dismissive of Grant’s place in US history beyond the Civil War

I'm talking as a general specifically. My thoughts on him the political figure would not lead me to compare him to Duncan lmao

oops. sorry. you were asking about Duncan.

Demon Souls, Dark Souls and Elden Ring are notorious for brutally difficult bosses. There was one which was a dual boss kind of deal and when you killed one he absorbed the life force of his dead buddy.

LOL I think you got the wrong thread. I know what a Souls boss is!

I did. I did. Didn't mean to impugn your gamer cred.

Oh I've never played one to be clear

I have occasionally watched other people play them on twitch dot television

Ulysses never played Starcraft on LAN, probably couldn’t have cut it with the boys, if I’m being honest

My rush game woulda had them before they could say Ft. Sumter

My life for the Zerg, bitch.

This is incredible

And he cheated by being funded by an income tax, which was so much better at raising revenue than tariffs. And by but being a traitorous loser who was fighting to support an utterly immoral institution. So much cheating.

*not* being a traitor

Also, it was patently unfair that he was just a superior tactician and strategist. But Lee did look good on Traveler.

The noble loser and all the rest of the Lost Cause edifice was justa shitty structure to hide the slave plantation out back. Any ridiculous excuse to not have to talk about, you know, slavery.

As always I blame the British for calling the M3 tank variants Lee and Grant respectively.

Sherman? But honestly I don’t mean to denigrate how much Grant accomplished.

Like, for example, Robert E Lee (until the end).

Lost Causer nonsense is what it is.

Some of the Union Generals were superior, Remember how Lincoln had to light a fire under some General's asses & fire some? It didn't go well for the first year. When Lee slunk home from Antietam & Gettysburg the end was inevitable. The total naval blockade really helped slow down the Confederacy.

Masterpiece. And Grant's all, "Screw it. Might as well grab Jackson while we're here!"

SHERMAN. Sherman was the best Civil War General. 🔥

The correct answer is George Gordon Meade or George Henry Thomas, depending on the phase of the moon or the eastern or western theater. Hell, yes, Ulysses was a far superior general to Lee as well as many others and was perhaps the best to be overall commander. However, best Union general? Nope.

Lee might have been a decent commander in (say) the Napoleonic Wars, but he didn't understand what the Civil War actually required. Grant was a proper modern general.

confederate sympathizers will point out that Grant's armies suffered much greater casualties than Lee as if the objective of the war was to get the highest K/D/A rather than to win.

Do they think Grant was not aware of this

see also: Rommel veneration (many other similarities - "Lost Cause" and "Clean Wehrmacht" are extremely similar ideas overall

I feel like Rommel was a better general and less of a focus for reactionary hagiographies than Lee, even though he served an arguably worse cause.

Not really; he mainly exploited flaws in British tank doctrine and once Montgomery took over and fixed those, his victories evaporated.

Rommel was also complete shit with logistics, fucked his army over multiple times, led to tremendous outbreaks of disease and hunger among his troops

yes

If you want a WWII general from a murderous dictatorship Zhukov is right there but people always go straight to the fascist.

People can call me a hater, but Rommel was a terrible general, propelled far above his actual qualifications solely by his personal relationship with Hitler (and by extension - the media), and got only worse as he advanced. He could've, and should've, been a good colonel instead.

Wolf Heckmann's "Rommel's War In Africa" is a great breakdown of his failures at the GO level and how his career successes fell more on how shit the British leadership was than anything else.

It's shocking how much Rommel was flying by the seat of his pants, and how quickly things fell apart for him in the face of even moderately organized opposition. He's really an anomaly in the German officer corps, coming totally from outside general staff qualifications, and that's not a compliment.

you're factually correct, but also Rommel was a worthless Nazi piece of shit, we should all be haters.

It's also false. Lee's army suffered more casualties than Grant's.

And by the time Grant and Lee were direct opponents, Grant was on the attack and Lee was defending. That says something right there

Lee won on defense, in an era that favored it. His offensives failed. Conversely, he was doomed from day one.

Everyone who went up against Grant ended up surrendering to him.

If anyone wants to know who was a better general, I would simply refer them to admire the flag on the nearest elementary school Scoreboard

It was in fact Grant's willingness to suffer greater casualties that made him such an effective general.

Trump prefers winners, with one peculiar exception.

Lee could very well have been the best general the confederates had (derogatory), but he didn't have a Vicksberg

The common thing i keep seeing from those who defend the Confederacy is "Oh but Lee was a gentleman while Grant was an alcoholic" Do they not realize that makes Lee look even worse?

One of my favorite stories from the war was when one of Lincoln's advisers objected that Grant was a drunk, to which Lincoln replied "find out what he drinks and get him a barrel of it".

I heard it as “find out what he drinks and send a case of it to my other generals.”

“Okay so we agree, he was so bad at this he lost to a drunk.”

I gather he could get his shit together and sober up when it was called for. A strange discipline but discipline none the less.

Less that, more that Grant’s alcoholism tended to run in extreme short term binges.

That’s just Army tradition

My spirit animal.

That's pretty much how everyone operated between 1607 and 1920.

But also, it means his devotion to slavery was clear headed and fully informed. Grant was never an abolitionist, but apparently when he inherited an enslaved person, he found it too reprehensible to force him to work, and he manumitted him. Who would give a shit if the papers were signed sloppily?

...who in all of his drunkenness was a superior tactician.

Just wait until you find out how Lee felt about his horse.

And besides, there's always....."scoreboard". It's not a hard question.

They were both good.

He was definitely good for the United States

I thought I'd heard that Lee was good in the middle of individual battles, but completely dog-vomit at large-scale strategy.

Robert “I’m the one who ordered the most notoriously disastrous infantry charge in the last thousand years and let the guy I ordered to lead it take the fall for it” Lee is the only person in America’s history with a more undeserved reputation for competence than MacArthur.

The Vicksburg campaign gets hidden by Gettysburg, but its a masterclass in capturing an entrenched position! The spring of 1863 was Grant just beating ass and doing crazy shit like marching his army without access to their supply train down the LA side of the MS river!

The Vicksburg campaign is one of the greatest military achievements in history, and its something that Robert E. Lee could never do or even think of doing. Anytime he ventured into enemy territory, he got turned back and was worse for it.

Yes! I mean Lee barely got across the confederate border and lost or was forced back both times. Grant spent the winter of 1862-63 in Memphis! And the Vicksburg campaign was where Sherman and Grant figured out their armies could forage their way instead of having cumbersome supply lines. Brilliant!

how did Vicksburg Grant turn into Cold Harbor Grant, is my question

Having grown up in the south, I always heard a lot of that "Grant wasn't good, he just won by throwing more numbers at the south" excuse. And even as a kid(who loved strategy games) I was just like "that...sounds like he used his resources well? Which is good strategy?" 🤷‍♀️

Scoreboard doesn’t lie.

Most Confederate generals became increasingly overrated over time; and I tend to think their early successes should be credited more to the average Confederate soldier.

And a hell if a lot of luck

Pretty clear. Grant beat both Pemberton and Lee. Lee didn't beat *either* Pemberton *or* Grant.

mcclellan was a coward who wanted to be president and got a lot of americans killed. after we got rid of him, Lee’s endless charging completely destroyed his army snd resources for no reason. dude was not good.

Scoreboard

Success leaves clues

Verdict I've heard from several people I trust on these matters is that he would've made a solid corps commander. He rose past the level of his incompetence & there were no structures in place to hold him to account for it.

The focus is always on the Chesapeake theater. Not enough people want to talk about how the North was kicking the south’s ass across the western theater

How many Scaramuccis was the Confederacy, again?

The best analysis I ever read of Lee was that he would use a strategy that won once until it failed, then pick another strategy and use it until it failed, and the only reason the Union didn't catch on sooner was internal pissing matches.

That, and idiots like Hooker, who thought marching thousands of men at entrenched Confederate soldiers on the heights overlooking a river crossing was a good idea Lee looks good only in comparison with capering, gibbering meatheads like McClellan

Unfortunately the Union Army had a lot of those guys and they all had to get fired before the competent leaders could take the wheel.

In my teens I got a hold of the Army of the Potomac series of books, and just couldn't wrap my mind around the stunning incompetence of Union leadership until Grant & Sherman Then I started reading about WWI and Gen. Haig in Passchendaele www.nam.ac.uk/explore/batt...

I did an essay on Paschendale in high school. I recall only that the casualties per foot to gained space were very upsetting.

I remember seeing a grainy B&W movie of Brits climbing out of mud pits and scrambling forward in this awful hellscape, as the narrator intoned, "If all the men who died in this little valley tried to stand up, there would not be room for them" made an impression

That's a wonderful approach for playcalling in sports. Spam a play to keep scoring until the defense adjusts, then try another one. It is immensely less useful in war when failure means losing a lot of men and resources

Tells you what Lee didn't give much of a shit about huh.

Which further highlights his incompetence given that he had less resources than the North to begin with. Willing to sacrifice men and resources if you have an overwhelming advantage in both and could live with the human cost is one thing. But when you're clearly at a deficit is sheer stupidity.

But Joseph Johnston is conversely not held up as the Confederacy's greatest general for his preserving his troops. I don't see many people take a consistent approach to it.

Johnston was arguably one of the few Confederates who grasped that the Union had a pretty much endless supply of troops due to immigration and the South did not.

Did that benefit the fronts he oversaw much?

Not sure if that should be the only or major qualification for being considered a great general for that period.

Lee was a pretty good tactician and if simply beeing a tactician was the job a general had to do Lee would beat grant. But there is this pesky thing called "operational decision making" and well....

“But Grant won unfairly! He wasn’t *gentlemanly* about it! He was a mere drunken butcher who had more resources!” -Multiple generations of Americans brought up on Lost Cause propaganda

Folks who don't understand that the drunken butcher is usually the better guy at butchery than the gentleman always confuse me. Like, Genghis Khan drank horse blood and got drunk off fermented yak's milk, he was a hard motherfucker, thats why he took half the world.

A lot of people are oblivious to scoreboards I guess...

Sherman.

lee was only "good" in that he valued aggression in ways that contemporary doctrine was vulnerable to; didnt help that he was also rock stupid and couldn't learn from his mistakes

Lee Grant was a beautiful actress! 😉

one of them won, it's kind of a no brainer there

Scoreboard.

You guys absolutely destroy the Confederacy on social media every day. How do you do it?

Bobby Lee’s reputation suffers because of the fact that he chose treason, and, by extending that grotesque war a couple years, probably killed more American soldiers than any man in history — including Hitler.

He also lost most battles he fought against people who weren't stuck in traffic in Fredericksburg or suffering from a head injury.

This is like doing the “could Superman beat up Goku” thing if Superman and Goku were both real and Superman had very famously and publicly beaten Goku within an inch of his life.

(And obviously, my apologies to Goku for the comparison.)

I always imagined Goku as more of a Stonewall Jackson type in my DBZ American Civil War fan fic.

It’s almost like they even had a competition involving multiple battles to determine it?

Lee comes off fairly well in that matchup. It’s Grant’s earlier achievements against other generals that make the case for his general superiority strong.

Whom surrendered to whom at the end of that campaign?

No surrender, the situation stalemated for months.

Yes because Grant could keep extending his lines south and west because he had the troops and Lee couldn't match it because he didn't. Lee let himself get pinned to Richmond and Petersburg where he couldn't be supplied without a functional railroad. Grant's maneuvers cut the railroad and that was it

Yes, I too believe that Grant won because of the advantageous strategic situation and not merely through superiority in ability

He made that situation. The union -always- had that advantage. They always had more armies than the CSA but they let the CSA have the advantage of maneuver to do things like transfer Longstreet's whole corps to Tennessee in 1863 to win the battle of Chickamauga. Grant pinned Lee down and

basically took his army out of the war. In the mean time, Sheridan utterly destroyed the Shenandoah Valley, Thomas liquified John Bell Hood and Sherman brutalized the last untouched heart of the confederacy. Grant made the CSA fight the war on the Union's terms and it was catastrophic for them.

Yes, he did. But you're not advancing the propositions that a) Lee lost because he was a mediocrity b) Losing a campaign proves that your opponents are more capable than you

Lee lost because he didn't understand that losing Richmond didn't mean losing the war but losing the Army of Northern Virginia did. He let himself get maneuvered into a position where he simply had no hope of winning. He should NEVER have allowed himself to be pinned in place but he did.

Lee wanted desperately to slip out of Richmond, link up with Joe Johnston in North Carolina to try and knock out Sherman and then turn on Grant, but Grant -would not let him go-.

Only one way to settle the argument. Trial by fire.

Bet 50 bucks on Grant. The bet kinda settles itself then.

I heard a theory recently that the war was winnable for the south even with inferior resources, but Lee would have had to basically fight defensively and wait for the north to lose the will to fight. He just was too prideful for that meanwhile Grant was a bit more straightforward.

Those people literally worship losers.

The proof of the pudding...

Lee was a colonel and not a general, anyway.

A whole lot of people are very invested in the idea that the South was in any way not completely wrong morally nor outmatched militarily for some strange reason

some of the most insistent "scoreboard"s in history

Way off topic but LOVE your name! Was explaining OODA loops to someone in re: the current hellscape just a couple days ago 🙂

Thank you! Yes I believe should we make it it will be because we decide to act

Fully agree with that orientation.

The correct answer is they both kinda sucked as generals lol.

It takes a lot of claim Grant "sucked" as a general. As a president, maybe.

So tbf i only learned about Grant in Christian Fundamentalist Baptist school, and likely my teaching was not great...but what i learned is that he basically just threw superior numbers at the opposing army not caring how many men he lost, and this is the only reason he won

To be fair to the the slim margin of truth there, he did take somewhat higher losses but also kept campaigning so those losses were in service to a military goal. Previous generals would take fewer losses but immediately retreat back north, allowing the CSA to recuperate from any damage.

But Grant wasn't the only guy to take high losses. Lee threw away a lot of good men at Gettysburg for absolutely zero gain, even if you set aside Pickett's Charge. It was a battle that was not nearly as close run as people claim and the overall campaign was boondoggle.

My understanding is that West Point does teach some Lee, but they don't call him a general (for obvious reasons)

For now

He wasn't a General in a real army

That's reasonable.

This is a hilarious reprise of the focus on vibes in generalship that was so disastrous in the early years for the Federal forces. Also, people don't think nearly hard enough about what makes a "good general" to answer this well.

Lee won a few victories over unprepared opponents early on, tried to invade the North without supply lines and got his ass kicked, and spent the rest of the war losing. Grant was not perfect but had a far better grasp of big picture strategy and also understood the value of logistics. No contest.

Saban v. Dabo writ in the past

though tbf Saban/Dabo are both Lee, so there's no good answer

Ty Seidule, who looked hard at the question, thinks he was a good general.

One of them won the war, the other was a complete failure from the start to the end of his life.

My favorite part of the Civil War is the United States casually building the transcontinental railroad at the same time. The entire confederacy was Wile E. Coyote stomping on a misfiring catapult level stupid. What were they thinking? Lee sucks and is a loser.

Lee was a gold digger , married rich babe who owned Arlington National cemetery land

And she owned other humans.

I think had they met in 1862 or 1863 Grant would still have beaten Lee. He knew his strategic advantage and never let go of it and could stomach reverses. I think Grant corners Lee just like he did in the Overland Campaign.

My favorite story about this fucking traitorous dummy is him ordering Pickett’s charge. He’s the dude who gave that order. Now I’m from PA so I went to Gettysburg a lot and let me tell you when you actually see the field where that took place in person you realize the levels of stupid it took.

One became president. The other had a bunch of corpses buried in his yard.

Bro spent the months leading up to the war with the union generals who were war-gaming it so he knew all their ideas, then defected because he rated being born in fucking Virginia higher than being a good person

That's something I'm quite glad about England's civil wars of the 1600s : No respectable historian tries to say that the Royalists would've won. Everyone's like 'The best commanders were Fairfax and Cromwell, hands down. They won.'

I always love that one. 'oh, but x was a better general and *should* have won.' 'but they didn't, so...'

"But muh heritage!"* *that had a shorter lifespan than numetal

The executive term of Mayor McCheese lasted longer than the Confederacy

Ike was right and @dicknixon.bsky.social knows it now

Nice Nixon burn too.

but geezuz, imagine the insane self belief in lecturing Eisenhower on any sort of army thing. I mean, Nixon was in the Navy.

And a supply officer, at that

Thank you i had never read that.

"I wouldn't say that, Dick. In fact I think it's not a very reasoned opinion." is ice cold lmao

Not only was Grant the better general, he was a better man than Lee, who deserved an ignominious death for his willingness to align with slavery. He got off easy, IMO. May he continue to burn in the hottest fires of hell.

I’m going out on a limb and saying James Longstreet was the best confederate officer and it’s not close. The only reason he’s been overshadowed by Lee was because Longstreet was a committed supporter of Reconstruction and civil rights after the war en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_...

Id say Grant. Replacing the TC's .30 cupola with a turret that could fit a no18 set thus reducing the crew by one,and removing the drivers hull mg's reducing the amount of ammo needed much improved on the basic M3 design. So, General Grant,well,certainly until the Shermans came along..

While both Grant & Sherman had their demons, they were an unstoppable force.

The OG participation trophy.

I went and checked their relative positions on the War WAR graph- across 16 battles he commanded, Grant had a WAR of just over 5, meaning that he won five more victories than an 'average' General would have in the same position. This puts him on par with Hannibal. It's *very* good.

Lee, meanwhile has... -2 WAR. Over 27 battles. Which means he actually performed slightly *worse* on average than any old bog-standard commander.

Some Confederate Generals do fine in this framework. Nathan Bedford Forrest, Stonewall Jackson, and P. G. T. Beauregard all have 2 and a half to 3 WAR scores overall. Lee just... Isn't one of the capable ones lmao

Grant won the western theatre tactically and the eastern theatre strategically. Lee lost the eastern theatre strategically and tactically

It's almost as crazy as a basis for grading M3 medium tank variants.

Got his ass best by George Meade just sitting there

And the reason he let Meade get position on him was because he sent his scouts, under Stuart, to go round up Black folks in western Maryland and ship them back south into slavery

Longstreet was the real brains of that operation in my opinion. He at least knew what war he was fighting.

I went to a Civil War Museum today

Racists aren’t smart

I feel like we ran a natural experiment on this already

Lee would’ve been nothing if his grandfather’s generation of Lees hadn’t been so prominent in the Revolutionary War. Without the name recognition his career likely would have been very different. Kinda like Eric Trump

My guess is about 30 to 35% of the US population gets it wrong.

He may have only reached Colonel, but he was the Superintendent of West Point. Pretty strategic position on several accounts. But he was doomed more than simply his soldiering.

Also, "was Patton or Seleucus a better general" is a difficult question. For two generals who actually fought each other in the climactic war of both their careers, there's a very easy way to figure out the answer.

It’s Seleucus and it’s not even close

Lee is the most overrated military leader in history. Much of his early war success is attributable more to the incompetence of his opposition than his own genius. He put himself in position at Antietam to be crushed but McClellan didn't see if or act on it.

He completely botched Gettysburg and ran into a good general, Meade, who wasn't going to give him a break, and had Henry Hunt to give him this to run into:

Then Grant came, and he understood the assignment. Grant checked Lee at every turn and left him nowhere to run.

This isn't even taking into account Grant's brilliant Vicksburg campaign.

I posted the map above, but it's worth the effort to add here. It's no joke, a thing of beauty. You can tell who's in charge and who's completely dumbfounded.

But this would contradict something that novelist Shelby Foote once drawled in a 1990 documentary that was terminally infected with "good people on both sides" ideology

#scoreboard

"which side won, again?" should settle a lot of "debate".

Yeah but unfortunately that answer is increasingly unclear.

We can settle on “did they ever match up 1 on 1?”

Grant v. Lee in the steel cage at the Sportatorium, let’s book it

Oh it’s clear who won the war — it’s just also clear that white supremacy, north and south, won the peace.

Grant never faced Lee until he tried and failed to take Richmond in 1864. The blockade and scorched earth defeated Lee. Not Grant. And set us up for total wars in Vietnam and Iraq that only made things worse...

Grant forced Lee into a position where it was a question of who had the logistical supply capacity and the ability to replenish troops, a situation that the confederacy had no hope of winning. Grant didn't need to defeat Lee in the field. He needed to take his army off the board. He did that.

And by pinning Lee to Richmond, he prevented him from having any space to assist Johnson, who Sherman was dog walking through the Carolinas. Losing Georgia, and the Carolinas was much more damaging to the CSA than losing Richmond but Grant wouldn't let Lee loose. It was strategically brilliant.

Funny how you draw all attention to the last year of the war, but not the effect of a Union blockade.😏By 1864 it simply became a war of attrition. Lee smashed several generals in absolutely brilliant maneuvers. Embracing Grant instead of Scott/Lee explains why we now lose most wars...

Colonel Lee was never a general.

Emperor Norton had as good a claim to his title, and was all around a much better person.

Fun fact: Col. Sanders is equal in rank to Robert E. Lee.

And Col. Angus was far more popular with the ladies

He was the only full bird from Virginia that actually decided to do it too. Makes you think it might have had to do with the bump in rank.

He was offered a major general's commission at the start of the war on the Federal side but turned it down to go to Virginia. He really was well regarded as a military man prior to the war. And as I said elsewhere, he was only a full colonel for about a month before he resigned his commission.

Ironically, the person he replaced as Colonel of the 1st US Calvary, Edwin "Bull" Sumner, was a rabid union man who accompanied President Elect Lincoln on his trip from Illinois to DC.The position became vacant because Sumner was given command of the Dept. of the Pacific, replacing AS Johnson.

Made many contemporaries, including parts of his family, think that.

It’d be a lot clearer if they ever, like, fought each other for the title or something like that. I guess the answer is lost to time forever.

Yeah, the lost cause narrative and the romantisation of the confederacy did, and are still doing, incredible harm. Even here in France. When I was younger and wasn't that interested in the Civil War, the cursory impression was that Grant was a drunk who won only by throwing troops at the problem.

Grant was only a drunk when he wasn't leading troops. He sobered up when he had something to do he was good at.

Yeah, I know, now😅

Fortunately you can access better information, but still, it's wild that this BS also took root this side of the Atlantic. Can't imagine what it is to deal with people who sincerely believe in the "war of northern aggression" simply because that's what they've been taught 😓.

The Union lost many battles and went through many generals at the start of the war. Grant was dogged and determined and willing to sacrifice many of his superior numbers to achieve victory. Lincoln said about him, "He fights." Lee has been recognized by many as a superior general.

Lee's war strategy was indefensible. He may have been a great battlefield tactition - I'm not qualified to say - but he deliberately pushed the confederacy into an unwinnable situation. That was all him.

Then you look at his battlefield blunders, eg. Gettysburg and you wonder how his legend ever grew in the first place. But I'm sorry, the very idea of a northern campaign would have been funny if not for the 10's of thousands of dead and wounded. Such a senseless sacrifice, and that was 100% Lee.

Only an egomaniacal crackpot embittered by a lack of recognition from his superiors and obsessed with his own ambition would have tried something so asinine. And well, that was Lee in a nutshell. So no, Lee was a terrible general, in almost every way.

The Union's arrogance and inability to cooperate gave Lee a chance in the early days, which turned out to be fool's gold after he was exposed.

"Grant the butcher" is mythologizing by anti-war democrats who never acknowledged similar loss of life under Confederate leaders. See historian James McPherson's observation about the battle of cold harbor:

My reading - it might have been Shelby Foote's trilogy - acknowledges that Lee made inexplicable errors/sacrifices at Gettysburg.

Lee was an idiot at Gettysburg. But Stuart was an even bigger one and his absence ended them. 🥰 Buford was a Genius who executed the single greatest dragoon combat in history of the United States. That let Meade have the high ground and, like Obi Wan, he used it. Those three things saved the Union.

George McClellan has a lot to answer for but building Lee’s mythology is up there

In pro wrestling terms, Confederate generals have their reputations because early Union generals put them over.

The moment Grant took over any major command that command started winning Even his "greatest loss" at Shiloh was more a PR loss as it was the death of the idea of an amicable truce

Ehh his first Vicksburg campaign was a loss, though it did help him figure out how to take Vicksburg on his 2nd attempt

I can't help but have a soft spot for him as a logistics nerd, but my god even for a logistics nerd was he a wimp

To me, I think a lot of the early union generals basically thought the war would end without fighting. Maybe that's common knowledge. They didn't want to fight too hard because that would discourage the hordes of Southerners who would defect. Or just a pretext/excuse for criminal passivity?

Not wanting to ask a group of military cosplayers to do anything actually military..? Why does that sound so familiar?

Winfield Scott recognized it would be a hard war that would take massive effort; he was mocked & forced into retirement. (& then his plan became the de facto blueprint, anyway.)

I mean even if you hate McClellan he has at least 2 victories against Lee(Malvern hill and Antietam)

George sucked at field command. He was great at building up the army though.

Early example of the Peter Principal.

McClellan was clinically unfit to lead anything but a parade. Useless Fancy Pants.

He didn’t even have a good mustache! Basement tier facial hair for the period.

McClellan really is the "yes, but" of Civil War history.

Lee for like three years: damn every time I fight the Yankees they run away lmao Lee at Gettysburg: alright Pickett you’re up!

Pickett is a funny case because he bears no responsibility for anything that happened at Gettyburg and is unfairly associated with the catastrophe. But he was such a piece of shit that he really deserved everything he got anyway.

Yeah Lee deserves all the blame for that lol dude was just too horny for battle, rip bozo

Or Longstreet who was actually in command of the action. Picket only commanded one of three divisions engaged.

IIRC Longstreet's view was that if he stood down in protest Lee would just make someone else do it.

He argued pretty hard that AP Hill should be in command because two of the three divisions were his and the main part of the attack was in front of Hill’s corp. And he pretty much half assed the execution of it.

What should Longstreet have done differently?

He did however invent a cavalry saddle that remained in use as long as the US had a horse cavalry.

I’ve ridden hundreds of miles on a McClellan saddle- a lot of originals from the late nineteenth/early twentieth century are still in use, especially among reenactors. Lack of a horn is the biggest issue I’ve found with the design.

Only for a cowboy. If you're a cav trooper, you don't _want_ one - it gets in the way as there are better ways to secure your items to the front of the saddle (multiple pistol holsters usually).

Yup. Once at Ft. Branch my Walker stumbled at a fast pace. I was about to sail over Coal’s head, so I kicked out of the stirrups, but he caught himself and and got his feet back in line. Which brought the pommel sharply into contact with me in a way that made the lack of horn my favourite feature .

LOL! Your description tells me _everything_ I need to know ... Yow!

The event was held six weeks before my kid was born. I was really glad we’d taken care of that beforehand, because I wasn’t entirely sure it was still an option. 🤣

Being European I rarely rode western but I did cossack trick riding, where the saddle has two horns. And I kind of fell (sat violently) on the forward one once. And I would very much have liked if it hadn't been there

Interesting - what are some negative consequences of that? Do military saddles normally have a horn? (I had thought horns were normally only on saddles used for working livestock.)

I meant that it’s an issue for non-military work. I’m thinking that the reason so many survive is because they weren’t really suitable for anything but riding in civilian life. Pretty awesome for going camping, though.

It's a good thought exercise to realize that Lee's situation in 1862 and Hood's in 1864 were identical. Joe Johnston almost lost a major city and got replaced by an aggressive bloodthirsty idiot. The difference is one faced McClellan and one Sherman and the results were night and day.

If you really want to make the Confederate LARPers mad, just point out that any credit Lee deserved for his victories were won with the army Joe Johnston left him as once he started promoting his own officers...

I wrote a report in 7th grade about what a terrible General McClellan was. One of my central arguments was that the Civil War should have been over MUCH sooner, but McClellan made the Union think the rebels were significantly better tacticians than they were. Just because he was so incompetent.

I subscribe to the conspiracy theory that McClellan was losing on purpose because he didn’t think slavery was worth fighting the war over and didn’t want to fight his old West Point buddies.

I would not be remotely surprised except that nothing I've ever read about the man makes me think McClellan was that clever.

No not clever, but obstinate and cowardly for sure

THAT I can definitely agree with, without reservation.

McClellan was a TRADOC guy and that's where he should have kept for the entire war BUILD UNITS. TRAIN TRAIN TRAIN. THAT'S YOUR JOB.

Do not, under any circumstances, tell them what to do

McClellan was an absolutely amazing administrative general and complete shit as a field general. He did much to win the war and just as much to prolong it.

McClellan should’ve been hanged as a traitor, preserving slavery was more important to him than winning battles.

I mean, McClellan had to pretend Lee was competent because otherwise it would have exposed his own profound incompetence

I mean he did almost take Richmond in 1862 because he faced Joe Johnston for a year and if he'd continued to face Johnston Richmond would have fallen that year. Would that have won the war? Maybe.

He could have taken Richmond in 1862. There was nothing but MacGruder and a lot of wishful thinking between General Sumner and the city when McClellan denied permission for him to attack.

That's what I'm saying, yes. When he faced Joe Johnston he faced the one general he was doomed against. Even Braxton Bragg would have done about as well as Lee did in 1862 and better than Johnston.

Not actually McClellan. Lee never truly beat McClellan (couldn’t drive him off the peninsula, McC stopped him at Antietam) but he did clean up over Pope, Burnside, Hooker. Grant bagged the surrender of 3 rebel armies: Ft Donelson, Vicksburg, Appomattox

McClellan could have end the war twice and lacked the intestinal fortitude.

McClellan should have pushed Lee right into the Potomac at Antietam. Lee put himself into an untenable position and McClellan utterly failed to take advantage.

McClellan did not have the ability to kill enough of his own to destroy the enemy to make Antietam what Gettysburg was. Had he been the equal of either Meade or Grant, the war would have been over with in weeks. Antietam creek should have broken the back of the traitors but they escaped instead.

Totally, but still technically a victory for McClellan over Lee!

McClellan's only positive legacy is "not terrible NJ gov"

That and the saddle named for him. It's actually damn good.

I’M HERE FOR GEORGE MCCLELLAN HATE !

The last name Bonekemper goes so hard

I need this book.

Gd what a title.

Seconded! Gonna hunt that baby down.

holy fuck is Nick Offerman a distant relative of his?

Don’t insult Nick like that!

why does the title say failure twice

Just emphasising that aspect of his legacy.

My hatred for McClellan knows no bounds

Seriously. One of history's most punchable faces.

Champagne and oysters by the Potomac.

He was a literal Confederate sympathizer.

George “Captain Sobel” McClellan. Builds great armies, plays with them vigorously, has no idea how to play with anyone else.

The fact that there were two men named Edward H. Bonekemper who thought "I should definitely pass this name down" is another fascinating wrinkle to this story

Lee was literally an old man chasing kids off his damn lawn.he wasn't going to get involved until the Confederates managed to drag the union onto his property, if my history teachers were right.

YES. I do not understand how anyone can read about the two of them and walk away thinking anything other than Grant was clearly miles ahead. And yet.

If he was miles ahead he would have taken Richmond immediately.

Richmond wasn’t important. Taking the capital wouldn’t have shut down the supply lines. Grant wanted Lee.

What supply lines? The ones leading to the supply of farmland that was rapidly dwindling into nothing?

And my point being - he wanted Lee, but could not bag him.

I should’ve been more specific…he wanted Lee’s Army. I maybe mistaken, but this does look like Lee was “bagged.”

This is a picture of the surrender that took place nine months after the poiny an overwhelmingly superior tactician would have demolished Lee

Nine months after the what?

The point at which, if the Overland Campaign had been fought between an excellent union general and a poor Confederate general, we’d expect everything to be finished.

Don’t forget, thinking ahead a bit to WW2…the Allies thought they’d be in Berlin by x-mas of 1944.

The Siege of Petersburg was 9 months. It was a different time. It was also the first time trench warfare was a major part of battle. Trying to equate warfare in the 1860s to today doesn’t work. Lee was a good Colonel. He did well in Texas and Mexico.

I'm a Sherman guy myself, respect for him just going, "fuck this shit, I'm done." Then just burning it all down.

Thomas Jackson

Also sucked

He was a disaster strategically.

I will elaborate. Lee was in contest with an enemy that could out produce him in terms of equipment and manpower and likely under the influence of a plantation run government that wanted this thing over fast he threw away manpower and equipment trying to hit home runs he couldnt afford to lose.

The way for the Confederacy to achieve its goal (secession) was to go to ground--keep the Union from winning too much & wear out the resolve of the northern population. Lee did the opposite.

Similar cultural and political factors at work as the ones that motivated Roman opposition to the original Fabian strategy, methinks.

The only way to achieve those goals was to make counterattacks - otherwise the Union could make steady advances with bearable losses.

His government of "gentleman planters" wanted a quick war with little economic and social sacrifice and Lee being of that pedigree likely didnt wanted to live a go to ground lifestyle, either.

Who won again? Grant? It was probably that guy

there is a third, secret, true option

Which is the better boxer, the guy who won or the guy who lost and then his trunks fell down in front of everybody? Truly a matter of debate.

Not to rain on anyone's serious, well-considered military history debate, but I feel like this is not too far away from the video I just watched from Princess Weekes about 'why the vast majority of pop-culture American vampires old enough to have served in the Civil War were Confederates ...'

Which isn't that far away from why so many of the 50s & 60s-era TV Westerns regularly had ex-Confederates as guest characters but no one EVER mentioned slavery ... which, let me tell you, put a damper on my love for The Big Valley ...

I am planting so many sour apple trees

Göring or Hindenburg. Hard to tell.

Lee was an average general. Grant was a great commander who was able to fully grasp strategy, tactics and most importantly, logistics. Also, unlike Lee, Grant learned from his mistakes and experiences.

a reason to be glad of American republicanism - had America become a monarchy down the line of inheritance from George Washington, Prince Robert Lee would have been the Prince Consort to Queen Mary I of the United States of America in 1861.

Yeah, however clever and dedicated Robert E Lee was, it is overshadowed by his turning Traitor against the country he had sworn fealty to, and in the name of Human Bondage. Take a lot of stolen marches to make up for all that. Dare to say there was a Right Side, and it was the US for once.

Sherman is but the apprentice. youtube.com/clip/Ugkx_me...

@iwriteok.bsky.social did a several-parter about what a generally incompetent little weasel Lee was (excepting artillery placement, I think?)

It’s almost like wars are fought to be won and not as a neat little thing to pass the Sunday.

Grant Was better, but also drunker

That aspect of Grant's personality was a bit overexaggerated because of all the Lost Cause historians trying to downplay Reconstruction and glaze the Confederates. He did have a problem but his Rasputin beard teetotaler bro kept him mostly on the straight and narrow. :V

Even if he and a drinking problem, he was an elite general and beat the pants off Lee

obviously one won and one lost but the south lost because they ran out of soldiers & Grant won despite shoving thousands of men into meat grinders like Cold Harbor caveat: holding Lee in place while turning Sherman loose was pretty smart

As a historian, there is a very complex model we use to determine who the superior general is, based on a variety of factors. I’ll try to break it down here: it’s the guy who won

The two counterexamples I can think of here are Hannibal and Pyrrhus: both very good generals that lost because they made bad political choices.

do we think Hannibal fucking around southern Italy is a political or a logistical call?

wasn't it essentially a failure to read the room politically? like it would've been a logistical stretch to put Rome to siege, but it was the better option if he had a better sense of the political climate of southern Italy at the time

ah, okay — I was reading political as internal Carthaginian politics for some reason, rather than a failure to understand southern Italian political structure. in that case I agree

The Carthaginian elite was also perfectly happy to have him wander around Italy for decades, kind of one of those “history just wasn’t with ya” episodes

I think at a certain point the two become inseparable

Hannibal lost because of a flooding river blocking his brother showing up with reinforcements from memory

say it louder for the Wehraboos in the back

Hold on I'm going to launch "Lee would have won if he wasn't held back by Jefferson Davis' woke politics" into the right wing discourse.

Don’t you put this evil on me

What in hell is woke about Jefferson Davis?

I mean, he was in favor of a certain employment program that favored minorities…

He cross dressed?

He has a nice memorial toilet

that's the joke.gif

Trying to force states and individual plantation owners to centralize their resources and actually contribute to fighting the war they started?

Thanks for actually answering my question. The Redeemer wannabes over on Twitter might actually split over that

I hear he drinks through a straw

Alright, that would do it for anyone

Gotdammit....

Doing gods work

That's ascribing a bit too much causal power to generalship as opposed to every other aspect of military success

Generalship can matter but is overwhelmingly not the most important factor in war. My take is out of exasperation with the amount of airtime generalship discussions take up relative to their importance, what matters is who won and what implications it had.

Also, bad generalship can lose wars but great generalship rarely wins them over a materially superior foe. The battle of France was partially lost by catastrophically bad force design & generalship but no amount of stunning victories would have stopped the Soviets from crushing the Nazis in time.

Yeah, that's the "what if the Japanese won at Midway?" kind of thing. In that case, the war lasts 6m longer, because the firehose of ship construction replaces them and more.

Yeah my understanding of Civil War generalship is that the CSA had competent leaders from the beginning while the USA was in that "generalship so bad it loses wars" category for the first couple years but were so superior in other ways that they could keep fighting until they found competent leaders

The CSA had its share of shitty political generals too. The debacle at Forts Henry and Donelson were mostly because they had about 1 competent General in the theater (Buckner) and he was subordinate to several idiots.

Which is also what happened to the Soviets, funnily enough. They lost 5 full army groups in the opening stages of Barbarossa, 4 million men all told and basically their entire pre-war military strength. So they just…built a second, cooler army behind the Urals & put guys like Rokossovsky in charge.

Yeah the WWII Eastern Front and ACW have oddly a lot in common - you can see where @hntdove.bsky.social got the idea to model the US vs CSA WWII equivalent in the Southern Victory Timeline on the Eastern Front