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In response to
"6 Civil War Myths Everyone Believes That Are Total B.S. -- (link)"
by
Beaker
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None of this should be surprising to most people, but it's nice to put it so succinctly.
Posted by
Mop (aka Rburriel)
Aug 13 '17, 16:55
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The part about the generals is a good fact to remember. Grant, for his part, wasn't a great strategic genius. But he leveraged another of the facts mentioned: the Union vastly outnumbered the confederacy. He wasn't very good at Shiloh. His Vicksburg campaign showed hints of brilliance. But by the time he assumed command of the Army of the Potomac, Lee was in full retreat after a very narrow defeat in Gettysburg that he managed to turn into a route through sheer stupidity. Grant won few of his battles against Lee. They were more like draws. He simply sent waves of troops against Lee and in a war of attrition, Grant had the numbers. They'd fight, Lee would withdraw, over and over again.
Stonewall Jackson earned his name not because he could hold his line but because Lee criticized him for not advancing. He got himself killed by his own troops, for Pete's sake!
Arguable the most successful general of the war was Sherman and that's because he fought dirty. He had little resistance in his march to the sea and ran a scorched earth campaign that "broke the back of the confederacy".
And we shouldn't dismiss the navy. While most ground troops were state militias, the navy was a national navy so when militias split between North and South, the navy didn't have any such division. Much like naval force decided the Revolutionary War (those wacky French at Yorktown), the navy cannot be dismissed here.
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