Grant                                                                 Lee

In 2008, while on a cross-country Civil War driving trip, Fort Monroe to Oregon, 5000 miles in two weeks, a pair of Mississippi gentlemen asked me who I thought the greatest Civil War general was. This question gave me a long moments pause, I know the answer that you are suppose to give, when asked this particular question, is Lee; or the acceptable alternative, Forrest. But, after a semi brief period of internal struggle I answered Grant.

Grant you say, why Grant? Well I have my reasons. First, I discovered the Civil War as a child while messing around in the school library, I came across a book about Shiloh. I didn’t really understand it much of what it said, I knew the Union won, sort of, and that there was a terrible struggle at someplace called the Hornet’s Nest, but I really didn’t get the significance of what happened there; but, I remembered it seemed to revolve around about someone named Grant and a lot of people got shot.

My mind wandered from the Civil War for many years. First, I got interested World War l and spent a few years trying to understand what happened over there and why anyone would leave a perfectly good trench to run at a machine gun. Next came the Holocaust, why would an intelligent, educated group of people go along with their own murder? Hannibal and the Punic Wars took a little time, only to be followed by quite a few years immersed in the Crusades with a particular emphasis on the Albigensians; but, the whole time the Civil War quietly beckoned to me to come home.

At last, almost reluctantly, I started reading about the Civil War again. As I read more over the years, I naturally heard a great deal about the war in the East: Virginia and Lee. Reading so much of what’s been written, because it’s about the East, gives the impression that the South was winning, right up until the day they lost. I found it all very confusing, but I kept reading, and this Grant fellow kept popping up.

For a while I became really enamored with Chamberlain, and his accomplishments certainly deserve a great deal of respect, but while he saved the day at Little Round Top, he didn’t win the war. That fellow Grant seemed to have had something more to do with that.

As I got older and less fascinated with the brutal slaughter of it all, I became more interested with just what exactly it was that happened during the years of 1861-5. I realized that it was Grant, and his good buddy Sherman, who figured out first, long before anybody else, just what that war was going to require to be won.

While Lee was running around Northern Virginia winning stunning victories against really bad Union Generals, Grant and Sherman were sitting around campfires in the west talking all night about how to end the thing. Lee, won battles, but was repeatedly fighting over the same ground: his victories never really gained any advantage or advanced the Confederate position.

The dominant military theories of the day held that wars were won by defeating the enemy's biggest army decisively, forcing him to surrender. Armies were to be concentrated so that maximum force could be brought to bear on a single point and that a decisive victory would force the loser to surrender. This therory held that fighting on multiple fronts would only weaken the main punch, and therefore was to be avoided.

Everything Lee did was to try and bring about such an effect. It didn’t work though; both sides suffered some devastating defeats, but did not surrender. Lee should have realized after Chancellorsville that the war was going to require more than a single devastating victory to win, but he never seemed to figure it out despite the evidence at hand.

That was the genius of Grant; he realized that a sudden stunning victory was not going to do anything in and of itself, it was going to take a united, concerted action on many fronts at once, and that victory would require the defeat of the southern civilians as much as a defeat of their armies in the field. Grant and his good buddy Sherman were developing the concepts of modern total war while their counterparts were still imitating Napoleon.