I still think General Sherman burning down Atlanta was one of the biggest gut punches in military history. He knew extreme measures had to be taken to ensure the Confederacy was defeated. He burned down plantations too. The idea being that if Johnny rebel heard through the grapevine that his family home had been burned down, he'd desert his post to go back home. It actually worked quite well too.
yes these vile traitors and slaveholders needed to taste at least a little bit of the hell they inflicted without mercy on the people they "owned" unfortunately because of the lincoln assassination and the fiasco of the 1876 election reconstruction ended too soon leading to a hundred yrs of jim crow and the ridiculous myths of the lost cause, that slavery wasn't the root cause of the war and pride in "southern heritage" and other idiocies ⚛😀
He didn’t burn down Atlanta, the confederates did when they tried to burn supplies and not much of Atlanta was actually burned compared to what you would think
What about Gen. Winfield Scott, union commander at the outset of the war. He devised the Anaconda Plan, which included a naval blockade, capturing the Mississippi, and holding the Confederates in northern Virginia while coming strong from the west. While the plan was not fully implemented, it ended up being how the war was fought, except of course for some very blood battles in northern Virginia which were unneeded under Scott's plan.
The Anaconda Plan only works because Lincoln sabotaged real peace efforts which would have avoided the conflict completely, by giving his wordd to those negotiating that he would not supply Ft Sumter, which was a total lie which provoked the Southerners into war. Lincoln is responsible for 632,000 deaths
I'm glad Meade, Longstreet, E. Johnston, and Thomas got the mentioned here. Online and in certain forums, the former 3's generalship tends to get besmirched, by self-proclaimed experts. And the latter tends to be forgotten a lot of the times it seems.
Yes, Meade is really not given enough credit for what he did at Gettysburg. When the Union army in the past faced the beating they took on day 1 & 2, other Union generals would withdraw. Meade stood and fought.
Grant's genius was that he realized that it wasn't simply a question of killing more Confederate soldiers than Union soldiers in a particular battle, it was a question of killing more Confederate soldiers than the Confederacy could absorb and still exist. Once Grant was put in charge the South HAD to know they were done.
genius huh!?!??? Example: @ cold harbor union casualties were over 12,000, including 1,844 dead, 9,077 wounded, and 1,866 captured or missing of 108,000 troops. The Confederate army suffered 83 dead, 3,380 wounded, and 1,132 captured or missing out of 62,000 troops. The union casualties were all lost in under an hour. So, we can say that grant was a GENIUS, a GENIUS when it comes to BUTCHERY! The way of the BUTCHER. I can tell you are one that believes in "might proves right" in ANY situation. Next time before you make a ST00PID comment brush up on history.
Grant's blunder at Cold Harbor was bad, but no worse than Lee's catastrophic losses at Malvern Hill or Pickett's Charge. If you want a general with no blunders on his record, you have to look to George H. Thomas.@@Rokdar1
Interesting Grant got fed up with Thomas's patience at Nashville and was going to relieve him but Thomas finally launched his attack before Grant could do it, and destroyed Hood's army.
Thomas is way underrated. The only commander to destroy 2 armies and never lost a battle. AS Johnston had an impossible situation defending too much with too little ordered by Davis. What difference would the troops that surrendered at Fort Donaldson have been at Shiloh
@@JEFFREYHAUGAN Where's the evidence that Thomas was a slow starter? Other than from Sherman, who had a really bad habit of blaming other people - especially dead people who couldn't contradict him - for his own inadequacies?
@@aaronfleming9426 My evidence? History!!!! Grant, Lincoln, Sherman, Halleck all getting almost hysterical trying to get Thomas to move. If nothing else, simply look at the battle of Nashville. Shelby Foote does an excellent job laying out the facts of the case in his trilogy on the civil war amongst others.
@@JEFFREYHAUGAN History vindicates Thomas at Nashville. Thomas was the man in Nashville observing Hood up close; he knew the situation in front of him better than any of the worry-warts back in Washington. Grant of all people should have known better than to try to micromanage a general from a thousand miles away in Washington; he was well familiar with Halleck's meddling and had taken pains from time to time to cut Halleck out of the loop so he could operate without his distant, bureaucratic interference. Sherman is probably most responsible for defaming Thomas, having penned the famous letter to Grant complaining: "My chief source of trouble is with the Army of the Cumberland, which is awful slow...etc." However, please consider the analysis of Sherman's letter by Albert Castel (an actual historian, unlike novelist Shelby Foote) in his work on the Atlanta campaign, "Decision in the West" (page 285): "The exaggerations, distortions, and falsehoods in the letter should be apparent to all who have read this far. Some of them, no doubt stem from simple ignorance and honest misunderstandings. Others, however, are the product of personal prejudice and represent a craven and dishonorable attempt to forestall censure from Grant for having failed to achieve decisive results in Georgia by putting the blame on others - notably Thomas, whom he knows Grant dislikes." Castel also demonstrates that a number of Sherman's complaints about Thomas are fabrications and flat-out lies. I cannot recommend more highly Castel's essay "Prevaricating Through Georgia" for a brief but thorough and devastating critique of Sherman's self-serving memoirs. It's also worth noting here that Sherman is the general who repeatedly failed to deal with Hood in the first place, often by ignoring advice from Thomas that would have ended the Atlanta campaign weeks if not months earlier. Sherman is also the general who stripped Thomas of transport and cavalry mounts when he went off to burn stuff in Georgia. In the end, Thomas attacked Hood, who was entrenched on high ground, and thrashed him to a frazzle. Thomas inflicted casualties at a 2:1 rate. Please compare Nashville with almost any battle where Grant or Sherman attacked an enemy entrenched on high ground. Chickasaw Bayou, Vicksburg, Cold Harbor, and Kennesaw Mountain would be some good starting points. Compare the results of those battles with Thomas' battle at Nashville and you'll begin to understand why Thomas was right to take his time and do the job right...and perhaps give you a hint as to why, perhaps, Grant and Sherman were jealous of Thomas.
Emory Upton was a great general who doesn't often see the acclaim he deserved. His groundbreaking tactics during the Civil War became the basis for American doctrine, albeit after his death.
this is a good nutshell description of the military leaders on both sides the union probably would have prevailed much sooner had they had the same quality of general officers at the war's beginning as the south did⚛😀
Maybe. Or maybe they needed better troops. By 1863, we just don't hear about the union forces breaking discipline and running. Not often at any rate. We heard it all the time from 1861 to 1863. By 1863, the Union had a much "harder" army of veterans who didn't flinch nearly so easily as earlier on. That has to be factored in.
A couple of notes, 1) Jeb Stuart hadn't planned on making a raid during the build-up to Gettysburg, rather he was surprised by how quickly the Union Army began pursuing Lee and he was forced northeastward in an attempt to hook up with Lee, who was supposed to be heading for Carlisle, PA. 2) Part of the selection process in choosing Meade to replace Hooker was a direct result of Hooker once noting that a "dictator" would be the best way to end the Civil War. Lincoln, when promoting Hooker to head the Army of the Potomac, pointed out to Hooker that in order to become a dictator, he'd have to win battles. After Chancellorsville, Meade was picked primarily because he was "foreign born" and would not be a political threat to Lincoln. 3) I've always liked Phillip Sheridan and I think he was one of the better officers on the Union side. Lincoln said of him, "a short, chunky brown-skinned chap with arms long enough to scratch his ankles without having to bend over".
Meade was chosen because Reynolds turned the offer down, Howard had already had two pretty significant failures, Hancock wasn't senior enough and Sickles, although personally very brave, was a political general who kept his command because Lincoln needed the democrat support from New York; but he wasn't going to give him the army. Not sure about why Sykes (checking, it looks as if Sykes was also too junior) and Sedgwick were passed over, have to look that up again. Guess it's time to "dust off" Shelby Foote again.
A major difference between Grant and his predecessors was that when they were defeated, they retreated back to Union territory. It didn’t matter to Grant whether he won or lost (it is considered by many that he lost the Battle of the Wilderness-I won’t take a side on that question), he would advance anyway. That took the Confederates somewhat by surprise. Though they quickly adapted as well as they could, there wasn’t much they could do about someone who wouldn’t retreat. While some disparage Grant because he won with a bigger army, the fact is that he knew how to leverage that advantage, something his predecessors didn’t.
That is correct. Longstreet told Lee that Grant, whom he knew well at West Point, would fight it out thru the summer and not retreat. Grant simply rolled on no matter what the outcome of any particular battle was. He was beaten repeatedly by Lee, not just at the Wilderness but at Cold Harbor and North Anna, yet he simply gathered the army and marched on, leaving behind casualties equal to the entire Army of Northern Virginia in his wake. By that point in the war, however, the end was inevitable because of manpower and supply problems the South could not overcome. By Petersburg, Lee was losing a regiment a day to desertion.
Lee was brilliant, of that there is no doubt...but he was a strategist. Grant never allowed him to develop any strategies, which demonstrates the brilliance of U. S. Grant. He never let go of Lee, which led to Lee's complete and total destruction.
Grant was the greatest general of the Civil War and one of the best of the 19th century. He was able to work out winning tactics and strategy in a war when new technology made it very hard to win on the offensive. Not only could Grant win battles but he could put together a winning strategy and select able generals to help him carry it out.
When fighting in the west he was definitely the top dog, but in the east he lost continuously but could afford it. Lee is the overall top dog. Lee was also pretty close at the top in Mexican American war too.
Except that Sherman kind of sucked. I mean, if you take a step back and look at his combat record, what did he accomplish before the rebellion was an exhausted shell?
@@aaronfleming9426Sherman made Georgia howl. Grant wouldn't have put him in charge of a major campaign if Grant didn't think Sherman was capable of being successful.😊 And boy, was he not successful?😮
The position of the Federal government was that Georgia was a region in rebellion, that the government wanted to bring back into the fold of national unity. Rarely has Sun Tzu's dictum been more germane: "In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good." Rather than destroying the rebel army and political apparatus and behaving in a winsome way toward the citizens, Sherman shattered and destroyed the civilian population, leaving a swathe of destruction that led to the death by starvation and disease of an estimated 40,000 people over the next winter. The bitterness Georgians felt is understandable, and we see the damage to national unity to this very day. When you dig into Sherman's record, you find a well-below-average combat general. Looking at his Atlanta campaign in specific, you see multiple botched opportunities to destroy the Army of Tennessee. There is a strong argument that it was frustration - born of his own incompetence - that led him to the destructive path to the sea, "shattering and destroying" as he went. Sherman was crowned with laurels by a northern population tired of war, and there is a clear correlation between his march to the sea and the collapse of the rebellion, but there is *not* a clear causal connection. Did his march finish the rebellion...or was he merely kicking a defeated enemy when he was already essentially down for the count? Grant was a great general. He did, however, have a penchant for politics that sometimes sidelined outstanding generals, like Francis Herron or George Thomas, in favor of his personal friends with weaker combat records.@@charlesharris3373
@@aaronfleming9426absolute revisionist crap. Sherman didn't target civilians, he targeted anything of military value. If white civilians struggled to feed themselves it's because they never learned how. Parasites are helpless without their hosts and when Sherman liberated the slaves in Georgia..... well a wise man would have learned how to use a spade for himself
Pretty solid list. I slightly disagree with AS Johnston being listed as “great”. At best I’d say he died too quickly, and didn’t accomplish much, or enough to allow us to judge his generalship. He was certainly aggressive, but getting himself killed in this most important of Battles was dumb.
I agree. Whatever he might have become if he had lived, his one battle was poorly planned, and he didn't seem to understand his role as commanding general.
@@aaronfleming9426 Exactly. Leading a charge on a tiny portion of his front, like a big show off, was childish. His misadventure deprived the army of leadership at a critical moment. Probably still a “loss” versus Grant, but who knows. If I were grading him, I’d give AS Johnson an-Incomplete!
Although not educated in military tactics or a true field general, Nathan Bedford Forrest was one bad man. As a northerner, I've always been fascinated by his prompt strategy, common sense, and toughness when it came to the Civil War, which had no blueprint. Yes, he was a slave owner and Grand Wizard of the KKK, but if you wanted someone in your "foxhole," he's that dude.
That's exactly what a devil worshiper would say. America is young and will prove to be the flash in the pan that it is. The earth has been inhabited for millions of years by humans .
Gettysburg was a complete reversal of prior battles. The Union had finally found a defensible position with superb lines of communication. The Union force was deployed in an arc that permitted easy reinforcement.
Meade commanded the AOP till the end of the war. Overshadowed by Grant. On his own he and Lee maneuvered each other to a standstill. He stood up to Stanton when pushed to attack at Mine Run. It has been said Meade was not the man to win the war but definitely not the man to loose it. Meadeous Victorious
There's the perennial question is wether the more successful generals for example (Washington, Lee, Rommel) do so because the were geniuses or because they faced inferior generals. McClellan, Burnside and Hooker were hardly fearsome opponents.
The British military historian H. Liddell Hart considered Sherman to be the best general on either side. Sherman's strategy and tactics were "indirect", meaning he did not just smash into his opponent headlong. Rather, Sherman would maneuver his opponent out of position and only fight when he had the advantage. In this way, he was able to accomplish great things at minimal cost. In all of his campaigns - Atlanta, Savannah, Carolinas - Sherman was able to achieve his objectives and lay waste to the heart of the Confederacy without fighting any full-scale pitched battles like Gettysburg.
Albert Castel, on the other hand, soundly and repeatedly refutes Liddell Hart in "Decision In the West". One excerpt reads: Sherman took advantage of this fact and his greater numerical strength to conduct a series of flanking moves that forced first Johnston and then Hood to relinquish otherwise impregnable positions....Yet despite the effectiveness of this modus operandi, it scarcely deserves to be hailed as an example of (to quote Liddell Hart) "strategic artistry."...Sherman ordered every one of his flanking moves with reluctance and out of sheer necessity, and he executed them without sufficient speed and force to attain maximum results. What Joseph Miller...said about Sherman's conduct of operations in mid June applies to the whole campaign and comes much closer to the truth than such superficial eulogies as Liddell Hart's: "Sherman has not made a single successful move but what common sense would have dictated under the circumstances." Also interesting is Castel's destruction of Liddell Hart's excuse for Sherman's failure at Snake Creek Gap.
Good overview on the key generals of the Civil War. A Teenager’s Guide on the Civil War: A History Book for Teens gives an overview history of the Civil War for teens.
One thing you did not point out about Joseph Johnston was that he was wounded in action in the Peninsula Campaign, leading Jefferson Davis to appoint Robert E. Lee to take his place. Another thing about Johnston was that Davis had to recall him to duty in 1865 to halt William Sherman's advance in North Carolina. Piecing together an army with the few troops left outside of Virginia, he managed to slow down Sherman - just as he had the previous summer.
Patrick Cleburne was far superior to Meade or Albert S. Johnston, one of the finest division commanders of the war. Beat Sherman at Tunnel Hill, despite being outnumbered 4 to 1. He deserved a mention. Same with Nathan B. Forrest, one of the best generals in American history. So good German General Rommel was once asked where he learned his strategy and he named Forrest.
Cleburne and Forrest both definitely deserve to be ranked higher than A.S. Johnston or Sherman, neither of whom deserve to be anywhere near this list. That said, Meade was also an outstanding division commander...that's how he rose to corps command, and then army command. There's really no basis to say Cleburne was better, let alone "far superior".
Sherman has a worse combat record than anyone else on that list. The army he led was built by others, and he fought it poorly. Failing to pin down and destroy Hood's army in Georgia, Sherman wandered off to burn things while other generals did the fighting.
@@aaronfleming9426 Sherman _deliberately_ did not follow Hood north. He beat the better Joe Johnston when the latter was running the same troops. It was Johnston, not Hood that Sherman had to outmaneuver and it was Johston that kept Sherman at bay. But, Sherman knew Hood was over aggressive and knew that Thomas would take him out when Hood went north. Which, in fact, happened. That's not failing to engage -- that is realizing that the enemy had dangled a prize in front of him with their own mistaken ideas. Hood left Georgia defenseless as he and Davis had this (wrong) idea that they could force Sherman to chase him. When people talk about Sherman, they entirely forget that Hood effectively quit the battlefield in a vain attempt to draw Sherman out. Meanwhile, Hood depleted his own army uselessly against Thomas. Grant, in his memoirs, talked well of Joe Johnston and disparagingly about Hood.
@@curious968I *deliberately* don't play Scrabble with my brother. Why? Because I've tried half a dozen times and I suck at the game. So when he plays Scrabble, I go off and play something different. Pretty much the same thing with Sherman: he knew he sucked at battle, so he went off to destroy undefended stuff while the real fighters took care of the enemy army.
@@Davemurray2880isaindian Funny story, I live in Iowa, a good stout Union state that had many regiments that marched in Sherman's Army of the Tennessee. But facts are facts - Sherman's combat record sucks.
Meade's success at Gettysburg was due less to his generalship than Lee's ineptness. The Confederates should have just flanked him, and fought a pitched battle later on more even ground. The most underrated Union general is John A. Logan. There is a book called "Nothing But Victory" which pretty much sums up his career. But Logan was not a West Pointer, and was disliked by both Sherman and Thomas - probably because both they and the army realized that Logan was a better general.
And how do you propose that Lee would have "just flanked him"? By what roads would they have marched? By what means would they have kept Meade from using his interior lines of communication and superior logistics to intercept them? What cavalry would Lee have used to screen his own advance and scout the Union positions?
@@aaronfleming9426The North was actually not that superior to Lee's army, that is a very absurd and biased belief, they were more equal than popularly believed.
One General of the Civil War NOT mentioned (and for good reason, disqualified) for consideration for being one of the Best Generals of the Civil War was Sam Houston. Houston sought to keep Texas out of the Civil War because he foresaw the outcome. Houston couldn't prevent Secession, bud did seek to steer Texas out of the Confederacy., possibly reverting to the old Republic of Texas or even rejoining Mexico. His credential of being one of the few Generals who had defeated Santa Anna was one that only one or two others could put on their resume.
1. It sounds as though you talk about "Calvary" units and generals. The military unit/general is "Cavalry." "Calvary" is a hill in the Middle East. The way I remember to pronounce the word correctly is that the nickname for "Cavalry" is "Cav." "Go Cav!" is a motivational exclamation of U.S. Cavalry soldiers. 2. You commented correctly that the Union army was tired after the Battle of Gettysburg. But so was the Confederate army. Then it started raining. If Meade has pursued Lee, he would have trapped the Army of Northern Virginia against the swollen Potomac River, and forced them to surrender. The was would have been over. 3. Have you never heard of Nathan Bedford Forrest?
I know it may seem like a tedious complaint, but as a lifelong student of history it drives me CRAZY when I hear people (who should know better) refer to military equine units as "calvary" instead of CAVALRY! And this guy does it several times!! 🤬
Interesting anecdote...I was complaining about this to my 18 year old daughter, who is mildly dyslexic and needed speech therapy when she was younger to learn how to say L's and R's. I kept saying "It's CAVALRY, not CALVARY," and she finally spoke up and said, "I can't hear a difference between the two words". Makes me wonder if that's common for dyslexic folks?
Why isn't Fitzjohn Porter on this list? He fought Lee to a draw at Gaines Mill, successfully retreated through a series of swamps over the next five days, and then beat Lee like a rented mule at Malvern Hill.
I believe the Civil War was a study into strategy matched against tactics. Sure, Bull Run, the Seven Days, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville and other battles may have been southern victories, they ultimately had little military effect because the Union could replace its losses both in manpower and equipment, while the Confederacy could not. Even victory came at an awful cost. But more than that, it was a case of poor leadership in the Union as much as it was skill on part of the south. Some say it was luck, but in truth, for all their brilliance, once the Confederate generals met a capable opponent, like Grant and Sherman, the war began to turn steadily against them. Besides that, there was a disagreement among the south as to what its overall objective should be. Many argued the war should be purely defensive. However, this was viewed as cowardly and so the Confederates attempted to bring the war to the Union. Twice, Lee attempted to invade the North, both times ended in retreat with heavy casualties. And then there's the civilian contribution to consider. The attempt to coerce European intervention through Cotton Diplomacy was a dismal failure, depriving both its people and its military much needed gold and provisions from British and French imports, and that was before the Union blockade was put in place.
Sherman was not controversial. He has a more honest view of what war was really unlike anyone else on this list. He was respected in the South until the 1880s when the "lost cause" southerners made him a scapegoat. As for the Indian wars, he left the treaties to politicians. Who did most of the dirty work was Phillip Sheridan yet this article does not mention this in his section.
Why Sherman? Mental breakdown in Kentucky Surprised at Shiloh Repulsed at Chickasaw Bluffs Opposed the Vicksburg maneuver Repulsed at Kennesaw and polks mill Allowed the Resaca maneuver to fail Failed to destroy Hardee's Corps at Jonesboro in favor of tearing up Railroads Surprised again in the battles for Atlanta and allowed subordinated to fight all three battles. He was lucky to have Grant as a friend, a senator as stepfather, and to serve far from the eastern media centers.
@aaronfleming9426 Right! Forgot to list the worst failure of all. Given half the army to make the decisive attack, he flubbed it, and Grant was saved by Thomas and (of all people) Hooker.
@@AnthonyGentile-z2g Honestly when I first saw your list I thought I was looking at one of my own posts and had to check your name! Glad to meet a fellow you-tube comment lurker who sees the truth about Sherman!
AS Johnston shouldn't be on the list. He had almost no battle record to draw conclusions from before Shiloh, where he was killed. And Nathan Bedford Forrest should be on this list. Though his generalship came late in the war, his record of victories is impeccable.
I once read about why Sherman was never too concerned about Nathan Forrest. Sherman claimed that Forrest had made his reputation off of attacking outposts of little importance with superior number and needed help when dealing with a better foe. In other words, to Sherman, Forrest meant nothing.
Interesting if true. Sherman had an interesting habit of ignoring certain foes. He didn't pursue Hood, either. He deserves more credit for keeping his eye on the prize and not wandering off to fight battles someone else was going to win.
@@curious968 I'd argue that Sherman was unable to defeat the foes in front of him, so he wandered off to burn things while someone else fought the battles. If you can forget for just a moment that Sherman is celebrated as a great general, and start analyzing him by his actual performances, you may end up with a surprisingly dim view of his generalship.
Missing from this list: Forrest, Upton, Rosecrans, Wilder, Cleburne Shouldn't be on the list: Joseph Johnston and Sherman. Joe Johnston was ineffective. Sherman's only significant achievement was using his massive army to chase off Joe Johnston and making war on noncombatants - in the South first and later in the Plains. Sherman never led a successful assault. His foolishness at Shiloh, Chickasaw Bayou, Meridian, and Chattanooga got a lot of men killed for no good reason. Grant's success and friendship is why Sherman kept his job.
Joe Johnston certainly belongs. He achieved all that was possible to achieve against Sherman. In fact, Lee was using essentially the same tactics by then, so if Lee is great, so was Joe Johnston. He suffers because Davis and Bell Hood had this delusion that they could go on offense. You can read up on what Hood did with Johnston's army. It isn't pretty. By contrast, Johnston was fighting the only way that had any chance of winning. Keep the biggest army you can in the field, wear down northern morale. Don't throw away men on stupid assaults that the union shrugs off even if you win. Sherman gets credit for realizing the Hood was going to go get destroyed by Thomas. He was supposed to chase north after Hood. Living without supply lines is not something to sneeze at either. His army might have been starved out had his foraging not worked for any reason.
Rosecrans wouldn't make the list because of his disastrous error at Chickamauga. He seems to have been a good general before that (and the misplacement was something of an accident due to bad intelligence), but the error hurt his reputation.
Jackson not defensive? at 2nd Manassas, he held the Union off for two days, while Longstreet dithered, finally moved on day 3, and you credit him with the victory?
Sherman is possibly the most overrated general of the war. "Armies are reliant on their civilian support" is not a modern realization, it's a concept as old as warfare. What Sherman did was he abandoned the idea of reconciliation and decided to go with punitive warfare, which proved to be cathartic for a war-weary northern public. Otherwise he'd be remembered as a chronic bumbler.
@@localkiwi9988 A great general who so vastly overestimated enemy strength in Kentucky that he had a nervous breakdown and had to leave the army... A great general who ignored all signs of the enemy advancing on his position at Shiloh and nearly got his army destroyed... A great general who got clobbered at Chickasaw Bayou... A great general who thought Grant's plan for invading Mississippi wouldn't work... A great general who utterly failed to achieve his objectives at Chattanooga... A great general who missed at least four opportunities to crush the enemy during the Atlanta campaign... A great general who ordered the insane attack at Kennesaw Mountain... A great general who took four months to travel 100 miles to capture Atlanta... So what was Sherman good at? Umm...marching unopposed through enemy territory and burning stuff...okay, sounds like a cool guy I guess.
@@aaronfleming9426 General Lee quoting on Sherman. 1, General Sherman was the most successful general of Union Generals. 2, As a strategist and military commander, Sherman showed the highest order of a military genius. Certainaly puts your crap comments in the bin. Go back and do some study and you might learn something.
@@localkiwi9988 I just got done reading Albert Castel's "Decision In the West". Maybe you should read it, and you might learn something. Also, every one of the things that I noted in my "crap comments" is a historical fact. Your response to facts was to offer up the opinion of Robert E. Lee, a man widely noted for being extremely courteous and polite. Also, Sherman had just beaten Lee in a war, so Lee was hardly going to be slamming Sherman, was he? So how about if you try telling me about some of the things Sherman did that were so brilliant. Maybe respond to some of Castel's comments from his conclusion: "Although Sherman's campaign achieved a decisive strategic-political result, from a strictly military standpoint it was incloncusive....Again and again, from Dalton to Lovejoy's Station, he overlooked, ignored, and even rejected opportunities to crush or fatally cripple the Confederate forces in Georgia or at the very least drive them from the state. Never once, moreover, did he engage or even try to engage the enemy with his full available strength; frequently he assumed that the Rebels were retreating when they were not, or he wishfully thought they would do other than what they did; and too often he wasted time in operations that either were obviously futile or patently unnecessary. One must conclude that while Sherman by 1864 had learned to control his fear of what the enemy might be up to, he had not mastered it, and that his preference for a war of maneuvering and raiding derived, not from a considered military philosophy, but rather from a deep-seated fear of the consequences of trusting to what he rightly called 'the fickle fortunes of battle'. He was, in short, a general who did not like to fight. Had Thomas' personal relationship with Grant permitted him to command in Georgia in 1863, almost surely the Union victory would have been easier, quicker, and more complete."
Alber Sydney Johnston? Seriously? Didn't even last halfway through his first battle. Died acting like a brigade commander when he should have been trying to coordinate his whole army.
Your assessment of Butler as a military governor is remedial. The ‘ladies’ of New Orleans needed courses in obedience. Unless you think ‘lady’ like things such as dumping chamber pots on soldiers is acceptable behavior? His big punishment? “If you ‘ladies’ want to act as ill mannered street walkers, we will treat you as such.” Let’s all clutch our pearls and gasp. What’s next? Was Frederick Douglas awful because klansmen thought he uppity? Consider your sources better. Yeah, he left a lot to be desired as a military commander, but he was the best man to keep New Orleans at heel. A politician was a perfect choice.
Without General Nathan Bedford Forrest this list is null and void. You can hate him for what happened at Fort Pillow but you can't deny his brilliance as a Calvary officer.
I would assume if you are talking about great generals it is because of their accomplishments. If you look at Forrest what battle did he fight that affected the outcome of the war. I would say not one. His best victory Brice’s crossroads didn’t have strategic results. Within two weeks another army was after him. So his big claim is that he was annoying. If you look at his other battles he gets less results. When he does fight with the main army. He fights as rearguard at Nashville And barely holds off Wilson. He fights during the Chickamauga campaign and his performance is not good. (Read failure in the saddle by Powell) Not saying Forrest is a bad general but to rank him as the best he has to earn with an accomplishment and I don’t see it.
@@liberalman8319 As a black Union supporter, I say, his slave trading and KKK involvement are all you really need to know about him. (Screw any reformation that his fans claim as he sought post war political ascension). He was uneducated and never trained for war; but like you said, he was a serious annoyance. His raids and tactics were a serious pain in the ass. He didn't seem to get the respect of the upper field generals because of his lack of education, but he was a really good soldier. He had a natural talent for when and where to strike, unlike some generals on both sides of the War who were often timid and quick to retreat. He was a general in title, but actually more of a major. He took orders; he didn't give them. He was feared by both sides.
Thomas was maddeningly slow and bordered on the insubordinate at times, but would only attack when he was ready. He utterly destroyed the Army of the Tennessee at Nashville. It was extremely difficult to destroy an army in the field. Lee could not do it in ANY of his battles-Chancellorsville included.
The only people "maddened" by Thomas' "slowness" were Grant and Sherman, who were jealous of him. If you want to talk about slow, talk about Sherman's Atlanta campaign. It not only took him four months to move a hundred miles, he repeatedly botched opportunities to cripple or destroy the Army of Tennessee...and he usually botched it by ignoring Thomas' advice.
When it looked the Civil War was going to start up Lee was offered the top General's position in the North. Meade won Gettysburg and he won the battle. He was ordered by Lincoln to pursue the fleeing confederate army of which he didn't do. It's been debated as to if that was the right decision or not. Lee said the mistakes at Gettysburg was completely his fault. Sherman's march is still thought of how horrendous it was to this day in the South.
Lee was not offered the top position. Scott already had the top position. What Lee was wanted for was his engineering skills. More than likely to prepare the defenses of Washington D.C. What was Lee's first job for the CSA? Constructing the defenses of Richmond. There were Generals in the U.S. Army that had seniority to Lee. Lee was a newly appointed Colonel, there were 12 other Colonels with seniority above him. No, they were not going to jump him over other senior commanders. especially when there was a shortage of commanders you don't want to piss off when building an army.
I've visited the grave of Gen'l Sherman whom I believe was the greatest US general ever. He lived off the land with a major army, something nobody else has been able to do. He was respected by all, including his enemies. Offered the total command of the Union Army he said no, he was loyal to his good friend Gen'l Grant. At his funeral CSA Gen'l Johnston walked behind his casket on a cold rainy day without a hat. People asked him to wear a head covering he refused saying if I was in that casket Sherman would be here without a hat. He caught cold and died 2 days later.
On the contrary: Sherman was a fourth-rate general. Better than Benjamin Butler or N.P. Banks, but well below many others. Consider a brief overview: 1. Did fine as a brigade commander at Bull Run 2. Promoted to command of Kentucky, he panicked, had a nervous breakdown, and sat out the action while cooler heads like Thomas and Grant crushed the rebel plans for Kentucky. 3. Back in command of a division at Shilah, Sherman ignored repeated warnings that an enormous enemy force was almost upon him. His stupidity nearly cost the Union the battle, and though he fought well once he realized what was going on, he was no better than others, like McClernand and Prentiss. 4. Next emerges as the loser of the Chickasaw Bayou debacle. 5. Far from being a brilliant visionary who realized an army could live off the land, he opposed Grant's strategy for the Vicksburg campaign. As a result, Grant had him bring up the rear of the army while McPherson and McClernand's corps did the heavy fighting at Port Gibson, Raymond, Champion Hill, and Big Black River Bridge. 6. Outperformed by McClernand again in the assaults at Vicksburg. 7. Burned stuff on his Meridian campaign, but otherwise failed all his strategic objectives. 8. Grant set up the whole battle of Missionary Ridge to give Sherman a chance to win battlefield glory, but Sherman failed while the "slow" Thomas and the "timid" Army of the Cumberland wiped Bragg's army off the ridge. 9. Bungled so badly at Snake Creek Gap that even he recognized a "once in a career opportunity" had been missed...although he predictably blamed McPherson. 10. Failed to trap Johnston at Resaca, failing even to put interdicting artillery fire on the bridges Johnston used to escape. 11. Ignored Thomas' advice to outflank Johnston at Kennesaw Mountain, opting instead for the bloody frontal assaults. 12. Failed to pursue Hood after beating him at Jonesboro, allowing Hood to escape and rebuild his army. 13. Failed to catch Hood and bring him to battle once Hood moved north of Atlanta again.
You seem to say that Albert Sydney Johnston was a good general. I can't think of anything he did right. Left handed support to Fort Donelson. He let Beauregard make the plan for Shiloh and then got involved in leading attacks when he should have been in command of the army. A pitiful performance.
Stuart followed his orders during Gettysburg, and Nathan Bedford Forrest was a much better general anyway. Albert Sidney Johnston was not much of a general mostly lived on his pre-war laurels.
Meade was one of the worst Generals. He rarely got out of his headquarters, which was blown up by the Confederate cannons. It was Meade's officers that saved him.
The tide of the war destroyed "good generals" and made midgets into giants ,,, (I'm thinking of Custer). Good fortune and great timing, along with manpower and logistics can make even lesser men seem great. What a tragedy. The whole affair.
Nonsense. He was a strategic, logistical, and operational genius. He made his subordinates better (most of the time) and did outstanding staff work. He understood the political exigencies of the war. While not a tactical innovator in terms of infantry combat, he saw the possibilities of combined arms operations and developed excellent rapport with naval officers, which led to close coordination and a good deal of success. He had complete mastery of his own fears and was able to move swiftly and decisively. Now, would he have been able to win without the industrial and manpower advantages? Probably not. Those advantages were necessary to offset the enormous advantages the rebels had in other areas. But leveraging advantages to offset other disadvantages is precisely what makes an excellent general. Contrast Grant with Lee, who did not have the strategic capacity to understand and leverage his own advantages. In all fairness, Grant had Lincoln to work with, while Lee was stuck with Davis and the dysfunctional Confederate political system. While Lincoln made his fair share of mistakes, he was objectively a superior commander in chief, working with a superior political system. Would Lee have been able to win if he were in Grant's place? Quite likely.
What you say isn't untrue. However, the way that Grant just kept charging ahead BECAUSE he had almost unlimited resources is what allowed the north to win. If he didn't have those resources and tried to keep attacking after the losses the north took, he would have exhausted what resources he had. Other commanders, when suffered a defeat, did not understand the resources they had, that's true, and they retreated. Grant understood what he had and used them brilliantly (also thanks to Lincoln's support: "I can't afford to lose Grant; he fights."). Someone, I forget who, once said that Grant had the look of someone who had made up his mind to drive his head through a brick wall and was about to do it. By stating that Lee could have won had he been in Grant's place only confirms my statement about Grant: "only because he had almost unlimited resources". Had Grant been on the Southern side and "butchered" as many men as he lost in battle, he likely would have been relieved of command, like Hood was at Atlanta. Lee was brilliant and the South had the far superior commanders, with a few exceptions. What is amazing is that the South was able to drag the war out for four years and damned near gained the support of foreign countries, and likely would have if Gettysburg had been a victory, which might have ensured the South's victory. Interesting conversation. @@aaronfleming9426
But Lee did butcher his own men, and at a higher percentage rate than Grant did. Malvern Hill, Antietam, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg were all bloodbaths, and all the worse for being poorly chosen times and/or places to fight a pitched battle. Lee certainly had some outstanding traits, but overall he did not understand the war he was fighting, from a strategic perspective. Jefferson Davis did little or nothing to help strategically, but Lee was the highest ranking general in the Confederacy, had Davis' full trust, and was the most popular man in the Confederacy. He was not able to leverage those factors into a successful strategy. It's not so amazing that the rebels held out as long as they did. They started with several strong advantages, including the fact that the U.S. Army was about 12,000 strong at the beginning of the war, and a whole army would have to be built from scratch to invade, subdue, and hold a vast land area - a land area larger than had been conquered since the time of Ghengis Khan. Grant's victories in the West were based on speed and maneuver, not bludgeoning his way forward despite heavy casualties. He was caught unawares at Shiloh, a near-fatal blunder to be sure, though his largest mistake there was trusting Sherman's judgement that the enemy was nearby - I have almost nothing positive to say about Sherman.@@Paul-ju5px
Lee lost a whole lot of men in battles that he could not afford to fight, and Grant knew it. Grant pulled a fast one on Lee after Cold Harbor and maneuvered Lee into the Siege of Petersburg. But to be honest, if Grants field commanders hadn’t fumbled on those first few days at Petersburg, Grant would have captured Petersburg and Richmond and bagged most of the Confederate government before Lee would have known what just happened.
@@ChristopherHueskes-kj6dt Agreed. Grant moved ahead fast after a defeat when commanders before him had always retreated. Little Mac was a great organizer, but not a fighter, always wanting more men, more supplies, more artillery, etc. When it came to fighting he overestimated the enemy's strength and miscalculated their position. He would have done well as an assistant to Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs. Grant's forward movements, rather than withdrawing, caught the south off guard because they expected the same from him. In reading about the war, especially Foote's narrative trilogy, it is maddening when Grant's subordinates seemed to drag their feet when they had victory in their grasp, particularly at Petersburg. The overcautious field commanders gave Lee the time to dig in and drag the war out for another year. Regarding Sherman, he did make Georgia howl, he moved fast, and The Army of The Tennessee was instrumental in preventing reinforcements from being sent to Lee. Stuart screwed up by absenting his cavalry when Lee needed him most, blinding Lee for days as he entered PA. The fast actions of Union commanders secured the better ground at Gettysburg, which forced Lee to fight an uphill battle (literally) from the start. One of the few times the Union moved fast when it was crucial to do so. Had Lee withdrawn sooner, rather than smash a large portion of his army during Pickett's charge on Cemetery Ridge, he would have had those men available for what lay ahead.
I find that annoying too, but here's an interesting anecdote: I was recently complaining about that pronunciation to my daughter, a very bright girl but who has dyslexia and had a speech impediment as a child. Here's the thing...*she can't hear the difference between the two words!* It makes me wonder if other dyslexic folk have trouble differentiating between cavalry and calvary???
Lee was bad. Period. He had no idea of strategy, did not coordinate with other confederate armies, and sucked at logistics. Also, he's battle plans were obsolete, and squandered lives usually. The confederacy needed to fight a defensive war, protecting their interior lines. Lee misjudged this, and kept trying to fight a decisive battle and destroy the A of P. He had no chance to do this. And after losing tens of thousands of men, while also starving them, he stupidly held on, until his army was destroyed by casualties and desertions. He won a couple of high risk ventures against incompetent Generals, but his tactics, poor logistics, and lack of any strategic plan doomed him when General Grant, who understood all these things, faced him. On top of this he was a cruel slave owner, and he betrayed his oath as an officer of the United States Army. Every true American should despise him.
As a young man, I admired Lee as a general. It took a long time for me to figure out that he was a traitor to the United States, first and foremost and should forever be reviled.
@@tedszweb5268 LMAO, it doesn't make your point! 🤣 On the contrary he was such a minor player in the war that changed nothing of the mighty Armies commanded by his superiors. Everyone that made the list dwarf's his accomplishments and his failures of plenty.
Samuel Curtis, Patrick Cleburne, Nathan Forrest, Richard Taylor, and James Blunt, all deserve to be higher on this list than A.S. Johnston and Sherman.
My mother, born in 1918, hated Sherman and didn't mind telling me about it. She grew up in Yazoo, Mississippi in the 1920s and probably listened to Civil War vets talk of Sherman's harsh war tactics on civilians.
@@snocamo154 Your mom was correct. He was an SOB what he did to the south! He came through my town on his way to Atlanta and left devastation in his wake.
The Persians had numerical superiority against Alexander the great but they lost to him. So I guess Lee wasn't the genius general that everyone claims that he is.
Who do you think was the best of all?
The best general, hands down, was Ulysses S. Grant.
Union: Lt. General Ulysses Simpson Grant
Confederacy: Lt. Cavalry General Nathan Bedford Forrest (Absent)
@@cht2162Grant is unbelievably overhyped.
@@stonewalljackson5692 so was *Bobby Lee* for the last 150 so years.
@@Peri0dPH Robert E Lee regularly outmaneuvered and repelled Grant's forces lol, inflicted 97,000 casualties.
I still think General Sherman burning down Atlanta was one of the biggest gut punches in military history. He knew extreme measures had to be taken to ensure the Confederacy was defeated. He burned down plantations too. The idea being that if Johnny rebel heard through the grapevine that his family home had been burned down, he'd desert his post to go back home. It actually worked quite well too.
yes these vile traitors and slaveholders needed to taste at least a little bit of the hell they inflicted without mercy on the people they "owned" unfortunately because of the lincoln assassination and the fiasco of the 1876 election reconstruction ended too soon leading to a hundred yrs of jim crow and the ridiculous myths of the lost cause, that slavery wasn't the root cause of the war and pride in "southern heritage" and other idiocies ⚛😀
And it worked and they are still MAD about it
He didn’t burn down Atlanta, the confederates did when they tried to burn supplies and not much of Atlanta was actually burned compared to what you would think
It’s what Sherman called Total war.
He called it “hard war,” and while he made war against civilian infrastructure, it was not the same as the total war of the 20th century.
What about Gen. Winfield Scott, union commander at the outset of the war. He devised the Anaconda Plan, which included a naval blockade, capturing the Mississippi, and holding the Confederates in northern Virginia while coming strong from the west. While the plan was not fully implemented, it ended up being how the war was fought, except of course for some very blood battles in northern Virginia which were unneeded under Scott's plan.
He retired early in the war, and as such he did not actually oversee that much.
@@ChristopherHueskes-kj6dt But, while ridiculed at first, his was the plan that basically worked. That's not a small thing.
The Anaconda Plan only works because Lincoln sabotaged real peace efforts which would have avoided the conflict completely, by giving his wordd to those negotiating that he would not supply Ft Sumter, which was a total lie which provoked the Southerners into war. Lincoln is responsible for 632,000 deaths
I'm glad Meade, Longstreet, E. Johnston, and Thomas got the mentioned here. Online and in certain forums, the former 3's generalship tends to get besmirched, by self-proclaimed experts. And the latter tends to be forgotten a lot of the times it seems.
Yes, Meade is really not given enough credit for what he did at Gettysburg. When the Union army in the past faced the beating they took on day 1 & 2, other Union generals would withdraw. Meade stood and fought.
Grant's genius was that he realized that it wasn't simply a question of killing more Confederate soldiers than Union soldiers in a particular battle, it was a question of killing more Confederate soldiers than the Confederacy could absorb and still exist. Once Grant was put in charge the South HAD to know they were done.
genius huh!?!??? Example: @ cold harbor union casualties were over 12,000, including 1,844 dead, 9,077 wounded, and 1,866 captured or missing of 108,000 troops. The Confederate army suffered 83 dead, 3,380 wounded, and 1,132 captured or missing out of 62,000 troops. The union casualties were all lost in under an hour. So, we can say that grant was a GENIUS, a GENIUS when it comes to BUTCHERY! The way of the BUTCHER. I can tell you are one that believes in "might proves right" in ANY situation. Next time before you make a ST00PID comment brush up on history.
Grant's blunder at Cold Harbor was bad, but no worse than Lee's catastrophic losses at Malvern Hill or Pickett's Charge.
If you want a general with no blunders on his record, you have to look to George H. Thomas.@@Rokdar1
Good to see General Thomas mentioned.....Best of All, General Grant.
Interesting Grant got fed up with Thomas's patience at Nashville and was going to relieve him but Thomas finally launched his attack before Grant could do it, and destroyed Hood's army.
Thomas is way underrated. The only commander to destroy 2 armies and never lost a battle. AS Johnston had an impossible situation defending too much with too little ordered by Davis. What difference would the troops that surrendered at Fort Donaldson have been at Shiloh
Thomas was really great on the defensive, but he was a slow starter and that is what has hurt his rep
@@JEFFREYHAUGAN Where's the evidence that Thomas was a slow starter? Other than from Sherman, who had a really bad habit of blaming other people - especially dead people who couldn't contradict him - for his own inadequacies?
@@aaronfleming9426 My evidence? History!!!! Grant, Lincoln, Sherman, Halleck all getting almost hysterical trying to get Thomas to move. If nothing else, simply look at the battle of Nashville. Shelby Foote does an excellent job laying out the facts of the case in his trilogy on the civil war amongst others.
@@JEFFREYHAUGAN History vindicates Thomas at Nashville.
Thomas was the man in Nashville observing Hood up close; he knew the situation in front of him better than any of the worry-warts back in Washington.
Grant of all people should have known better than to try to micromanage a general from a thousand miles away in Washington; he was well familiar with Halleck's meddling and had taken pains from time to time to cut Halleck out of the loop so he could operate without his distant, bureaucratic interference.
Sherman is probably most responsible for defaming Thomas, having penned the famous letter to Grant complaining: "My chief source of trouble is with the Army of the Cumberland, which is awful slow...etc."
However, please consider the analysis of Sherman's letter by Albert Castel (an actual historian, unlike novelist Shelby Foote) in his work on the Atlanta campaign, "Decision in the West" (page 285): "The exaggerations, distortions, and falsehoods in the letter should be apparent to all who have read this far. Some of them, no doubt stem from simple ignorance and honest misunderstandings. Others, however, are the product of personal prejudice and represent a craven and dishonorable attempt to forestall censure from Grant for having failed to achieve decisive results in Georgia by putting the blame on others - notably Thomas, whom he knows Grant dislikes."
Castel also demonstrates that a number of Sherman's complaints about Thomas are fabrications and flat-out lies. I cannot recommend more highly Castel's essay "Prevaricating Through Georgia" for a brief but thorough and devastating critique of Sherman's self-serving memoirs.
It's also worth noting here that Sherman is the general who repeatedly failed to deal with Hood in the first place, often by ignoring advice from Thomas that would have ended the Atlanta campaign weeks if not months earlier. Sherman is also the general who stripped Thomas of transport and cavalry mounts when he went off to burn stuff in Georgia.
In the end, Thomas attacked Hood, who was entrenched on high ground, and thrashed him to a frazzle. Thomas inflicted casualties at a 2:1 rate. Please compare Nashville with almost any battle where Grant or Sherman attacked an enemy entrenched on high ground. Chickasaw Bayou, Vicksburg, Cold Harbor, and Kennesaw Mountain would be some good starting points.
Compare the results of those battles with Thomas' battle at Nashville and you'll begin to understand why Thomas was right to take his time and do the job right...and perhaps give you a hint as to why, perhaps, Grant and Sherman were jealous of Thomas.
@@JEFFREYHAUGAN
Same with Longstreet ! 👍
Emory Upton was a great general who doesn't often see the acclaim he deserved. His groundbreaking tactics during the Civil War became the basis for American doctrine, albeit after his death.
Interesting fact, Lee’s casualty rate was higher than Grant’s; Grant’s Siege of Vicksburg is still studied today as textbook.
Wilderness Campaign?
this is a good nutshell description of the military leaders on both sides the union probably would have prevailed much sooner had they had the same quality of general officers at the war's beginning as the south did⚛😀
True.😊
Maybe. Or maybe they needed better troops.
By 1863, we just don't hear about the union forces breaking discipline and running. Not often at any rate. We heard it all the time from 1861 to 1863. By 1863, the Union had a much "harder" army of veterans who didn't flinch nearly so easily as earlier on.
That has to be factored in.
A couple of notes, 1) Jeb Stuart hadn't planned on making a raid during the build-up to Gettysburg, rather he was surprised by how quickly the Union Army began pursuing Lee and he was forced northeastward in an attempt to hook up with Lee, who was supposed to be heading for Carlisle, PA. 2) Part of the selection process in choosing Meade to replace Hooker was a direct result of Hooker once noting that a "dictator" would be the best way to end the Civil War. Lincoln, when promoting Hooker to head the Army of the Potomac, pointed out to Hooker that in order to become a dictator, he'd have to win battles. After Chancellorsville, Meade was picked primarily because he was "foreign born" and would not be a political threat to Lincoln. 3) I've always liked Phillip Sheridan and I think he was one of the better officers on the Union side. Lincoln said of him, "a short, chunky brown-skinned chap with arms long enough to scratch his ankles without having to bend over".
Meade was chosen because Reynolds turned the offer down, Howard had already had two pretty significant failures, Hancock wasn't senior enough and Sickles, although personally very brave, was a political general who kept his command because Lincoln needed the democrat support from New York; but he wasn't going to give him the army. Not sure about why Sykes (checking, it looks as if Sykes was also too junior) and Sedgwick were passed over, have to look that up again. Guess it's time to "dust off" Shelby Foote again.
I have a great great uncle who was named Grant Ulysses
A major difference between Grant and his predecessors was that when they were defeated, they retreated back to Union territory. It didn’t matter to Grant whether he won or lost (it is considered by many that he lost the Battle of the Wilderness-I won’t take a side on that question), he would advance anyway. That took the Confederates somewhat by surprise. Though they quickly adapted as well as they could, there wasn’t much they could do about someone who wouldn’t retreat. While some disparage Grant because he won with a bigger army, the fact is that he knew how to leverage that advantage, something his predecessors didn’t.
That is correct. Longstreet told Lee that Grant, whom he knew well at West Point, would fight it out thru the summer and not retreat. Grant simply rolled on no matter what the outcome of any particular battle was. He was beaten repeatedly by Lee, not just at the Wilderness but at Cold Harbor and North Anna, yet he simply gathered the army and marched on, leaving behind casualties equal to the entire Army of Northern Virginia in his wake. By that point in the war, however, the end was inevitable because of manpower and supply problems the South could not overcome. By Petersburg, Lee was losing a regiment a day to desertion.
Yes, my friend.😊
Lee was brilliant, of that there is no doubt...but he was a strategist. Grant never allowed him to develop any strategies, which demonstrates the brilliance of U. S. Grant. He never let go of Lee, which led to Lee's complete and total destruction.
Grant was aggressive ...but still a butcher.
Glad that Meade got some props
Grant was the greatest general of the Civil War and one of the best of the 19th century. He was able to work out winning tactics and strategy in a war when new technology made it very hard to win on the offensive. Not only could Grant win battles but he could put together a winning strategy and select able generals to help him carry it out.
When fighting in the west he was definitely the top dog, but in the east he lost continuously but could afford it. Lee is the overall top dog. Lee was also pretty close at the top in Mexican American war too.
@@SouthernGentleman Grant was looking at the overall strategy and Lincolns reelection. Grant was a genious for war. He won the war. Lee lost the east.
But Lee won more with less...
@@marknewton6984Yes, so did the Japs and Germans in WW2. On Iwo Jima, for example, it was 60,000 to 20,000. We were on the attack just like Grant.
Do you really believe Grant could beat Lee with even odds? Really?😮
Grant and Sherman was the best team of high-level generals since Marlborough and Prinz Eugen.
Except that Sherman kind of sucked. I mean, if you take a step back and look at his combat record, what did he accomplish before the rebellion was an exhausted shell?
@@aaronfleming9426Sherman made Georgia howl. Grant wouldn't have put him in charge of a major campaign if Grant didn't think Sherman was capable of being successful.😊 And boy, was he not successful?😮
The position of the Federal government was that Georgia was a region in rebellion, that the government wanted to bring back into the fold of national unity. Rarely has Sun Tzu's dictum been more germane: "In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good."
Rather than destroying the rebel army and political apparatus and behaving in a winsome way toward the citizens, Sherman shattered and destroyed the civilian population, leaving a swathe of destruction that led to the death by starvation and disease of an estimated 40,000 people over the next winter. The bitterness Georgians felt is understandable, and we see the damage to national unity to this very day.
When you dig into Sherman's record, you find a well-below-average combat general. Looking at his Atlanta campaign in specific, you see multiple botched opportunities to destroy the Army of Tennessee. There is a strong argument that it was frustration - born of his own incompetence - that led him to the destructive path to the sea, "shattering and destroying" as he went.
Sherman was crowned with laurels by a northern population tired of war, and there is a clear correlation between his march to the sea and the collapse of the rebellion, but there is *not* a clear causal connection. Did his march finish the rebellion...or was he merely kicking a defeated enemy when he was already essentially down for the count?
Grant was a great general. He did, however, have a penchant for politics that sometimes sidelined outstanding generals, like Francis Herron or George Thomas, in favor of his personal friends with weaker combat records.@@charlesharris3373
@@aaronfleming9426absolute revisionist crap. Sherman didn't target civilians, he targeted anything of military value.
If white civilians struggled to feed themselves it's because they never learned how. Parasites are helpless without their hosts and when Sherman liberated the slaves in Georgia..... well a wise man would have learned how to use a spade for himself
Dumb and Dumber..
Patrick cleburne, under appreciated.
True.
George Henry Thomas, a Union General, deserves more recognition.
Grunge is very good for General knowledge..
Does Sherman look Homeless?
Pretty solid list. I slightly disagree with AS Johnston being listed as “great”. At best I’d say he died too quickly, and didn’t accomplish much, or enough to allow us to judge his generalship. He was certainly aggressive, but getting himself killed in this most important of Battles was dumb.
I agree. Whatever he might have become if he had lived, his one battle was poorly planned, and he didn't seem to understand his role as commanding general.
@@aaronfleming9426 Exactly. Leading a charge on a tiny portion of his front, like a big show off, was childish. His misadventure deprived the army of leadership at a critical moment. Probably still a “loss” versus Grant, but who knows. If I were grading him, I’d give AS Johnson an-Incomplete!
Although not educated in military tactics or a true field general, Nathan Bedford Forrest was one bad man. As a northerner, I've always been fascinated by his prompt strategy, common sense, and toughness when it came to the Civil War, which had no blueprint. Yes, he was a slave owner and Grand Wizard of the KKK, but if you wanted someone in your "foxhole," he's that dude.
A real Fighter..
That's exactly what a devil worshiper would say. America is young and will prove to be the flash in the pan that it is. The earth has been inhabited for millions of years by humans .
@@marknewton6984Shame he was such a dirtbag and war criminal. A pity he and Early survived and JEB and Stonewall got killed in battle.
Well said. He struggled to cooperate with the regular army, but he was an extraordinary self-taught talent.
Overrated thug fighting on his own turf
General U.S.Grant was the steel President Abraham Lincoln backed his word with.
So was Ferdinand Ward hahaha.
I think my top would be Winfield Scott Hancock, US Grant, George Thomas, Patrick Cleburne, JEB Stuart and perhaps James Longstreet.
I'll go with Hancock and Forrest.
Gettysburg was a complete reversal of prior battles. The Union had finally found a defensible position with superb lines of communication. The Union force was deployed in an arc that permitted easy reinforcement.
Meade commanded the AOP till the end of the war. Overshadowed by Grant. On his own he and Lee maneuvered each other to a standstill. He stood up to Stanton when pushed to attack at Mine Run. It has been said Meade was not the man to win the war but definitely not the man to loose it. Meadeous Victorious
True.
Medeous mediocre...
I like Meade..not flashy, solid and of course won at Gettysburg, though Lincoln wanted him to follow Rebs and finish them off.
Lincoln did not like Meade, promoted him sideways..a military insult.
Lincoln did not like him.
Good points.
There's the perennial question is wether the more successful generals for example (Washington, Lee, Rommel) do so because the were geniuses or because they faced inferior generals. McClellan, Burnside and Hooker were hardly fearsome opponents.
Maybe good generals make other generals look bad?
hooker was a better general than grant and sherman
Congrats on including George Thomas, but any list of the best generals of that conflict lacking Forrest ...is a casual wikipedia-ish list at best.
The British military historian H. Liddell Hart considered Sherman to be the best general on either side. Sherman's strategy and tactics were "indirect", meaning he did not just smash into his opponent headlong. Rather, Sherman would maneuver his opponent out of position and only fight when he had the advantage. In this way, he was able to accomplish great things at minimal cost. In all of his campaigns - Atlanta, Savannah, Carolinas - Sherman was able to achieve his objectives and lay waste to the heart of the Confederacy without fighting any full-scale pitched battles like Gettysburg.
Albert Castel, on the other hand, soundly and repeatedly refutes Liddell Hart in "Decision In the West". One excerpt reads:
Sherman took advantage of this fact and his greater numerical strength to conduct a series of flanking moves that forced first Johnston and then Hood to relinquish otherwise impregnable positions....Yet despite the effectiveness of this modus operandi, it scarcely deserves to be hailed as an example of (to quote Liddell Hart) "strategic artistry."...Sherman ordered every one of his flanking moves with reluctance and out of sheer necessity, and he executed them without sufficient speed and force to attain maximum results. What Joseph Miller...said about Sherman's conduct of operations in mid June applies to the whole campaign and comes much closer to the truth than such superficial eulogies as Liddell Hart's: "Sherman has not made a single successful move but what common sense would have dictated under the circumstances."
Also interesting is Castel's destruction of Liddell Hart's excuse for Sherman's failure at Snake Creek Gap.
Grant was the greatest Union General by far!!
a good assessment - IMO
I miss Monument Avenue!
Good overview on the key generals of the Civil War. A Teenager’s Guide on the Civil War: A History Book for Teens gives an overview history of the Civil War for teens.
Take a shot every time he says “Calvary” instead of “cavalry”.
I would probably die of alcohol poisoning.
😂 I noticed that, too.
Oh balderdash, he knows the difference and listen to him closely
*Nathan Bedford Forrest* - The Confederate Batman in Sherman's nightmares when he sleeps at night.
The man too angry to be captured.
Didn't Sherman put a bounty on his head?
Get there firstest with the mostest
Afterwards he led A GROUP OF RACIST P******S who WORE MASKS AND BURNED CROSSES!!!
Absolutely not. Name one battle he fought in that affected the outcome of the war.
Nothing he did even delayed the result of the war by even a day.
Strange, I do not recall Thomas being mentioned in the Smithsonian's Documentaries 'Great Battles of the Civil War'.
One thing you did not point out about Joseph Johnston was that he was wounded in action in the Peninsula Campaign, leading Jefferson Davis to appoint Robert E. Lee to take his place. Another thing about Johnston was that Davis had to recall him to duty in 1865 to halt William Sherman's advance in North Carolina. Piecing together an army with the few troops left outside of Virginia, he managed to slow down Sherman - just as he had the previous summer.
He slowed down the inevitable, the defeat of the Confederacy.😊
Patrick Cleburne was far superior to Meade or Albert S. Johnston, one of the finest division commanders of the war. Beat Sherman at Tunnel Hill, despite being outnumbered 4 to 1. He deserved a mention. Same with Nathan B. Forrest, one of the best generals in American history. So good German General Rommel was once asked where he learned his strategy and he named Forrest.
I want Forrest on my side!
Cleburne and Forrest both definitely deserve to be ranked higher than A.S. Johnston or Sherman, neither of whom deserve to be anywhere near this list.
That said, Meade was also an outstanding division commander...that's how he rose to corps command, and then army command. There's really no basis to say Cleburne was better, let alone "far superior".
I am surprised to not find A.P. Hill on this list.
Just one thing: Calvary and cavalry are not the same thing. Otherwise, it's a great video.
1) Sherman.... and that's about it. He also lead the finest army the US has produced.
Sherman has a worse combat record than anyone else on that list. The army he led was built by others, and he fought it poorly. Failing to pin down and destroy Hood's army in Georgia, Sherman wandered off to burn things while other generals did the fighting.
@@aaronfleming9426 How's things going for you in Atlanta?
@@aaronfleming9426 Sherman _deliberately_ did not follow Hood north. He beat the better Joe Johnston when the latter was running the same troops. It was Johnston, not Hood that Sherman had to outmaneuver and it was Johston that kept Sherman at bay.
But, Sherman knew Hood was over aggressive and knew that Thomas would take him out when Hood went north.
Which, in fact, happened. That's not failing to engage -- that is realizing that the enemy had dangled a prize in front of him with their own mistaken ideas.
Hood left Georgia defenseless as he and Davis had this (wrong) idea that they could force Sherman to chase him.
When people talk about Sherman, they entirely forget that Hood effectively quit the battlefield in a vain attempt to draw Sherman out. Meanwhile, Hood depleted his own army uselessly against Thomas.
Grant, in his memoirs, talked well of Joe Johnston and disparagingly about Hood.
@@curious968I *deliberately* don't play Scrabble with my brother. Why? Because I've tried half a dozen times and I suck at the game. So when he plays Scrabble, I go off and play something different.
Pretty much the same thing with Sherman: he knew he sucked at battle, so he went off to destroy undefended stuff while the real fighters took care of the enemy army.
@@Davemurray2880isaindian Funny story, I live in Iowa, a good stout Union state that had many regiments that marched in Sherman's Army of the Tennessee. But facts are facts - Sherman's combat record sucks.
Meade's success at Gettysburg was due less to his generalship than Lee's ineptness. The Confederates should have just flanked him, and fought a pitched battle later on more even ground. The most underrated Union general is John A. Logan. There is a book called "Nothing But Victory" which pretty much sums up his career. But Logan was not a West Pointer, and was disliked by both Sherman and Thomas - probably because both they and the army realized that Logan was a better general.
And how do you propose that Lee would have "just flanked him"? By what roads would they have marched? By what means would they have kept Meade from using his interior lines of communication and superior logistics to intercept them? What cavalry would Lee have used to screen his own advance and scout the Union positions?
@@aaronfleming9426The North was actually not that superior to Lee's army, that is a very absurd and biased belief, they were more equal than popularly believed.
One General of the Civil War NOT mentioned (and for good reason, disqualified) for consideration for being one of the Best Generals of the Civil War was Sam Houston. Houston sought to keep Texas out of the Civil War because he foresaw the outcome. Houston couldn't prevent Secession, bud did seek to steer Texas out of the Confederacy., possibly reverting to the old Republic of Texas or even rejoining Mexico. His credential of being one of the few Generals who had defeated Santa Anna was one that only one or two others could put on their resume.
Houston was tough. Too bad he never met Forrest...
1. It sounds as though you talk about "Calvary" units and generals. The military unit/general is "Cavalry." "Calvary" is a hill in the Middle East. The way I remember to pronounce the word correctly is that the nickname for "Cavalry" is "Cav." "Go Cav!" is a motivational exclamation of U.S. Cavalry soldiers.
2. You commented correctly that the Union army was tired after the Battle of Gettysburg. But so was the Confederate army. Then it started raining. If Meade has pursued Lee, he would have trapped the Army of Northern Virginia against the swollen Potomac River, and forced them to surrender. The was would have been over.
3. Have you never heard of Nathan Bedford Forrest?
Please learn the distinction between Calvary and cavalry.
I know it may seem like a tedious complaint, but as a lifelong student of history it drives me CRAZY when I hear people (who should know better) refer to military equine units as "calvary" instead of CAVALRY! And this guy does it several times!! 🤬
Interesting anecdote...I was complaining about this to my 18 year old daughter, who is mildly dyslexic and needed speech therapy when she was younger to learn how to say L's and R's. I kept saying "It's CAVALRY, not CALVARY," and she finally spoke up and said, "I can't hear a difference between the two words". Makes me wonder if that's common for dyslexic folks?
@@aaronfleming9426 An interesting theory, but I hear this mistake so very often I feel it must be more a matter of simple carelessness.
@@pcbacklash_3261 Between carelessness, ignorance, and dislexia, it certainly does fill UA-cam with annoying mispronunciations :(
Why isn't Fitzjohn Porter on this list? He fought Lee to a draw at Gaines Mill, successfully retreated through a series of swamps over the next five days, and then beat Lee like a rented mule at Malvern Hill.
The story of the Union victory is pretty much the story of Grant rising through the ranks.
I believe the Civil War was a study into strategy matched against tactics. Sure, Bull Run, the Seven
Days, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville and other battles may have been southern victories, they ultimately had little military effect because the Union could replace its losses both in manpower and equipment, while the Confederacy could not. Even victory came at an awful cost.
But more than that, it was a case of poor leadership in the Union as much as it was skill on part of the south. Some say it was luck, but in truth, for all their brilliance, once the Confederate generals met a capable opponent, like Grant and Sherman, the war began to turn steadily against them.
Besides that, there was a disagreement among the south as to what its overall objective should be. Many argued the war should be purely defensive. However, this was viewed as cowardly and so the Confederates attempted to bring the war to the Union.
Twice, Lee attempted to invade the North, both times ended in retreat with heavy casualties.
And then there's the civilian contribution to consider. The attempt to coerce European intervention through Cotton Diplomacy was a dismal failure, depriving both its people and its military much needed gold and provisions from British and French imports, and that was before the Union blockade was put in place.
How about Joshua Chamberlain, he saved the second day of battle at Gettysburg. He was a great general
Sherman was not controversial. He has a more honest view of what war was really unlike anyone else on this list. He was respected in the South until the 1880s when the "lost cause" southerners made him a scapegoat. As for the Indian wars, he left the treaties to politicians. Who did most of the dirty work was Phillip Sheridan yet this article does not mention this in his section.
Why Sherman?
Mental breakdown in Kentucky
Surprised at Shiloh
Repulsed at Chickasaw Bluffs
Opposed the Vicksburg maneuver
Repulsed at Kennesaw and polks mill
Allowed the Resaca maneuver to fail
Failed to destroy Hardee's Corps at Jonesboro in favor of tearing up Railroads
Surprised again in the battles for Atlanta and allowed subordinated to fight all three battles.
He was lucky to have Grant as a friend, a senator as stepfather, and to serve far from the eastern media centers.
Great comment. We could add: repulsed at Chattanooga, and was lucky to have a brother as a senator as well.
@aaronfleming9426 Right! Forgot to list the worst failure of all. Given half the army to make the decisive attack, he flubbed it, and Grant was saved by Thomas and (of all people) Hooker.
@@AnthonyGentile-z2g Honestly when I first saw your list I thought I was looking at one of my own posts and had to check your name! Glad to meet a fellow you-tube comment lurker who sees the truth about Sherman!
It's a matter of perspective. To people in the South, Sherman was the devil incarnate, Lincoln was a tyrant and Grant was a beast!
AS Johnston shouldn't be on the list. He had almost no battle record to draw conclusions from before Shiloh, where he was killed. And Nathan Bedford Forrest should be on this list. Though his generalship came late in the war, his record of victories is impeccable.
Couldn't agree more. Well said.
I once read about why Sherman was never too concerned about Nathan Forrest. Sherman claimed that Forrest had made his reputation off of attacking outposts of little importance with superior number and needed help when dealing with a better foe. In other words, to Sherman, Forrest meant nothing.
Interesting if true. Sherman had an interesting habit of ignoring certain foes. He didn't pursue Hood, either.
He deserves more credit for keeping his eye on the prize and not wandering off to fight battles someone else was going to win.
@@curious968 I'd argue that Sherman was unable to defeat the foes in front of him, so he wandered off to burn things while someone else fought the battles.
If you can forget for just a moment that Sherman is celebrated as a great general, and start analyzing him by his actual performances, you may end up with a surprisingly dim view of his generalship.
Forrest would eat Sherman for breakfast..
then spit him out!😮
The exclusion of Patrick Cleburne from this list is inexcusable.
This list is missing A. P. Hill
Hill is underrated😮!
@@marknewton6984 He is not underestimated, he was actually a very bad general.
Have you not heard of Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest? Many feel, the greatest cavalry commander of all times.
Grunge please do a video on Mary Kay Bergman 😢❤
It's Cavalry, not Calvary.
Missing from this list: Forrest, Upton, Rosecrans, Wilder, Cleburne
Shouldn't be on the list: Joseph Johnston and Sherman.
Joe Johnston was ineffective.
Sherman's only significant achievement was using his massive army to chase off Joe Johnston and making war on noncombatants - in the South first and later in the Plains. Sherman never led a successful assault. His foolishness at Shiloh, Chickasaw Bayou, Meridian, and Chattanooga got a lot of men killed for no good reason. Grant's success and friendship is why Sherman kept his job.
Joe Johnston certainly belongs. He achieved all that was possible to achieve against Sherman. In fact, Lee was using essentially the same tactics by then, so if Lee is great, so was Joe Johnston.
He suffers because Davis and Bell Hood had this delusion that they could go on offense. You can read up on what Hood did with Johnston's army. It isn't pretty.
By contrast, Johnston was fighting the only way that had any chance of winning. Keep the biggest army you can in the field, wear down northern morale. Don't throw away men on stupid assaults that the union shrugs off even if you win.
Sherman gets credit for realizing the Hood was going to go get destroyed by Thomas. He was supposed to chase north after Hood.
Living without supply lines is not something to sneeze at either. His army might have been starved out had his foraging not worked for any reason.
Rosecrans wouldn't make the list because of his disastrous error at Chickamauga. He seems to have been a good general before that (and the misplacement was something of an accident due to bad intelligence), but the error hurt his reputation.
Outstanding comment, thank you! He had other blunders we could add to the list, but you nailed the essence of it!
Jackson not defensive? at 2nd Manassas, he held the Union off for two days, while Longstreet dithered, finally moved on day 3, and you credit him with the victory?
Unconditional Surrender Grant🔥
I wish that Generals Lee and Jackson had studied the teachings of Sun Tzu.
In war, numbers alone confer no advantage. - Sun Tzu
Sherman was possibly the first modern general. A strategic thinker who realized that armies are reliant on their civilian support.
Sherman is possibly the most overrated general of the war. "Armies are reliant on their civilian support" is not a modern realization, it's a concept as old as warfare. What Sherman did was he abandoned the idea of reconciliation and decided to go with punitive warfare, which proved to be cathartic for a war-weary northern public. Otherwise he'd be remembered as a chronic bumbler.
@@aaronfleming9426 You write crap, Sherman was a great General.
@@localkiwi9988 A great general who so vastly overestimated enemy strength in Kentucky that he had a nervous breakdown and had to leave the army...
A great general who ignored all signs of the enemy advancing on his position at Shiloh and nearly got his army destroyed...
A great general who got clobbered at Chickasaw Bayou...
A great general who thought Grant's plan for invading Mississippi wouldn't work...
A great general who utterly failed to achieve his objectives at Chattanooga...
A great general who missed at least four opportunities to crush the enemy during the Atlanta campaign...
A great general who ordered the insane attack at Kennesaw Mountain...
A great general who took four months to travel 100 miles to capture Atlanta...
So what was Sherman good at? Umm...marching unopposed through enemy territory and burning stuff...okay, sounds like a cool guy I guess.
@@aaronfleming9426 General Lee quoting on Sherman.
1, General Sherman was the most successful general of Union Generals.
2, As a strategist and military commander, Sherman showed the highest order of a military genius.
Certainaly puts your crap comments in the bin. Go back and do some study and you might learn something.
@@localkiwi9988 I just got done reading Albert Castel's "Decision In the West". Maybe you should read it, and you might learn something.
Also, every one of the things that I noted in my "crap comments" is a historical fact. Your response to facts was to offer up the opinion of Robert E. Lee, a man widely noted for being extremely courteous and polite. Also, Sherman had just beaten Lee in a war, so Lee was hardly going to be slamming Sherman, was he?
So how about if you try telling me about some of the things Sherman did that were so brilliant. Maybe respond to some of Castel's comments from his conclusion:
"Although Sherman's campaign achieved a decisive strategic-political result, from a strictly military standpoint it was incloncusive....Again and again, from Dalton to Lovejoy's Station, he overlooked, ignored, and even rejected opportunities to crush or fatally cripple the Confederate forces in Georgia or at the very least drive them from the state. Never once, moreover, did he engage or even try to engage the enemy with his full available strength; frequently he assumed that the Rebels were retreating when they were not, or he wishfully thought they would do other than what they did; and too often he wasted time in operations that either were obviously futile or patently unnecessary. One must conclude that while Sherman by 1864 had learned to control his fear of what the enemy might be up to, he had not mastered it, and that his preference for a war of maneuvering and raiding derived, not from a considered military philosophy, but rather from a deep-seated fear of the consequences of trusting to what he rightly called 'the fickle fortunes of battle'. He was, in short, a general who did not like to fight. Had Thomas' personal relationship with Grant permitted him to command in Georgia in 1863, almost surely the Union victory would have been easier, quicker, and more complete."
General Winfield Scott Hancock? He also was a great civil war general.
Alber Sydney Johnston? Seriously? Didn't even last halfway through his first battle. Died acting like a brigade commander when he should have been trying to coordinate his whole army.
Hornets nest he took a ball in the back of his knee, didnt even notice till he fell of his horse, blacked out from loss of blood, femoral artery
Your assessment of Butler as a military governor is remedial. The ‘ladies’ of New Orleans needed courses in obedience. Unless you think ‘lady’ like things such as dumping chamber pots on soldiers is acceptable behavior? His big punishment? “If you ‘ladies’ want to act as ill mannered street walkers, we will treat you as such.” Let’s all clutch our pearls and gasp. What’s next? Was Frederick Douglas awful because klansmen thought he uppity? Consider your sources better. Yeah, he left a lot to be desired as a military commander, but he was the best man to keep New Orleans at heel. A politician was a perfect choice.
Oh jeez.
Worked out really well, didn't it? 😅
Why does everyone want to live in the South now?
@@marknewton6984
Free mosquito burgers and southern belles.
@@marknewton6984lol. There is more people in New York City than Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana combined.
And they can stay in NY.
Without General Nathan Bedford Forrest this list is null and void. You can hate him for what happened at Fort Pillow but you can't deny his brilliance as a Calvary officer.
@ronjames7953. That is, until he met Union Major General James Harrison Wilson, who "whipped" Forrest twice.
Forrest was tough.
I would assume if you are talking about great generals it is because of their accomplishments. If you look at Forrest what battle did he fight that affected the outcome of the war. I would say not one.
His best victory Brice’s crossroads didn’t have strategic results. Within two weeks another army was after him.
So his big claim is that he was annoying.
If you look at his other battles he gets less results.
When he does fight with the main army. He fights as rearguard at Nashville
And barely holds off Wilson.
He fights during the Chickamauga campaign and his performance is not good. (Read failure in the saddle by Powell)
Not saying Forrest is a bad general but to rank him as the best he has to earn with an accomplishment and I don’t see it.
@@liberalman8319 As a black Union supporter, I say, his slave trading and KKK involvement are all you really need to know about him. (Screw any reformation that his fans claim as he sought post war political ascension). He was uneducated and never trained for war; but like you said, he was a serious annoyance. His raids and tactics were a serious pain in the ass. He didn't seem to get the respect of the upper field generals because of his lack of education, but he was a really good soldier. He had a natural talent for when and where to strike, unlike some generals on both sides of the War who were often timid and quick to retreat. He was a general in title, but actually more of a major. He took orders; he didn't give them. He was feared by both sides.
Slave trading, Ft. Pillow, and the KKK are enough to dislike him; but he was one bad ass when it came to war.
Thomas was maddeningly slow and bordered on the insubordinate at times, but would only attack when he was ready.
He utterly destroyed the Army of the Tennessee at Nashville.
It was extremely difficult to destroy an army in the field. Lee could not do it in ANY of his battles-Chancellorsville included.
The only people "maddened" by Thomas' "slowness" were Grant and Sherman, who were jealous of him. If you want to talk about slow, talk about Sherman's Atlanta campaign. It not only took him four months to move a hundred miles, he repeatedly botched opportunities to cripple or destroy the Army of Tennessee...and he usually botched it by ignoring Thomas' advice.
This is a good list. What about Hooker, Hancock, Forrest, Cleburne, etc?
And "the Gallant Pelham"?
What about them? They lost the war. That is what about them.😊
@@charlesharris3373do you even know who those generals are?
Forrest? 🤣 Minor player.
"War is Hell".
When it looked the Civil War was going to start up Lee was offered the top General's position in the North.
Meade won Gettysburg and he won the battle. He was ordered by Lincoln to pursue the fleeing confederate army of which he didn't do.
It's been debated as to if that was the right decision or not.
Lee said the mistakes at Gettysburg was completely his fault.
Sherman's march is still thought of how horrendous it was to this day in the South.
Lee was not offered the top position. Scott already had the top position. What Lee was wanted for was his engineering skills. More than likely to prepare the defenses of Washington D.C. What was Lee's first job for the CSA? Constructing the defenses of Richmond. There were Generals in the U.S. Army that had seniority to Lee. Lee was a newly appointed Colonel, there were 12 other Colonels with seniority above him. No, they were not going to jump him over other senior commanders. especially when there was a shortage of commanders you don't want to piss off when building an army.
Calvary is a hill in the holy land. Oh, and you must know better than G❤en. Lee’s assessment of Nathan Bedford Forrest.
I've visited the grave of Gen'l Sherman whom I believe was the greatest US general ever. He lived off the land with a major army, something nobody else has been able to do. He was respected by all, including his enemies. Offered the total command of the Union Army he said no, he was loyal to his good friend Gen'l Grant. At his funeral CSA Gen'l Johnston walked behind his casket on a cold rainy day without a hat. People asked him to wear a head covering he refused saying if I was in that casket Sherman would be here without a hat. He caught cold and died 2 days later.
Sherman also lost some battles, Bull run and battle of north carolina
although honestly he was the man the north needed
On the contrary: Sherman was a fourth-rate general. Better than Benjamin Butler or N.P. Banks, but well below many others. Consider a brief overview:
1. Did fine as a brigade commander at Bull Run
2. Promoted to command of Kentucky, he panicked, had a nervous breakdown, and sat out the action while cooler heads like Thomas and Grant crushed the rebel plans for Kentucky.
3. Back in command of a division at Shilah, Sherman ignored repeated warnings that an enormous enemy force was almost upon him. His stupidity nearly cost the Union the battle, and though he fought well once he realized what was going on, he was no better than others, like McClernand and Prentiss.
4. Next emerges as the loser of the Chickasaw Bayou debacle.
5. Far from being a brilliant visionary who realized an army could live off the land, he opposed Grant's strategy for the Vicksburg campaign. As a result, Grant had him bring up the rear of the army while McPherson and McClernand's corps did the heavy fighting at Port Gibson, Raymond, Champion Hill, and Big Black River Bridge.
6. Outperformed by McClernand again in the assaults at Vicksburg.
7. Burned stuff on his Meridian campaign, but otherwise failed all his strategic objectives.
8. Grant set up the whole battle of Missionary Ridge to give Sherman a chance to win battlefield glory, but Sherman failed while the "slow" Thomas and the "timid" Army of the Cumberland wiped Bragg's army off the ridge.
9. Bungled so badly at Snake Creek Gap that even he recognized a "once in a career opportunity" had been missed...although he predictably blamed McPherson.
10. Failed to trap Johnston at Resaca, failing even to put interdicting artillery fire on the bridges Johnston used to escape.
11. Ignored Thomas' advice to outflank Johnston at Kennesaw Mountain, opting instead for the bloody frontal assaults.
12. Failed to pursue Hood after beating him at Jonesboro, allowing Hood to escape and rebuild his army.
13. Failed to catch Hood and bring him to battle once Hood moved north of Atlanta again.
As a Georgian i hate him. As a military historian, I have great respect for Sherman.
You seem to say that Albert Sydney Johnston was a good general. I can't think of anything he did right. Left handed support to Fort Donelson. He let Beauregard make the plan for Shiloh and then got involved in leading attacks when he should have been in command of the army. A pitiful performance.
Well said and exactly on point.
Stuart followed his orders during Gettysburg, and Nathan Bedford Forrest was a much better general anyway. Albert Sidney Johnston was not much of a general mostly lived on his pre-war laurels.
Forrest was toughest. Don't mess with him!😅
Well said.
No talk of General Winfield Scott Hancock ? Proven fighting general 🙌🏾💪🏾🙏💔🙌🏾👏🏿❤️🇺🇸
Hancock did more at Gettysburg than Meade.
Damn straight he did!!
General N.B.Forrest to not be included here is a disgrace.
Kinda sorry Prince John Magruder didn't get a mention
Leaving out Forrest?
Damn right, he was a minor player.
Meade was one of the worst Generals. He rarely got out of his headquarters, which was blown up by the Confederate cannons. It was Meade's officers that saved him.
Lincoln did not like Meade.😮
On the reb side Nathan Bedford Forrest was the best fighting general the south had.You may hate but read about this God of war.
Nathan Forrest? Has he been demoted by present historians?
Sherman, a great general, a symbol of the deep America !
Robert E. Lee
a pathetic general
The tide of the war destroyed "good generals" and made midgets into giants ,,, (I'm thinking of Custer).
Good fortune and great timing, along with manpower and logistics can make even lesser men seem great.
What a tragedy. The whole affair.
Nathan Bedford Forrest was a midget.
A tragedy indeed. To think that the whole thing started because people believed they had the right to own other humans.
Grant, only because he had almost unlimited resources due to the North's superior industrial capabilities and larger population.
Nonsense. He was a strategic, logistical, and operational genius. He made his subordinates better (most of the time) and did outstanding staff work. He understood the political exigencies of the war. While not a tactical innovator in terms of infantry combat, he saw the possibilities of combined arms operations and developed excellent rapport with naval officers, which led to close coordination and a good deal of success. He had complete mastery of his own fears and was able to move swiftly and decisively.
Now, would he have been able to win without the industrial and manpower advantages? Probably not. Those advantages were necessary to offset the enormous advantages the rebels had in other areas. But leveraging advantages to offset other disadvantages is precisely what makes an excellent general.
Contrast Grant with Lee, who did not have the strategic capacity to understand and leverage his own advantages.
In all fairness, Grant had Lincoln to work with, while Lee was stuck with Davis and the dysfunctional Confederate political system. While Lincoln made his fair share of mistakes, he was objectively a superior commander in chief, working with a superior political system. Would Lee have been able to win if he were in Grant's place? Quite likely.
What you say isn't untrue. However, the way that Grant just kept charging ahead BECAUSE he had almost unlimited resources is what allowed the north to win. If he didn't have those resources and tried to keep attacking after the losses the north took, he would have exhausted what resources he had. Other commanders, when suffered a defeat, did not understand the resources they had, that's true, and they retreated. Grant understood what he had and used them brilliantly (also thanks to Lincoln's support: "I can't afford to lose Grant; he fights."). Someone, I forget who, once said that Grant had the look of someone who had made up his mind to drive his head through a brick wall and was about to do it. By stating that Lee could have won had he been in Grant's place only confirms my statement about Grant: "only because he had almost unlimited resources". Had Grant been on the Southern side and "butchered" as many men as he lost in battle, he likely would have been relieved of command, like Hood was at Atlanta. Lee was brilliant and the South had the far superior commanders, with a few exceptions. What is amazing is that the South was able to drag the war out for four years and damned near gained the support of foreign countries, and likely would have if Gettysburg had been a victory, which might have ensured the South's victory. Interesting conversation. @@aaronfleming9426
But Lee did butcher his own men, and at a higher percentage rate than Grant did. Malvern Hill, Antietam, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg were all bloodbaths, and all the worse for being poorly chosen times and/or places to fight a pitched battle.
Lee certainly had some outstanding traits, but overall he did not understand the war he was fighting, from a strategic perspective. Jefferson Davis did little or nothing to help strategically, but Lee was the highest ranking general in the Confederacy, had Davis' full trust, and was the most popular man in the Confederacy. He was not able to leverage those factors into a successful strategy.
It's not so amazing that the rebels held out as long as they did. They started with several strong advantages, including the fact that the U.S. Army was about 12,000 strong at the beginning of the war, and a whole army would have to be built from scratch to invade, subdue, and hold a vast land area - a land area larger than had been conquered since the time of Ghengis Khan.
Grant's victories in the West were based on speed and maneuver, not bludgeoning his way forward despite heavy casualties. He was caught unawares at Shiloh, a near-fatal blunder to be sure, though his largest mistake there was trusting Sherman's judgement that the enemy was nearby - I have almost nothing positive to say about Sherman.@@Paul-ju5px
Lee lost a whole lot of men in battles that he could not afford to fight, and Grant knew it. Grant pulled a fast one on Lee after Cold Harbor and maneuvered Lee into the Siege of Petersburg. But to be honest, if Grants field commanders hadn’t fumbled on those first few days at Petersburg, Grant would have captured Petersburg and Richmond and bagged most of the Confederate government before Lee would have known what just happened.
@@ChristopherHueskes-kj6dt Agreed. Grant moved ahead fast after a defeat when commanders before him had always retreated. Little Mac was a great organizer, but not a fighter, always wanting more men, more supplies, more artillery, etc. When it came to fighting he overestimated the enemy's strength and miscalculated their position. He would have done well as an assistant to Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs. Grant's forward movements, rather than withdrawing, caught the south off guard because they expected the same from him. In reading about the war, especially Foote's narrative trilogy, it is maddening when Grant's subordinates seemed to drag their feet when they had victory in their grasp, particularly at Petersburg. The overcautious field commanders gave Lee the time to dig in and drag the war out for another year. Regarding Sherman, he did make Georgia howl, he moved fast, and The Army of The Tennessee was instrumental in preventing reinforcements from being sent to Lee. Stuart screwed up by absenting his cavalry when Lee needed him most, blinding Lee for days as he entered PA. The fast actions of Union commanders secured the better ground at Gettysburg, which forced Lee to fight an uphill battle (literally) from the start. One of the few times the Union moved fast when it was crucial to do so. Had Lee withdrawn sooner, rather than smash a large portion of his army during Pickett's charge on Cemetery Ridge, he would have had those men available for what lay ahead.
union was fighting for central bankers, but had no clue their cause was shared by London financiers !
What happened to Nathan Bedford Forest ?
A brilliant and tough fighter.
R.I.Hell!!!
@@freddy8479Who would win: Forrest or Sherman?
he started KKK not really politically correct
He was a raider with 7,000 soldiers at most. He didn't command effectively over that number. A Chickamauga he failed.
PLEASE! “Calvary” is the hill where Jesus was crucified. “Cavalry” refers to soldiers mounted on horses.
I find that annoying too, but here's an interesting anecdote: I was recently complaining about that pronunciation to my daughter, a very bright girl but who has dyslexia and had a speech impediment as a child. Here's the thing...*she can't hear the difference between the two words!*
It makes me wonder if other dyslexic folk have trouble differentiating between cavalry and calvary???
Lee was bad. Period. He had no idea of strategy, did not coordinate with other confederate armies, and sucked at logistics. Also, he's battle plans were obsolete, and squandered lives usually. The confederacy needed to fight a defensive war, protecting their interior lines. Lee misjudged this, and kept trying to fight a decisive battle and destroy the A of P. He had no chance to do this. And after losing tens of thousands of men, while also starving them, he stupidly held on, until his army was destroyed by casualties and desertions. He won a couple of high risk ventures against incompetent Generals, but his tactics, poor logistics, and lack of any strategic plan doomed him when General Grant, who understood all these things, faced him. On top of this he was a cruel slave owner, and he betrayed his oath as an officer of the United States Army. Every true American should despise him.
He was brilliant at Chancellorsville
@@brentinnes5151 Chancellorville was a pyrrhic victory. A complete waiste of Southern men and resources that could never be replaced.
As a young man, I admired Lee as a general. It took a long time for me to figure out that he was a traitor to the United States, first and foremost and should forever be reviled.
Where is Nathan Bedford Forest & John Buford ????😠
Forrest is small potatoes. Commanding only 7,000 troops at the most as a raider doesn't register against the commanders of Armies.
@@scottgoens7575
Thank You for making my point !
The damage he wrought with such a small force was incredible.
@@tedszweb5268 LMAO, it doesn't make your point! 🤣 On the contrary he was such a minor player in the war that changed nothing of the mighty Armies commanded by his superiors. Everyone that made the list dwarf's his accomplishments and his failures of plenty.
Cavalry….not Calvary
Forrest and Richard Taylor should be on the list.
Both.
Forrest 🤣 Minor player.
Samuel Curtis, Patrick Cleburne, Nathan Forrest, Richard Taylor, and James Blunt, all deserve to be higher on this list than A.S. Johnston and Sherman.
Forrest 🤣 Minor player.
@@scottgoens7575 A lot less minor than AS Johnston.
The American Civil Jihad had a fair share of great generals from both sides
😂😂😂😂 what?
Sherman did what they wanted him to do but he was severe sadistic and crushing. No southerner likes the bum
He was a pretty lousy combat general too. Probably went on the rampage of destruction because he couldn't catch, let alone destroy, Hood's army.
My mother, born in 1918, hated Sherman and didn't mind telling me about it. She grew up in Yazoo, Mississippi in the 1920s and probably listened to Civil War vets talk of Sherman's harsh war tactics on civilians.
@@snocamo154 Your mom was correct. He was an SOB what he did to the south! He came through my town on his way to Atlanta and left devastation in his wake.
Sherman looks homeless.
The Persians had numerical superiority against Alexander the great but they lost to him. So I guess Lee wasn't the genius general that everyone claims that he is.