re: The Will of a Southerner to a roaring Confederacy victory - The Battle of Chancellorsville

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Both were about self determination.

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Self determination to own other people?

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Then the foundation of the United States was founded by traitors. Why was the American Revolution justified when the Southern revolution was not? Both were about self determination.

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A tactician truly ahead of his time.

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I swear you people have never studied the period. You just parrot what someone told you and never bother to do any of your own research. Robert E. Lee's tactics were no different than those of Napoleon some 50 years earlier. There was nothing "ahead of his time" about Robert E. Lee. He was schooled in Napoleonic warfare, which preached offense, and was more than likely going to come straight at you with a good, old-fashioned frontal assault. He hit McClellan straight on at Beaver Dam Creek, Gaines' Mill, and Malvern Hill during the Seven Days Campaign. He also used frontal assaults on the third day of the Battle of Chancellorsville and days two and three at the Battle of Gettysburg. His final major attack of the Civil War on the second day of the Battle of the Wilderness was also a frontal assault on Union positions along the Brock Road. His most lopsided victory (the Battle of Fredericksburg) was a defensive victory in which his army entrenched on high ground and slaughtered wave after wave of suicidal attacks across open ground. There was hardly anything "ahead of his time" about that battle either.

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This is an asinine term to describe the men who fought for the Confederacy. Your average Confederate soldier grew up on rural, isolated farmland. They would have had zero concept or interaction with any federal installation or agency save maybe the mail. In my area, the nearest federal building would have been the courthouse in Florence, which was 45 miles away. The very concept of a unified, centralized United States was alien to them. Of course they'd fight for their states over some foreign notion of Union with people they'd never met and places they'd never been.

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Exactly. Social media boys try to look at the civil war through a 21st century lens.

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They'd still be tearing down his statues as I type.

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Agree.

Last summer the idiots in Madison destroyed a statue of an abolitionist who died fighting for the Union.

I believe he was referring to the North in that slavery really wasn't the main issue. The average Northerner was by no means an abolitionist. In fact, there were numbers of Federals who left the ranks after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued.

They sure didn't take a beating at Fredericksburg, not really as late as Cold Harbor. Grant was basically a butcher he was prepared to lose as many as it took. It doesn't take being a great general when you don't care how many lives you spend. The strategy was win at all costs. The cost was an estimated 1.5 million casualties all told.

It took a whole lot of Yankees too. And Johnny Rebs. Lincoln and Grant have blood on their hands .

To anyone wanting reparations, go to Hell. That debt has been paid, in blood, suffering, and treasure.

The Civil War was not about slavery, for one very simple reason.

Slaves were freely traded. You want the slaves to be free? Pay the people who bought them, legally, and then free them yourself. This is what happened in Britain.

That's not the Yankee way. The Yankee never met a problem he didn't think he could solve with his big war machine.

I'm not sure he's ever actually been right about this, though. The blacks are still poor and downtrodden, the Afghani highlands are still full of pedophiles and smack, the Serbs still hate the Bosniaks, etc.

Whatever it would have cost to free the slaves, the Yankee gladly spent 10 times that on rifles and cannons. That's what the Civil War was about: the Yankee and his ways.

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Grant was basically a butcher he was prepared to lose as many as it took. It doesn't take being a great general when you don't care how many lives you spend. The strategy was win at all costs. The cost was an estimated 1.5 million casualties all told.

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It’s crazy that wartime and election propaganda from 150 years ago is still recited today. Grant wasn’t a “butcher” who didn’t care about his troops, he just understood what it took to win what was a modern war at the time. He used the resources he was given to win the war the most efficient and quickly he could. This reputation as a “butcher” pretty much comes from Shiloh, there were several battles he commanded where confederate casualties were higher, and percentage wise they were almost always higher.

I think it’s hilarious he gets labeled as a bad or uncaring general just because he had more troops and was in enemy territory, large invading armies almost always have higher casualties than the defenders