re: George Meade took command of the Army of the Potomac on this day in 1863...

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I have long believed that the US Civil War was waged in an exceedingly amateur fashion on both sides because neither side had anything other than amateur-level military leaders. For the most part, IMHO, none of these guys really knew what they were doing - they were most often "winging it", and the haphazard and disorganized manner in which most of these battles were fought bears this out.

I realize that these Leaders all went to West Point, but, West Point obviously did not create the kind of combat leaders needed for that period of military history. These Leaders were "professionals" by the standard of what West Point could produce, but, compared to what the military problems of the day presented to them, these Leaders acted the majority of the time as an amateur might.

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I think this is way too harsh.

West Point's curriculum was heavy on engineering, mathematics, and small-unit tactics, not generalship at scale. And that's actually the rub: it trained company and battalion-level tactics for a Napoleonic-era army of fewer than 16,000 men, then turned these men loose commanding forces of 100,000 or more. The "haphazard" battles you're seeing are partly the predictable result of that scaling problem, not evidence nobody knew what they were doing. Irvin McDowell was a major in April 1861, a career staff officer with no command experience at all. By the end of May he was a brigadier general in charge of the largest army the United States had ever fielded up to that point. Obviously there is going to be a learning curve.

The "disorganization" itself is mostly a technology problem, not a competence problem. Rifled muskets had tripled effective infantry range, making the close-order assault tactics everyone was trained in suddenly suicidal. No army on earth had solved that yet and the same deadlock reappeared a half century later in the First World War with far less excuse. That's friction and fog of war, intrinsic to battle, not amateurism.

And "winging it" can't explain Grant's Vicksburg campaign, Jackson's Valley campaign, Lee's Chancellorsville campaign, or the leap from the shambles of First Bull Run to Grant coordinating multiple armies across a thousand-mile front by telegraph in 1864–65. That trajectory, from chaos to coordination, is what professionalization under fire looks like, not a flat line of incompetence.