Spinoff thread: The main difference between Grant, Lee, and Jackson?

Results.

Someone in an earlier thread commented on how Grant's Vicksburg campaign was overrated and, that if you wanted to see how a campaign should be properly fought, then look no further than Jackson's Valley campaign and Lee's Chancellorsville campaign.

And while those two aforementioned campaigns look pretty on paper, you have to ask yourself what they accomplished. Lee's Chancellorsville campaign merely kept the status quo, minus 13,000 of his best soldiers (including Stonewall Jackson). Jackson's Valley campaign was a little more strategically important as it kept large numbers of troops from reinforcing McClellan on the Virginia peninsula. But those troops still occupied the Shenandoah Valley when all was said and done and still formed an army to threaten Richmond in the waining days of the summer of 1862.

Whereas Grant's campaign against Vicksburg, while not as pretty to look at, accomplished more strategically than Lee or Jackson ever even came close to accomplishing. His capture of Vicksburg made Port Hudson untenable, thus opening the entire Mississippi River to the Union navy and thus cutting the Confederacy in two. It also annihilated an entire Confederate army, which surrendered to Grant when Vicksburg fell. This is just one of three armies that would surrender to Grant during the Civil War. How many armies surrendered to Lee or to Jackson? Zero.

Grant saw beyond the importance of a single particular state and had a far superior strategic eye for the conflict than Lee or Jackson possessed. All the latter two saw was the importance of defending Virginia. Grant saw the entire war as one big, interconnected chess board. When he finally took over all Union armies in 1864, he would use this vision to launch a campaign that would ultimately defeat Lee and the Confederacy.