re: The Top 10 Greatest Generals of All-Time (according to Moneyball math)

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Sherman > Grant 

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Uncle Billy underrated

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This is what won the war for the north.

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And who executed Winfield Scott's idea? He was booted from his position as General-in-Chief and replaced by McClellan in November 1861. So he had almost nothing to do with its planning or execution. Do you know who did? Grant.

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People acting like Lee was an idiot for going on the offensive are wrong. He had to because he didn’t have the men to stay on the defensive. He had to deliver a knockout blow.

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Lee was most definitely not an idiot, but he was still foolish for taking the tactical offensive in most of his campaigns. He didn't have to do that as his performance in 1864 clearly shows. Had he been entrenching and receiving the Union army in 1862 the same way he did in 1864, he may have forced the Union to negotiate a peace. Of all the commanders of the Civil War, Lee lost more men under his command than anyone else. And that includes Grant. The vast majority of his victories, while they looked good on paper, did nothing but preserve the status quo.

There is no better example of this than his victory at Chancellorsville - long observed by military historians to be Lee's greatest victory. On paper it's gorgeous to look at. No other battle of the Civil War was so Napoleonic in scale and result. But what did Lee's victory at Chancellorsville give him? At the start of the battle, Lee was on one side of the Rappahannock River and Hooker was on the other side of the Rappahannock River. Two weeks after the battle? Lee and Hooker were still staring at each other from across the same river. The only difference: Lee had lost 13,000 men and some of his best commanders (including Stonewall Jackson).

Lee's greatest victory did absolutely NOTHING for him in the strategic sense. The Union army was still in Virginia and still heavily outnumbered him. At the same time, his army took heavy losses that he could not hope to replenish.

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Ulysses S. Grant, USA

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I don’t get this simply because he was fighting a war where he had all the advantages any competant general could duplicate what he did.

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I don’t get this simply because he was fighting a war where he had all the advantages any competant general could duplicate what he did.

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So are you arguing that Grant was the North's only competent general?

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You are free to rebut my arguments

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I did in your previous thread iterations. Multiple times. I don’t care enough to do it yet again.

If you’re truly just passionate and not a troll then by all means. But after seeing this play out the same way so many times I have my doubts.

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switch Lee, Jackson and Longstreet into control of the army of the Potomac the war would have been more of a footnote instead of a defining moment in history

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I could just as easily make the argument that had Grant been in command of the Army of the Potomac at Antietam the war would have ended in 1862 instead of 1865.

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Grant was not a good general
He was a drunk

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people in the south are so fricking dumb

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they had Lee outnumbered severly and his plans had been captured, Yet they managed only a minor victory/draw

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1. It depends on what you mean by outnumbered severely. The Union army had about 85,000 men of all arms at the Battle of Antietam. But the Union had a different way of counting the men in their army than the Confederates did. The CSA would report only combat effectives while the USA would report everyone present for duty. While the Union had 85,000 men on the field at Antietam, that counted men in the artillery corps, the commissary wagons, the general staff, etc. In actuality, the number of Union soldiers that were on the frontlines that day probably numbered closer to 55,000 men. Lee had roughly 40,000 front line soldiers. Still less than McClellan, but by no means the heaviest of odds as some have portrayed. It also must be noted that before the Maryland Campaign of 1862 even started, McClellan had multiple units in his army that didn't know how to load their rifles, much less form into a line of battle.

2. Special Order 191's significance has been grossly exaggerated by historians. In actuality, McClellan had real-time intelligence on Lee's movements almost from the word "go" due to the fact that citizens in western Maryland were feeding his army intelligence for the entirety of the campaign. He was able to put together a picture of what Lee was doing thanks to the work of men and women who were hiding in plain sight. The capture of Special Order 191 merely confirmed what McClellan already knew about Lee's movements.

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A huge contingent of the north thought so at the time too.

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That's because Grant had a lot of enemies on his own side. The Union army was very cutthroat and political, with multiple generals vying to destroy rivals so they could have the glory for themselves. After Grant's victories at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, powerful men in the high command took a special interest in him and wanted to see him fail. Chief among them was his own boss, Major General Henry Halleck. From St. Louis, Halleck was doing everything in his power to find ways to reign in Grant's successes on the field.

After the Battle of Shiloh - a battle that Grant barely won - his rivals pounced on him by bringing up incidents from his days in the pre-war army, focusing mostly on his issues with the bottle. Halleck and other rivals of Grant were well-connected and stories began circulating in all the major papers about how Grant was drunk the night before the battle (a story that was 100% false).

The sad thing is, Grant thought Halleck had his back. It was only later that he realized much of the negative publicity was being generated by Halleck - a revelation that deeply wounded him.

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Good info 1987, were many of Lee’s men also support personel decreasing his 40000?

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The Confederates only reported combat effectives in their after action reports. There were more men there when you count their artillery corps, medical corps, and commissary corps. But those weren't frontline soldiers so they weren't included in the final tally of men engaged. As the Confederates were very shoddy at record keeping, we'll probably never know how large Lee's army was at Antietam.

One thing we know for sure is that Lee's full contingent wasn't present in Maryland as many men in his service disagreed with invading the North. Thousands of soldiers actually remained behind in Virginia because they were only in favor of defending the South. Lee had 85,000 men under his command on the Virginia Peninsula in June 1862 and 75,000 men under his command at the Battle of Fredericksburg six months later. Compare that with only 40,000 men he had at Antietam and it becomes quite apparent that his invasion of the North was very unpopular with many soldiers in his army.