re: The Ultimate Civil War Debate: Ulysses S. Grant or Robert E. Lee?

Malvern Hill was two years earlier. And if you approve of Grant's decision to attack at Cold Harbor because it was made against a retreating enemy who had been badly handled and a successful assault might have won the war, then you have to admit Lee had the same reasons for attacking at Malvern Hill. If he had successfully breached Maclellan's last defensive line there, he could have completely destroyed the Union expeditionary force. A defeat of that magnitude might certainly have been expected to force the North to negotiate terms.

The bald facts of the matter are these: Lee and Grant directly faced each other in a war of maneuver only in the Overland campaign. In that campaign, Lee, while being outnumbered somewhere between two and three to one, either drew or won all of the battles, while successfully preventing Grant from turning his flank. Grant did achieve his objective, but Lee had no realistic means to prevent him from doing so. It would have required another victory on the level of Fredericksburg or Chancellorsville, and Grant and Meade were far too capable to allow that.

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And if you approve of Grant's decision to attack at Cold Harbor because it was made against a retreating enemy who had been badly handled and a successful assault might have won the war, then you have to admit Lee had the same reasons for attacking at Malvern Hill

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I never said I approved of Grant's decision to attack Lee's works at Cold Harbor. I merely said his reasoning made more sense than Lee's did on the third day at Gettysburg. But while we are on the subject, you are most definitely using a false equivalence to compare Malvern Hill to Cold Harbor. This is so for multiple reasons:

1) Lee had only been facing off against one half of the Union army for the entirety of the Seven Days' Campaign in the lead up to Malvern Hill. The other half of McClellan's army was south of the Chickahominy River for the entirety of the campaign.

2) While Lee had been pushing back McClellan, this was due almost entirely to McClellan. The Union only lost one battle during the entirety of the Seven Days' Campaign and that was at Gaines' Mill. In every other battle the Union army withdrew from the field voluntarily. Bottom line, they were hardly a defeated force on the morning of the Battle of Malvern Hill.

3) For the first time during the whole campaign, Lee would finally be facing off against the entire Union army. So half of the forces he was fighting were fresh and hadn't seen action since the Battle of Oak Grove back at the end of May.

4) All throughout the campaign, Lee had been outnumbered. Attacking an entrenched foe with the inferior numbers is an example of something you should never do.

Now compare the above to the situation confronting Grant at Cold Harbor. Both armies had endured heavy losses. Not a single company had gone through the campaign without seeing heavy action at least once. This was especially true in the case of Lee's army as entire brigades (specifically the famed Stonewall Brigade) had been wiped off the face of the map.

Knowing this, and realizing he had the superior numbers by a very clear margin, Grant decided to take the risk of assaulting an entrenched army that may or may not have broken from sheer exhaustion. The failure of his assault caused Grant to realize that the fighting spirit of the Southern soldier was far from broken, and he re-tooled his strategy accordingly.

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The bald facts of the matter are these: Lee and Grant directly faced each other in a war of maneuver only in the Overland campaign. In that campaign, Lee, while being outnumbered somewhere between two and three to one, either drew or won all of the battles, while successfully preventing Grant from turning his flank.

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That's one way to look at it. Another way to look at it, however, is from the point of view that in just six weeks, Grant had forcibly removed Lee's army from their line on the Rapidan River. Not only that, but Grant had also moved the line down below the James River, had completely immobilized Lee's army, and forced it into a siege it had not a prayer's chance of breaking. In short, he accomplished in a month and a half what every other Union general before him had failed to do in three years. The only thing that could have saved Lee and the Confederacy by the end of June 1864 was the lack of a major Union victory elsewhere or the defeat of Lincoln in the November election - both of which failed to pass for the Confederates.

While the Overland Campaign may have been a tactical victory for Lee, it was a strategic victory for Grant and the Union.

If an American General did the same shite today overseas in any location whatsoever that Sherman did in the Civil War, he would be court martialed today and thrown in prison for the rest of his natural life at the very least.

We had a huge national scandal that embarrassed the White House and the military in Abu Ghraib for christ's sake.

Got to go with Lee since he's like a great uncle of mine.

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Hey everybody, get a load of this dude fawning over a thug piece of shite who let his men rape innocent women, burn innocent people's homes down and imprison and/or murder them

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The hyperbole is strong with you. For one, there are less than a dozen known rapes that occurred during Sherman's infamous March to the Sea. And the vast majority of those rapes were committed by "stragglers" - men that couldn't or wouldn't keep up with the moving army and just wandered across the countryside miles behind, pillaging and stealing as they went.

I don't deny that Sherman sanctioned the destruction of crops and the burning of homes because that was one of the strategic aims for his March to the Sea. He wanted to make Georgia howl and destroy any ability or incentives it had remaining to make war on the United States.

To your points:

Point one is correct. The situations were only roughly equivalent, not exactly.

Point two was the same situation Grant found himself in at Cold Harbor. The South either won or drew all the battles in the Overland campaign.

Point three is correct; again, the situations are only roughly equivalent.

Point four is correct in principle. Lee, however, was smart enough to know he could not simply sit and fight a defensive war if he wanted to win. The result would, eventually, be Petersburg, or something like it. If he wanted to win, he had to smash the Union army, which meant he usually had to take the offensive. That he was able to do this and still win battles the way he did speaks to his genius.

I agree the Overland campaign was a strategic victory for the North. There's no other way you can look at it. I do think, however, that during the course of the campaign, Lee proved his superiority at commanding armies in a war of maneuver. He consistently anticipated Grant's next move and beat him to the punch. He just couldn't hit hard enough to deliver a knockout blow.

Grant was, I think, the better strategician, though. That level of command was not Lee's forte.

He might be a hero to Yankee scum. He is not an American hero. Do you also approve of the way the Union murdered Indians after the war? Please take your leave from us and pollute a Big 10 board.

Grant realized logistics win wars far more than clever manuvers and can lose them faster than doomed charges.

First President of LSU?

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If Lee had avoided Gettysburg there was still a chance war fatigue could have cost Lincoln the election

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Sherman's liberation of Atlanta would still have been a campaign boon for Lincoln.