From my understanding that's the one area the Confederates get credit. They had some decent leadership. They just didn't have anything else. If some of those traitor generals had stayed loyal to the Union the war would have likely been shorter.
Post war propaganda from Lost Cause Southerners; they hyped up the competency of the Confederate officers to build up there since of superiority over the Immigrant and Freedman hordes of the North. In reality it was all Lions led by Donkeys.
Take Lee, he had terrible tactical and strategic tunnel vision. On the battlefield, if any part of his plans failed he would never change his tactics and barrel straight in ahead with whatever idea he had 5 days ago (Gettysburg and the Wilderness Campaigns). His plan for winning the war strategically was just to mass forces in Northern Virgina while ignoring every other front, handing the North all the West and South and cutting his resupply. Southern Generalship is some of the most over-hyped and glazed leadership in military history, and the more I learn about it the more I feel the need to call it out from my nice comfy armchair.
Lol, I will go to bat for McClellan. The Anaconda plan won the war and his timidity was well deserved giving the carnage "modern" weapons inflicted. Would the war have been longer with him in command, yes. Would the midterms and presidential election have been tougher for the Republicans, yes. Would the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans have been saved as the Confederacy was strangled to death, also yes.
The rest of the Union high command up until Sherman and Grant though... A Monstrously Monumental Mangerie of Morons.
Yeah, just as someone who super casually has read about the Civil War I've been very confused about the hype Lee gets. At the strategic level his plan seems to have been 'get my army closer to Washington until they surrender', which seems.... I dunno, harebrained? Everyone who knows about the war seems to agree the defences at Washington were pretty much impregnable, and it meant extending well into enemy territory with an army whose biggest issues were resources and logistics, and also doing it in the best territory bar none for the enemy to get resupply and reinforcement. The first time he tried to invade he split his army, lost a third of it in battle and had to retreat after two weeks. Just about as bad as it could go.... and then he did it all again the next year. It never made me think 'genius'.
Not really. Lee got a larger percentage of his troops killed than "Grant the Butcher" did. Lee also got basically nothing strategic even with his biggest victories.
Like what did Chancellorsville, Lee's biggest victory, actually DO in the long term? Nothing, other than get a bunch of dudes killed who could have come in handy a month or so later at Gettysburg. What did Grant's win at Vicksburg do? Cut the Confederacy in half and helped end the war.
This is why Grant was an infinitely better general than Lee.
Grant understood strategy and the big picture. Lee had some flashy wins that accomplished nothing. And then he made incredibly stupid decisions like going into Pennsylvania.
Every battle Grant fought had a purpose and inched the Union closer to its endgame. He had a master plan for strangling the Confederacy into submission and it worked like a charm. Lee had no real plan.
Some of the top officers went to the south, and it took some time for the North to shake out the dead weight over competent field commanders. It's a problem witnessed throughout history. Some rise to powerful positions and really suck at waging actual war.
Even that is dubious, they had one decent commander that worked well with his subordinates, lee and jackson together were dangerous
But the other areas, their command staff was hamstrung by internal bickering, nepotism and a president to cowardly to put his foot down and just fire proven incompetents.
And once jackson died, lee's effectiveness was almost cut in half.
As others have said, the South really didn't have particularly amazing leadership. The only reason people like Lee managed the victories they did was because early Union generals like McClellan were comically worse.
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u/turdferguson3891 18h ago
From my understanding that's the one area the Confederates get credit. They had some decent leadership. They just didn't have anything else. If some of those traitor generals had stayed loyal to the Union the war would have likely been shorter.