Stonewall but thats not the point, i dont think it comes down to the South having better generals.
This being the same erratic Stonewall Jackson who could win a brilliant campaign in the Shenandoah and then subsequently not only perform poorly in the Seven Days' Battles (if he showed up at all he did it late) but also take a huge chance on dividing the army (by God! what an idiotic idea) at Chancellorsville and even order thousands of pikes for his men in the style of the Macedonian sarissa because he thought that bayonets and Stuff That Pokes Holes And Is Sharp were the mainstays of warfare. Frankly, he was too erratic to be a good commander.
BCLG100 said:
Was it McClellans fault that Lincoln had about as much faith in him as i do in a chocolate tea pot. He was obviously a very sound administrator shown by the potomac and the soldiers love of him, is it his fault he recieved wrong information from pinkerton? obviously he wasnt a good general but that is Lincoln & co's fault for not using his abilities correctly.
That is truly amazing. I have never heard anyone attempt to defend McClellan by saying that even though he wasn't a good general, Lincoln should have trusted him. McClellan's very promising stroke on the Peninsula was poorly executed and he failed to destroy the rebel army at Antietam despite having full knowledge of their plans. He also signally did not pursue a defeated enemy, something that most generals who win battles like to do. True, his army was partially mauled, but that was in large part because he kept a large number of troops out of the fighting and fed others in piecemeal, in a fashion in which they were sure to get slaughtered. A general who loses and/or fails to win when handed victory on a silver platter doesn't deserve
my trust, and Lincoln clearly felt the same way. As to why the troops liked him: fighting in two campaigns in a year, with a grand total of perhaps three months of anything resembling hard fighting, would make me like my general too. He kept them out of the fight, so he got kudos from them. Making your troops like you doesn't mean that you will win the war, though, and clearly that wasn't enough to keep him in power. I'd also like to know how Lincoln could have "used his abilities properly" when the man didn't have the temperament to be a subordinate and didn't have the competence to be a commander.
BCLG100 said:
Other than Lee and chums the South wasn't overabundant with decent generals in the same way the North wasn't, Grant wasn't that brilliant he just realised he had more men than the South.
As to Grant's generalship, I would contend that he was a very well-rounded and skilled general; maybe not a genius, but certainly no fool and not even merely competent. His esoteric and brilliant solution to the Big Black River campaign smacked of Philip II and Turenne in its operational skill and his recovery of Tennessee from Donelson to Shiloh and Chattanooga show an excellent combination of an understanding of industrial warfare and excellent maneuver and dislocation. When he was back east, it is true that he did not often attempt the kind of maneuvering that he had done in the west, partly because the US Army in the east wasn't made for maneuver and genial operational art like the western one. The ratio of force to space and the preponderance of rivers practically forced him to do as he did, and the fact that he seemed to combine the objectives of Lee's army and Richmond - after each battle, like the Wilderness and Spotsylvania Court House and North Anna and Cold Harbor, he always attempted to outflank Lee to the east, and in this manner slowly got closer to Richmond, exerting multiple kinds of pressure on the Confederacy. He was far better than competent, and what he did throughout the war took a good deal more intelligence and artful generalship than realizing that he had more men. When he didn't have vastly more men, he won too, after all.
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