I like the logic that if Grant failed in his Vicksburg campaign, he would have been banished to a lessor post. Instead, he is elevated to top general in the U.S. army, and General Lee and his Army of N. Virginia's days are numbered.
Well that did happen to a number of other generals during the course of the war, Hooker, McClernand, Pope, Fremont, Shaw, the list goes on they lost (often times disastrously) and they ended up getting transferred to unknown commands in the middle of nowhere.
@@pittland44 - Not in today's army. If you have the "correct" politics, you rise to the top and stay there. Failures, such as exiting from Afghanistan leaving behind obscene amounts of military weapons, vehicles, ammo, hardware, and a billion dollar air base for the enemy, not to mention American civilians and Afghan allies,and you keep your job.
Grant was able to defeat confederate detachments in detail piece by piece after he crossed the Mississippi. The thing that set Grant apart from the incompetent McClellan was that Grant customarily in the early part of the War rode from one part of the battlefield to another. For example at Shiloh, he saved the day by personally riding up to one part of the field to look at how the fighting was taking place and then adjusting by brings in more troops to bear on that portion of the fight. It is known that Robert Lee tried to personally direct his forces during the initial fighting at the Wilderness but was pushed away by his own troops to prevent his( Lees) being exposed to enemy fire. Grant did personally direct battle maneuvers less and less after 1864 when he was named overall Union Commander with Meade being the one to directly supervise Union troops. However it should be noted that by 1864 the command staff of the Army of the Potomac was finally able to at least sometimes conduct obviously needed troop movements. After Chancellorsville the Army of Northern Virginia was only able to do the same at cold harbor, wilderness, and early petersburg. Starting with 5 forks with able field commanders like Sheridan, Custer, and Chamberlin the Union was consistently able to smash the the Confederates at will which led in short order to the overall defeat of the Confederates.. No charge for explaining it all to you. best Bruce Peek
I think Grant understood that time spent planning could be a hinderance as much as it could bring advantage. Where McClellan depended solely on extensive planning and superiority in numbers and needed clear routes of retreat at every stage, basically planned a masterpiece for months. Grant just went
No Thanks , Grant was probably Drunk riding around trying to find another jug. Robert E. Lee had the plan with 1/3 of Troops and Munition. He relied upon West Point Generals and was the biggest blunder in the history of American wars at that time. The Next will be Gen Milley in Afghanistan.
17:50 While Grant may not have been a master administrator, the reason for the delay in his communications to Halleck during this period was later found to be a confederate spy working in one of the telegraph offices who was intercepting and delaying Union communications
@@blaugranisto Thank you Omar! What we here in America forget (due to a deliberate smearing campaign) is Grant's powerful effect on Civil Rights. If his reputation hadn't been tarnished we may well have made progress much sooner. I just found out that History Channel did a 3-part series based on Chernow's book, just called "Grant." You want to buy it from Amazon (cost me like $6 US, don't know what it would be for you) to watch it without the interminable commercials.
Please accept my compliments, Instructor Nettesheim and Kenosha CWM! Charming, low-key lecture. Excellent perspective. Complements knowledge about the campaign from Catton, McPherson, and Foote. I only wish Grant's seven failed attempts were covered in greater detail, including the coincidental down- and up-river escapades (Porter's gambit and Farragut's follow-up). Cheers!
Gettysburg gets the focus because it fits the “Lost Cause” mythology of how the South fought hard, nearly won .Pickett’s Charge was a near-done thing, etc. The reality is that when Vicksburg fell, it became nearly impossible for the Confederacy to win the war. They lost a whole army. Vicksburg validated that Anaconda strategy (the South had no real strategy, just making it up as they went along while the North had the Anaconda strategy-surround the Confederacy, blockade ports and cut off supplies, gradually constrict and control. As if the loss of a large and well equipped army were not enough, the Confederates lost mountains of war materiel which the non-industrial South could not replace. Sixty thousand stand of small arms, 260 cannon (ranging from 6-pounder field guns to giant 10-inch columbiads), and much ammunition fell into the Federals’ hands at Vicksburg. The U.S. Army Field Manual 100-5 (May 1986) describes the Vicksburg campaign as “the most brilliant campaign ever fought on American soil,” one which “exemplifies the qualities of a well-conceived, violently executed offensive plan.”
I'm going to say this loud for the people in back who don't know this: GRANT'S OVERLAND CAMPAIGN AGAINST VICKSBURG WAS TERMINATED BY LINCOLN, HALLECK, AND MCCLERNAND A WEEK BEFORE VAN DORN EVER ATTACKED. Grant was sitting idle in Oxford as a diversion because he had just been directly ordered to send most of his army down river under Sherman, and he was waiting for the results of that movement to decide what to do next. Follow Pemberton if he retreated? Order Sherman back to Memphis? Consolidate his entire army on the river? All Van Dorn's attack really did, besides destroy an expendable quantity of supplies, was to make Grant's decision very easy and expedite his move to Young's Point to take command.
Excellent presentation but as a military man I disagree this was his masterpiece, His campaign from Cold Harbor to Appomattox was his masterpiece. He would have won the war in 1864 if he had Sheridan in command of the first assault of Petersburg. He had Lee's whole army out of place and then he took Lee apart bit by bit - When Lee said McClellan was his best opponent he showed himself small and petty as he truly was in every respect.
Was Lee being Petty or was he saying that sarcastically? Because I can see Lee saying that McClellan was his "best" opponent with Lee making big air quotes when he says that. From what I do know about Lee (which to be fair is limited) he was a very competitive and aggressive general, and he got very accustomed to winning against the Army of the Potomac. They even fell into a very predictable pattern. The AOP would invade Virginia, Lee would execute some nifty maneuver to drive them off, the army would fall back across the Rappahannock, regroup, get a new commander and then they'd repeat the whole cycle. The thing about Grant was he didn't do that. Even though they fought engagements that were rather indecisive (the Wilderness) or were straight up defeats (Cold Harbor) Grant kept advancing and kept attacking Lee regardless of the actual results of the individual battles. That was what made Grant unique, he kept advancing in spite of things. Lee also had a very old school view of warfare. If your army lost the engagement, you withdrew. In Lee and Grant (I would argue) you see the beginning of the shift away from 19th century Napoleonic style warfare towards 20th century industrial style warfare. That's my two cents anyways. Let me know what you think.
@@pittland44 Outside of McClellan, who was great at organizing but not being aggressive, most Union Generals had command when the AOP was on the defensive. Burnside actually had a really solid plan to take Fredericksburg, but the potoon boats showed up late causing him to lose the advantage and then he didn't change his plans which led to disastrous consequences. But, the point being, Union generals usually kept the big picture of winning the war as the focal point. If they felt a battle or engagement was non-consequential or didn't play into the overall plan of winning the war, they would disengage and fight another day. Lee, on the other hand, had this very Napoleonic, grandeous mindset that the war would be decided by a single, decisive battle. Lee, especially when he had Jackson who was brilliant at aggressive tactics, (not so much at defensive tactics but that's a discussion for another day) much like Lee was so they always had a very good cohesive understanding. It's why Lee was a macromanager. He only had 2 Corps from July 1862 until May 1863 under Jackson and Longstreet. Lee was very good at predicting what moves would be made, but here's the thing: most of Lee's victories didn't really mean much to the overall conflict or outcome of the war. In the Penninsula Campaign he brilliantly pushed McClellan back, but then made a very questionable decision to attack Malvern Hill and got absolutely cut to pieces. At Chancellorsville, the famous attack on the right wing of the Union was tactically brilliant, but strategically actually hurt the Confederates because for 1, he lost Jackson and for 2, be suffered a lot of casualties. And that was normal for Lee. Grant gets called the butcher for the Wilderness campaign, but Lee actually lost an average of 20% of his men per engagement, or right around 121,000 men throughout the war. Grant lost around 18% or around 96,000 in the war. Lee was fighting a style of war the Confederates couldn't wage. Lee needed to fight a Washington style war, basically pester and annoy the North enough to where they gave up and let them be. Lee was a great field commander, as was Jackson, but there is an overhyped mystic around them. Grant, Meade and George Thomas were all equally brilliant commanders for the Union. Lee was never going to openly defeat the Union, unless he really got lucky and caught them by surprise, because of the sheer numbers of the Union Army. This will probably be an unpopular opinion, but on a grand, strategic scale, the Confederate Army never achieved an ultimate victory that put the Union in a very bad spot.
@@grantlicari6393 I agree with almost everything you said. Lee was far too aggressive given their circumstances and he had an increasingly antiquated view of warfare (now to be fair Lee had been in the army off and on since 1829). Now, in his defense a lot of warfare is based on perception and his victories did have an effect on the morale of the AOP and on the North at large (both were major problems Grant and Lincoln had to contend with). I think Lee had two main ideas in mind with his prosecution of the war, and they were legitimate to an extent. The first is Lee wanted to demoralize the North. To make it seem like the war wasn't worth waging and there was nothing to be gained by continuing the fight. Now as you pointed out, and I don't think your opinion is all that controversial if you look at the conflict objectively, the South never seriously threatened the North in any major way (with maybe one or two exceptions) However, that doesn't mean that morale on the Northern side didn't get bad and many people wanted to abandon the fight. What we forget is that came very close to happening several times, including the spring of 1863 with Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville and such and again in the summer of 1864 during the Overland Campaign before Petersburg, the Shenandoah, Atlanta and Mobile. Part of the problem was the civilian populations on both sides. Not being military people, the general public wanted flashy, decisive victories. That was a large part of why they looked at the Overland Campaign with horror. It seemed to be a pointless bloodbath that didn't appear to be accomplishing anything (in fact Grant was whittling down both Lee's army and Lee himself). The second thing Lee was trying to do, at least before Gettysburg, was to help convince the French and British to back the Confederacy against the Federal Government. If memory serves one reason Lee invaded Maryland in the Antietam Campaign was to try and convince the British to ally with the Confederate States. They desperately needed money, guns (especially artillery), ammunition, commercial goods, medicine and food (people forget that at the beginning of the war neither South Carolina nor Virginia fed themselves). They also seriously needed naval support to break the Union blockade, which as time went on became more and more effective at cutting off the South. So while I agree with you that Lee should have fought more in the style of George Washington and try and draw off the Union army (they needed to seriously analyze the fighting style of Nathaniel Green during the war in the South against Cornwallis), I do think there's at least an argument for some of what he was doing (although you're entirely right that he was far, far too cavalier with his men's lives and never really caught on to that fact). The problem was that Lee was trying to win the war militarily and they needed to win the war politically. I don't think the Confederacy as a whole truly realized that until very late in the conflict.
@@pittland44 very true, logistically the South had major problems which are widely known and understood. What's lesser known or talked about, is the fact that since the South had a much higher importance on States sovereignty, Jefferson Davis had a lot of problems trying to work governors to help allocate materials and supplies for his armies. Davis actually lamented openly that he wished he had Lincoln's power. And yes, anti war sentiment in the North was very high, i.e. the New York City draft riots in 1863, but even with some of the demoralizing defeats, there was never huge pressure on Lincoln to find a way for peace. That mainly came from the public, who, to their defense, were very nieve when it came to just how much the North and South didn't like each other at the time and were willing to put up with abhorrent casualty rates at the cost of winning. As far as the Confederates getting outside help, I don't believe it was ever gonna happen. The South tried to lobby for Britain to help by saying the war was over taxes, but Britain had outlawed Slavery at this point and had a heavy abolitionist presence that knew the South harbored the "peculiar institution" of slavery. I don't think Britain was ever really that close to helping the South even though they were trying to persuade them with both invasions of the North in 1862, which targeted Harper's Ferry and Harrisburg for supplies, and 1863. By all rights, in theory of course, McClellan should have absolutely crushed Lee at Antietam. But his failure to push in reserves ended the battle in a draw but I think showed that when Lee entered the North, the discrepancies in the sizes of the army were glaring. Militarily and strategically, I don't see a way to victory for the South, and I think Britain saw that as well.
@@grantlicari6393 I think you're right, I don't think there was ever a large push for Britain to side with the South. The only people in Britain who were pro south were the cotton mill owners, and a few people who had other ties down south, but that was it. However, the Confederacy was desperately lobbying for help from Britain, especially from the British navy, in hopes of breaking the blockade. Actually I think there was more chance of the French siding with the South than the British, at least until 1864 when France decided to intervene in and invade Mexico and install Maximillian as emperor. There was a path forward to victory for the South, but it would have been extremely unsatisfying for Lee and the Confederate officer corps, as well as deeply unpopular with the civilian populace. They needed a stalemate with the North. That would have fed antiwar sentiment more than anything else because it would have made the war seem pointless as well as futile. They needed Lincoln to lose the election of 1864 and they didn't really catch on to that fact until the election was upon them. The problem was they wanted to "whip them yankees good," and that wasn't what the situation called for. Lee was also always looking for that knockout punch and that impulse led him to go on the offensive when he didn't need to, like at the end of the Seven Days or the back end of Chancellorsville.
Nepoleon had entire corps of calvary to pursue retreating armies that would destroy them. America doesn't really offer the terrain to use that large of calvary units, Europe has a lot of open plains that make it perfect. It also takes along time to train good calvary units, like years of riding, and rifled muskets are deadly to calvary so why waste men you can't replace on the spot
I toured through the Vicksburg siege site last month (November 2021), and I remember reading that Grant had 77,000 troops to the Confederates’ 44,000. I think I have the ballpark numbers correct. So the Union was not outnumbered.
By the time the siege was on there were more troops for the siege… He was outnumbered when touching down, surrounded by confederates between Jackson & Vicksburg… hope this helps
Grant didn't know where to land on the east side of the Mississippi river until an escaped slave told him Bruinsburg was not defended. That's a lot of luck involved. Grant's successes almost always seems lucky until the wildness campaign.
I believe Lee was the better tactition in the war, but Grant was the better Strategist. Lee's downfall, was that at all costs he spent all his energy trying to preserve Virginia, at all costs! Where as Grant could see more of the scope of the war
This is an excellent point and I must grudgingly agree; however, Grant had something else beside being a master of strategy that is hard to articulate but nonetheless a rare quality. And he had it in abundance: call it determination, call it absolute confidence in himself and his men, cal it Balls. People often overlook the all important factor that Lee was blessed with outstanding subordinate generals. Grant was not so fortunate by any means. While Sherman and McPherson were reliable and competent they were not in the same league (at all) as Jackson and Longstreet.
@gjf..agreed.. George Masons son John Masons wife was Anna Maria. She married Sydney Smith Lee..Robert E. Lee's brother. I am a direct relative to George Mason founder of our Bill of Rights plus directly related to REL. Grew up in Northern VA. Robert E. Lee HS..just a few miles away. Lee and Grant both attended West Point and Lee could have just as well headed the Union side. He was well seasoned from the Mexican scene. This is a great topic!
Sigh. The Surrender... my Great Great Great Grandpa lost many personal properties that day. Though Pemberton tried to negotiated to allow my family to keep the slaves. He gave in at the end. Such a tragedy.
@@rickyemiguel No worries though, Pemberton allowed our families enough time to Lynch them all before he surrendered. We would rather dispose of them ourselves then have them taken away from us. Just unfortunate to lose so much property that day. But that's history now.
Stop just repeating "unity of command" without elaborating, explaining, connecting with your example. Otherwise "unity of command" of just a hollow catch phrase or mantra.
It doesn't need explanation. It is a simple, self evident principle. Don't be a nit picker. Grant engineered the fall of Vicksburg. He deserves the credit because he was in command both in name and in actuality. Get it?
And? If Grant went on to win the war single-handedly with nothing but a Colt and a bottle of liquor there would still be people seething about how he was a terrible farmer before the war. Each and every one of Grant's failures as a commander were surrounded by great performances, and that's not going to change no matter how hard Lost Causers cry about it.
You have a completely inadequate and obviously biased view of the big picture. Vicksburg fell. Grant made that happen. It was incredibly difficult. He was awesome, and you are not.
Grant was given Vicksburg by the Northerner Pemberton. Grant should have been destroyed at the Big Black, but Pemberton purposely left the high ground and fought in the fields.
@@roberthoover4491 Maybe being a commander was not a real easy assignment. Even more so trying to beat an army commanded by Grant. The list of those beaten by Grant is long.
You are speculating about the nicest place to fight a battle, while completely failing to see the strategic picture. By smashing Jackson and tearing up the rail and telegraph lines, Grant left Pemberton cut off from communication, supply, reinforcements. Pemberton needed to give Grant a bloody nose to buy some breathing room to link up with Johnston's forces that were chased out of Jackson. Sitting on the defense on the west bank leaves Grant complete freedom to roam the whole state of Mississippi. Those defensive river positions are far enough away from Vicksburg that his army could be bypassed and Vicksburg seized, but still not eastward enough to be easily supplied. When Grant does not make the direct attack, but instead probes across the river both north and south of Pemberton's main army, what does Pemberton do? Shift north and leave Vicksburg exposed to attack from both the east and south? Or shift south to better protect Vicksburg and allow his supply line to be completely cut?
