As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.
In every way, General Hiram Grant was one of thee most tactical commanders which the United States ever produced. He possessed a fighter's sense in and out of combat and between the bell sounding, for the next round, in not only what he would do, but what the enemy would do.
It is true as General Lee stated, he worried that the North would one day find a General better than him, which it did not, but the North had a General in Grant who was the blunt object to the brain of General Lee's finesse.
There was little finesse in General Grant's tactics or strategy. He moved to cut off and kill the South's military. The quote below is the way Grant's mind calculated and processed information. He had to kill the Army of Northern Virginia's dedicated troops, once that was accomplished, the South would lose
Smashing was what the combined armies of Grant were. Sheridan smashed Jubal Early in the Shenandoah Valley. In a brilliant strategy, General Joe Johnston in Georgia parried with General Sherman effectively. Richmond wanted action and appointed General Hood, who Sherman defeated, and then left for General Thomas to shatter, which he did in Tennessee in a skilled destruction of a Confederate army which was a threat to the North.
Hood allowed Grant to expose more of his thinking, as Grant was concerned that Hood would do what Grant would do if faced with the same conditions. Grant would not fight, he would break out and smash the supplies of Hood and build moral in destructive strikes in the North.
I remember Grant in listening to Lincoln in an early meeting was silent and polite as the President urged Grant to cross the river as it would be his back and attack Lee. Grant never gave a reply, but later stated, "If I would have deployed that way, Lee would have had the river too".
That is the genius of General Grant, as much as General Lee, in they knew how to read a field for combat and did not make mistakes in that. Grant never made a mistake in battle. He was always thought out and thorough. Lee's great failures took place on Union soil. In both cases, it was not that the Union was better, but that Lee was inadequate. He deployed the wrong commanders at Antietam. At Gettysburg he assaulted the Union line, instead of maneuvering around it, and striking the cities as General Longstreet advocated.
In the quote below, General Grant did not employ the mass extermination of the Southerner, but he focused on the planters, that race of men who the South bred, who were superb fighters and horse soldiers. The greatest of that ground was General Nathan Bedford Forest. They were natural talents at warfare.
What Grant understood after hammering Lee's planter to death over the summer of 1864 AD in the year of our Lord, was that if Lee came out of his trenches, he did not have the strength to attack or maneuver as before. If he tried, he would be defeated. If he somehow gained a victory, he would still be defeated, because the battle would obliterate the last 22,000 planters which were the core of that army.
As I have stated, there was no finesse to Grant. It was always sound military strategy and if some Burnside tunneling to blow up the Confederate lines was undertaken, Grant was busy moving a siege to cracking the army dug in. He had no time for gimmicks.
A punch with an iron fist to the face, end the fight. It is not a pretty as a French parry with a little hole, doing the same death, but it is the effective charm which an opposing army learns to dread.
Grant had knocked the fight out of the Confederacy, long before the surrender.
I write these pieces as wars continue in the current era in the same magnitude and same smashing brute force. While effective, I believe that General Grant used up too much of his resources to gain the victory, but it was the military science he was grounded by and it brought success. Both Sherman and Grant were schooled in using up men to achieve the result. A bit of finesse now and then would have saved thousands of lives.
It is more interesting to wonder what he would have fought like, if he had to conserve resources, rather than expend them.
agtG
