Grant Did Grant Fight A Pyrrhic War?

Admittedy, I am NO fan of Grant. And I am talking about Grant the General, Grant the Commander in Chief and Grant the President. All I can do is give him credit for being tenacious and using his great numerical advantage plus an unlimited supply of materials to "out gun" Lee in '64 and '65 and win the war. That's it. Being honest, I'd say a major re-assessment to the man is due. If it's OK to do that with Lee the General, why not Grant? To me, there is nothing to like and admire about him.

1. Was Grant in favor of an all out war against Southern armies as well as the Southern people? Most assuredly - YES. All you have to do is look at what Sherman and Sheridan did under his watch to the southern civilians who happened to be in their way. Burn and plunder; it all happened quite often with Yankee troops. Maybe you can say the end justified the means? With Grant it did.

2. What was Grant's policy against the Indians following the war? Remove, kill the Indians and buffalo and make way for the white settlers to occupy all the land. Grant even broke treaties he signed with the Indians; noteworthy is the one he signed giving the Indians all of the Black Hills.

3. Grant was one of the worst presidents our nation has ever had. Corruption was rampant! Just look at the record and history of the man. The only good thing I can point to, in regards to Grant, is when he made Yellowstone a national park.

Anyone else like and admire this man?
Not me.
 
To my mind, the idea of Grant being a "butcher" or otherwise callous about the lives of his soldiers is overblown, but so too is the idea of Grant's grit/persistence/determination. Both of these probably stem partly from politics and partly from the same detail about Grant, which is that Grant is a general who underrates the impact of fortifications for almost his entire career in army command based on two specific incidents.
 
To my mind, the idea of Grant being a "butcher" or otherwise callous about the lives of his soldiers is overblown, but so too is the idea of Grant's grit/persistence/determination. Both of these probably stem partly from politics and partly from the same detail about Grant, which is that Grant is a general who underrates the impact of fortifications for almost his entire career in army command based on two specific incidents.

Underrates the impact of fortifications how? Using frontal attacks on an army that was dug in was suicide? Nowadays, they carpet bomb to give an opening. No bombs for the Union army. Imo, being dug in is was Lee's saving grace, well, it kept him around for a little while anyway.
 
Underrates the impact of fortifications how? Using frontal attacks on an army that was dug in was suicide? Nowadays, they carpet bomb to give an opening. No bombs for the Union army, which being dug in was Lee's saving grace, well, for a little while.
 
Underrates the impact of fortifications how? Using frontal attacks on an army that was dug in was suicide? Nowadays, they carpet bomb to give an opening. No bombs for the Union army. Imo, being dug in is was Lee's saving grace, well, it kept him around for a little while anyway.
It's because it's a career pattern for Grant to launch (costly) attacks on dug-in enemies (it happens all through his career) and to underrate fortification for himself (notably he doesn't fortify at Shiloh). It means his army takes lots of avoidable casualties.

Other generals would try to turn fortifications, or apply other methods (like regular approaches); Grant's first instinct, as repeatedly shown, is a storming attack.
 
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Examples of the kind of pattern I mean.

"I must order a charge to save appearances" (Fort Donelson) - this worked, because it happened that the Confederates who'd tried to break out hadn't yet reoccupied their fortified positions. If they'd reached them there would have been, well, the usual result of such things.
Shiloh - Grant doesn't intrench his troops and suffers from a massive attack which makes much more progress than it would have done if his troops had been disposed for defence.
Vicksburg - Grant reaches Vicksburg, orders an attack off the line of march, then a couple of days later orders a full assault. This is held off and causes a lot of the casualties of the siege on the Union side.
Champion Hill - this is the other time it worked, because the Confederates had positioned the fortified line wrong.
Spotsylvania Court House, North Anna, Cold Harbor, Second Petersburg - in all of these cases Grant launches major attacks, sometimes more than once against the same positions, and the result is serious one-sided casualties. It could perhaps be excused as inflicting attritional damage, but the problem is that in so doing he wrecks the offensive morale of his army - a complicated process involving the interaction of several factors, including many of the most aggressive men becoming casualties and the men of the army as a whole deciding that their general is willing to send them on futile attacks. It's the same process which generates the WW1 French mutiny, for example.
 
Examples of the kind of pattern I mean.

"I must order a charge to save appearances" (Fort Donelson) - this worked, because it happened that the Confederates who'd tried to break out hadn't yet reoccupied their fortified positions. If they'd reached them there would have been, well, the usual result of such things.
Shiloh - Grant doesn't intrench his troops and suffers from a massive attack which makes much more progress than it would have done if his troops had been disposed for defence.
Vicksburg - Grant reaches Vicksburg, orders an attack off the line of march, then a couple of days later orders a full assault. This is held off and causes a lot of the casualties of the siege on the Union side.
Champion Hill - this is the other time it worked, because the Confederates had positioned the fortified line wrong.
Spotsylvania Court House, North Anna, Cold Harbor, Second Petersburg - in all of these cases Grant launches major attacks, sometimes more than once against the same positions, and the result is serious one-sided casualties. It could perhaps be excused as inflicting attritional damage, but the problem is that in so doing he wrecks the offensive morale of his army - a complicated process involving the interaction of several factors, including many of the most aggressive men becoming casualties and the men of the army as a whole deciding that their general is willing to send them on futile attacks. It's the same process which generates the WW1 French mutiny, for example.

This is what I been saying all along, the Confederacy was dug in and probably should have lasted way longer than 4 years.
 
This is what I been saying all along, the Confederacy was dug in and probably should have lasted way longer than 4 years.
Not so sure about increasing the longevity of the Confederacy. Once all the ports are list then it makes no sense to grow any kind of crops. Cotton can no longer be exported and growing food crops means being paid in monopoly money. Therefore slaves are essentially worthless at least for agricultural work.
The whole purpose of the war is to preserve and expand slavery but after Wilmington Harbor is siezed why bother having agricultural slaves?
Leftyhunter
 
Not so sure about increasing the longevity of the Confederacy. Once all the ports are list then it makes no sense to grow any kind of crops. Cotton can no longer be exported and growing food crops means being paid in monopoly money. Therefore slaves are essentially worthless at least for agricultural work.
The whole purpose of the war is to preserve and expand slavery but after Wilmington Harbor is siezed why bother having agricultural slaves?
Leftyhunter

I know all this and I appreciate your feedback. But I was talking purely from strategic and tactical maneuvers. The Confederates were dug in like an Alabama tic.
 
I know all this and I appreciate your feedback. But I was talking purely from strategic and tactical maneuvers. The Confederates were dug in like an Alabama tic.

Unlike the Western Front in the Great War, the rebels were almost always in positions that could be turned. And those positions that couldn't be turned ended as sieges or evacuations.
 
Unlike the Western Front in the Great War, the rebels were almost always in positions that could be turned. And those positions that couldn't be turned ended as sieges or evacuations.

But like we already concluded, not without the expense of a lot of men wasted.
 
Examples of the kind of pattern I mean.

"I must order a charge to save appearances" (Fort Donelson) - this worked, because it happened that the Confederates who'd tried to break out hadn't yet reoccupied their fortified positions. If they'd reached them there would have been, well, the usual result of such things.
Shiloh - Grant doesn't intrench his troops and suffers from a massive attack which makes much more progress than it would have done if his troops had been disposed for defence.
Vicksburg - Grant reaches Vicksburg, orders an attack off the line of march, then a couple of days later orders a full assault. This is held off and causes a lot of the casualties of the siege on the Union side.
Champion Hill - this is the other time it worked, because the Confederates had positioned the fortified line wrong.
Spotsylvania Court House, North Anna, Cold Harbor, Second Petersburg - in all of these cases Grant launches major attacks, sometimes more than once against the same positions, and the result is serious one-sided casualties. It could perhaps be excused as inflicting attritional damage, but the problem is that in so doing he wrecks the offensive morale of his army - a complicated process involving the interaction of several factors, including many of the most aggressive men becoming casualties and the men of the army as a whole deciding that their general is willing to send them on futile attacks. It's the same process which generates the WW1 French mutiny, for example.
Attacking in line across a broad front was tactically deficient. It could work if weather was bad, or if attackers had cover until the last few hundred yards.
The tactical problem of using artillery power to shoot at a section of line, without shooting over the heads of friendly troops, had a solution, JFC Fuller speculated, but working out the geometry and the signalling was too hard with the war going on.
 
This is what I been saying all along, the Confederacy was dug in and probably should have lasted way longer than 4 years.
Not really? The ACW is unusually long compared to other wars of the period - every other Great Power war either involves some big battles followed by peace terms or some big battles, a single round of sieges, and then peace terms.

Frankly this is because of a lack of Union competence in high command more than anything - the capability and strategy were there to win the war in 1862, but a lack of commitment was the problem.
 
The war in the east was won when Sheridan created a huge numerical mismatch in the Valley and pursued the Confederate flanks. The same thing happened at Five Forks, and Grant had remade the Army of the Potomac into an army of pursuit. But Sedgwick, Warren, Hancock and Burnside were gone.
 
Attacking in line across a broad front was tactically deficient. It could work if weather was bad, or if attackers had cover until the last few hundred yards.
The tactical problem of using artillery power to shoot at a section of line, without shooting over the heads of friendly troops, had a solution, JFC Fuller speculated, but working out the geometry and the signalling was too hard with the war going on.
It's not a question of the nature of the attack so much as the quality of the troops. Remember that the average open-fire range in the Civil War for infantry troops was less than ~150 yards... the problem is psychology, because it asks a lot more of lower quality troops to make them attack works (and a lot less to have them defend works).

Attacks in dense column would have been superior for the partially trained troops of the Civil War - it's the solution used by the French.
 
Not really? The ACW is unusually long compared to other wars of the period - every other Great Power war either involves some big battles followed by peace terms or some big battles, a single round of sieges, and then peace terms.

Frankly this is because of a lack of Union competence in high command more than anything - the capability and strategy were there to win the war in 1862, but a lack of commitment was the problem.
Politics, in the east. In the far west, in naval operations, and then along the Mississippi, wherever the politicians were not involved, things went much better for the US.
 
The war in the east was won when Sheridan created a huge numerical mismatch in the Valley and pursued the Confederate flanks. The same thing happened at Five Forks, and Grant had remade the Army of the Potomac into an army of pursuit. But Sedgwick, Warren, Hancock and Burnside were gone.
I think that bit about remaking the Army of the Potomac might not actually be the case, as such - I suspect that what actually happened was that Grant gave the Army of the Potomac months to regenerate the morale they'd had so brutally reduced by the bloodletting of the Overland.

Armies naturally recover over time; it's when someone does it quickly that you have to try and find another cause.
 
It's not a question of the nature of the attack so much as the quality of the troops. Remember that the average open-fire range in the Civil War for infantry troops was less than ~150 yards... the problem is psychology, because it asks a lot more of lower quality troops to make them attack works (and a lot less to have them defend works).

Attacks in dense column would have been superior for the partially trained troops of the Civil War - it's the solution used by the French.
You know more about tactics. Fuller wrote that there were tactical solutions, given the US advantage in artillery. Advance in columns, per Upton, was one possible solution.
 
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