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throwback to when I was in 5th grade and hyperfixated on the civil war and for some reason our elementary school library had a Lee biography that I checked out and also learned about stonewall Jackson and thought the Confederates had better generals and only lost because of the unions economic strength. Oh and also of course I learned at the time Lee only joined the CSA to protect his family or whatever.
Thankfully my dad wasn’t that type of Republican or I could have ended up quite the chud
my sibling is the type who reads shit like this in a book and then acts like it MUST be true just because it was in a book.
any time they start saying some shit like this and i refute it they go on about “their books” and im like dude i could write a fucking book and put anything in it. that doesnt make it more true than the other books that say the exact opposite
Yeah but do you consider it was a thick book with no pictures and also many sources (sources: the ramblings of a few random civil war reenactors)
Whatever is written in a book is right — such is still the mentality of culturally backward Chinese peasants.
It won’t do!
It won’t do!
You must investigate!
You must not talk nonsense!
One of them won a war. The other lost a war. Pretty self-explanatory smh
Robert E. Lee has a car named after him. Not sure if that’s worth much, though.
Them Duke boys are in a whole heap o’ trouble
Especially since I think at least one of them is a Chud
East Tennessee preppers and ati-gov tendencies? The whole family is probably chuds.
The way I’ve see it summed up by smarter history nerds than me. Lee was probably the better general on the micro level, as in he was better at winning single battles, Grant was the better macro level general as he was better at managing a whole campaign.
…and the macro level is where being a good general and being a conqueror is decided lol
Civil War general discourse is all kind of a wash. There were competent and incompetent officers on both sides, with the Union having a better strategy overall developed by Grant and Sherman.
If you’re a general in a modern army your job is making sure the right people are leading the battles and that logistics are running smoothly. You might be great at other things, but that’s not your duty.
Given that one received the surrender of the other, we have one metric to measure who was the better general.
With that said, if you swapped their resources and roles (imagine US Grant a confederate general and Lee a union general), Lee would probably be victorious on the union side. Wars are won with logistics, not with daring and clever generals.
And just cuz I was curious, during their Wilderness Campaign in 1864, when they regularly fought head to head, Grant and Lee attritioned each other’s armies down by about 50% each. Grant reduced the Confederate fighting force from 60k --> 30k whereas Lee reduced the union forces from 105k --> 50k. Lee’s leadership did a better job killing union troops then Grant’s did killing confederate troops. Sure, defender’s advantage etc.
It’s not entirely dissimilar to the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany. The Nazis killed a lot of Soviets with their “skilled generals” but weren’t skilled enough to not lose the war
Anytime you have to attack a defended, fortified position, you’re going to take more losses than the defender. This is especially true during the ACW, which was mainly trench warfare not at all dissimilar to WWI (which was why WWI was so awful). The strategy at the time was to dig trenches, which means the only way to overrun a trench in an era without tanks was to throw bodies at it.
