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The North was stronger on paper, but the South had better generals. A number of initial battles happened fairly close to Washington DC (remember DC is directly

The North was stronger on paper, but the South had better generals. A number of initial battles happened fairly close to Washington DC (remember DC is directly adjacent to Virginia, and Virginia was a Confederate state!), so things were touch-and-go early on. Furthermore, at the time of the split, there were still lots of officials in the US federal government who were sympathetic to the cause of the South. I don't believe the Confederacy had to worry as much about the loyalties of its officials. In any case, even after the immediate threat to DC was addressed, the Union wasn't making a lot of progress during the first years of the war, and there were a lot of people in the North who wanted to give up and let the Confederacy exist as an independent country. The North's eventual win came at very high cost. In my opinion, we should memorialize Union soldiers more than we do. There was so much discussion of Confederate monuments the other year, but no one ever mentions the many Union monuments across the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Union_Civil_War_monuments_and_memorials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Union_Civil_War_monume... A lot of people paid the ultimate price, fighting for the promise that "history will remember you for helping to end slavery!", and yet we don't remember them that much. It actually makes me rather upset to be honest.

hef19898 3y ago
Which Confederate General was actually better? The only decent one would be Lee. No idea where this idea comes from, the idea that the loosing side in a war had better Generals. For the Wehrmacht it's the same. People tend to forget thatbthise Generals lost their battles, and the war, at the end.
- brailsafe 3y ago
  I don't even know much about the U.S civil war, but are you saying you don't understand how a great leader could be fighting for an unlikely victory?
  - hef19898 3y ago
    No, I am saying that there os a narrative around Generals of the loosing side being "better" than those on the winning side. Which, more often than not, is just plain wrong.
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  > The only decent one would be Lee. Lee had a habit of couching orders as if they were suggestions or requests. The South's most effective general may have been Jackson. For the first half of the war, the Union's top general in the east was McClellan, who was useless. [Edit] McClellan didn't fight in the west. And I spelled his name wrong. [Edit 2] Lee overruled Longstreet, who wanted to flank the Union's right. Lee insisted on a frontal assault. That decision led directly to Picket's disastrous charge. I don't understand why some generals are so averse to flanking actions. Is it because they are somehow considered cowardly, or "just not cricket"? Flanking actions are often decisive, and sometimes even the threat of a flanking action can critically disrupt enemy operations.
  - pdonis 3y ago
    Not just McClellan, but also McDowell, Pope, Burnside, Hooker...all failures. (Meade at least gets credit for holding back the Confederacy at Gettysburg, but even there he failed to follow up the victory by pursuing Lee's army, instead allowing it to escape back across the Potomac.)
- bee_rider 3y ago
  I suspect the losing side often ends up with “better looking” generals because they end up fighting defensively. If you lose long enough you end up in familiar terrain, with a sympathetic populace, and your supply lines get shorter! Eventually the war gets truly hopeless. Without any feasible objectives to go for, the loser has incredible latitude to try and stay alive and inflict harm. Never any need to take a tactically disadvantageous battle for strategic reasons if there’s no strategic hope, after all!
- pdonis 3y ago
  > Which Confederate General was actually better? The only decent one would be Lee. Not at all. Longstreet, Jackson, Forrest, Stuart, Early (and that's just off the top of my head)...all of them routinely outperformed their Union counterparts in individual battles and smaller engagements for the first couple of years of the war. Until Grant came into his own and was able to properly empower others like Sherman and Sheridan, the Union didn't really have any competent generals (although Meade does deserve recognition for holding the line at Gettysburg). The reason the Union still won was, first, logistics--as the saying goes, battles can be won by generalship but wars are won by logistics, and the Union had superior logistics (for example, running rail lines on the fly to support its armies). And second, the fact that the Confederacy failed to follow up key victories: for example, after the first battle of Bull Run, Washington, DC was pretty much there for the taking, but the Confederacy never tried. I suppose one could put that down to generalship, but I think it's more a matter of overall policy as regards the goal of the war: the Confederates weren't trying to conquer the Union, they were just trying to be independent from it. (Similar remarks could be made about the Wehrmacht generals: no, they didn't lose all their battles, they actually won quite a lot of them, but because of the insane overall leadership they were under, and because once the war became protracted they were at a disadvantage in logistics, they ended up losing the war.)
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Wars are won on logistics, absoluteoy. And guess who is responsible for that? Hint, it isn't Corporal Smith.
    - pdonis 3y ago
      Generals play a role, sure (and that includes generals who don't play a battlefield role at all), but they also need proper support from their government. Much of the credit for the Union logistics effort has to go to Stanton, the Secretary of War. The Confederates had nobody even close in their government, and didn't really see the value of it until it was too late.
      - hef19898 3y ago
roenxi 3y ago
> ...and there were a lot of people in the North who wanted to give up and let the Confederacy exist as an independent country. Just because something was done doesn't mean it was a great idea. There is an uncomfortable counterfactual to explore of whether it a better idea to let people split up and self govern. It is very much a history-written-by-winners moment to assume it is self evident that people have to be conquered for their own good. A remarkable number of countries that weren't invaded by Union soldiers also gave up on slavery. It isn't economically feasible, anyone who tries to use it is going to get shredded by capitalists.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  Fundamentalism can keep going without concern over what is tenable from a capitalist viewpoint. There is Russia, North Korea and Iran right now, to just name some prominent examples. (Then there is the uncomfortable juxtaposition of the words "self govern" within a country that kept slaves. The slaves of course aren't counted as self governing.)
  - roenxi 3y ago
    And we're also better off for the US not invading Russia, North Korea and Iran. That is what was so suspicious about the US Civil War, the US is traditionally fairly heedless of terrible things happening unless it smells an economic benefit from being involved. The traditional tool for ending slavery has been prosperity. That worked pretty much everywhere it was tried - including North America. Armies are not a tool of creating prosperity, so it seems a bit suspicious that this was the best path in the Southern US. Obviously the States gets to sort itself out with no involvement from anyone else, but it is a very open question whether holding itself together was the best choice.
    - actionfromafar 3y ago
      I'm not saying invade this or that. I'm saying, if the South had persisted as a state, it could very well have lived on way past its prime as a fundamentalist slave state.
high_5 3y ago
> The North's eventual win came at very high cost. In my opinion, we should memorialize Union soldiers more than we do. There was so much discussion of Confederate monuments the other year, but no one ever mentions the many Union monuments across the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Union_Civil_War_monume https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Union_Civil_War_monume... A lot of people paid the ultimate price, fighting for the promise that "history will remember you for helping to end slavery!", and yet we don't remember them that much. It actually makes me rather upset to be honest. I'm not from the US but I find it really ironic that even from the outside it appears the US culture views this phenomenon as normal: the losers (Confederates) highly priced the traditional values (just take a look at the personal position of general Lee), thus those values got denigrated because they got associated with racism, taking along the ability of the winners (Union) keep the memory and gratitude to those who gave their lives for. I actually live in a country torn by a civil war (disputed to this day!) and man, it is tragic. The wounds seem to never really heal, they just reopen along line where the scars used to be at the next big dilemma in society.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  I’m not sure what traditional values you mean… The North and the South had sort of different dispositions. The North grew out of New England and New York, the kernel is sort of Yankee values, and then expanded outwards. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yankee https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yankee I’m not sure what the South’s traditional values are, I mostly associate them with a sort of slow-paced agrarian society, but I’m not sure to what extent that’s just a modern invention.

hef19898 3y ago

Which Confederate General was actually better? The only decent one would be Lee. No idea where this idea comes from, the idea that the loosing side in a war had better Generals. For the Wehrmacht it's the same. People tend to forget thatbthise Generals lost their battles, and the war, at the end.

brailsafe 3y ago
I don't even know much about the U.S civil war, but are you saying you don't understand how a great leader could be fighting for an unlikely victory?
- hef19898 3y ago
  No, I am saying that there os a narrative around Generals of the loosing side being "better" than those on the winning side. Which, more often than not, is just plain wrong.
denton-scratch 3y ago
> The only decent one would be Lee. Lee had a habit of couching orders as if they were suggestions or requests. The South's most effective general may have been Jackson. For the first half of the war, the Union's top general in the east was McClellan, who was useless. [Edit] McClellan didn't fight in the west. And I spelled his name wrong. [Edit 2] Lee overruled Longstreet, who wanted to flank the Union's right. Lee insisted on a frontal assault. That decision led directly to Picket's disastrous charge. I don't understand why some generals are so averse to flanking actions. Is it because they are somehow considered cowardly, or "just not cricket"? Flanking actions are often decisive, and sometimes even the threat of a flanking action can critically disrupt enemy operations.
- pdonis 3y ago
  Not just McClellan, but also McDowell, Pope, Burnside, Hooker...all failures. (Meade at least gets credit for holding back the Confederacy at Gettysburg, but even there he failed to follow up the victory by pursuing Lee's army, instead allowing it to escape back across the Potomac.)
bee_rider 3y ago
I suspect the losing side often ends up with “better looking” generals because they end up fighting defensively. If you lose long enough you end up in familiar terrain, with a sympathetic populace, and your supply lines get shorter! Eventually the war gets truly hopeless. Without any feasible objectives to go for, the loser has incredible latitude to try and stay alive and inflict harm. Never any need to take a tactically disadvantageous battle for strategic reasons if there’s no strategic hope, after all!
pdonis 3y ago
> Which Confederate General was actually better? The only decent one would be Lee. Not at all. Longstreet, Jackson, Forrest, Stuart, Early (and that's just off the top of my head)...all of them routinely outperformed their Union counterparts in individual battles and smaller engagements for the first couple of years of the war. Until Grant came into his own and was able to properly empower others like Sherman and Sheridan, the Union didn't really have any competent generals (although Meade does deserve recognition for holding the line at Gettysburg). The reason the Union still won was, first, logistics--as the saying goes, battles can be won by generalship but wars are won by logistics, and the Union had superior logistics (for example, running rail lines on the fly to support its armies). And second, the fact that the Confederacy failed to follow up key victories: for example, after the first battle of Bull Run, Washington, DC was pretty much there for the taking, but the Confederacy never tried. I suppose one could put that down to generalship, but I think it's more a matter of overall policy as regards the goal of the war: the Confederates weren't trying to conquer the Union, they were just trying to be independent from it. (Similar remarks could be made about the Wehrmacht generals: no, they didn't lose all their battles, they actually won quite a lot of them, but because of the insane overall leadership they were under, and because once the war became protracted they were at a disadvantage in logistics, they ended up losing the war.)
- hef19898 3y ago
  Wars are won on logistics, absoluteoy. And guess who is responsible for that? Hint, it isn't Corporal Smith.
  - pdonis 3y ago
    Generals play a role, sure (and that includes generals who don't play a battlefield role at all), but they also need proper support from their government. Much of the credit for the Union logistics effort has to go to Stanton, the Secretary of War. The Confederates had nobody even close in their government, and didn't really see the value of it until it was too late.
    - hef19898 3y ago

roenxi 3y ago

> ...and there were a lot of people in the North who wanted to give up and let the Confederacy exist as an independent country. Just because something was done doesn't mean it was a great idea. There is an uncomfortable counterfactual to explore of whether it a better idea to let people split up and self govern. It is very much a history-written-by-winners moment to assume it is self evident that people have to be conquered for their own good. A remarkable number of countries that weren't invaded by Union soldiers also gave up on slavery. It isn't economically feasible, anyone who tries to use it is going to get shredded by capitalists.

actionfromafar 3y ago
Fundamentalism can keep going without concern over what is tenable from a capitalist viewpoint. There is Russia, North Korea and Iran right now, to just name some prominent examples. (Then there is the uncomfortable juxtaposition of the words "self govern" within a country that kept slaves. The slaves of course aren't counted as self governing.)
- roenxi 3y ago
  And we're also better off for the US not invading Russia, North Korea and Iran. That is what was so suspicious about the US Civil War, the US is traditionally fairly heedless of terrible things happening unless it smells an economic benefit from being involved. The traditional tool for ending slavery has been prosperity. That worked pretty much everywhere it was tried - including North America. Armies are not a tool of creating prosperity, so it seems a bit suspicious that this was the best path in the Southern US. Obviously the States gets to sort itself out with no involvement from anyone else, but it is a very open question whether holding itself together was the best choice.
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    I'm not saying invade this or that. I'm saying, if the South had persisted as a state, it could very well have lived on way past its prime as a fundamentalist slave state.

high_5 3y ago

> The North's eventual win came at very high cost. In my opinion, we should memorialize Union soldiers more than we do. There was so much discussion of Confederate monuments the other year, but no one ever mentions the many Union monuments across the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Union_Civil_War_monume https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Union_Civil_War_monume... A lot of people paid the ultimate price, fighting for the promise that "history will remember you for helping to end slavery!", and yet we don't remember them that much. It actually makes me rather upset to be honest. I'm not from the US but I find it really ironic that even from the outside it appears the US culture views this phenomenon as normal: the losers (Confederates) highly priced the traditional values (just take a look at the personal position of general Lee), thus those values got denigrated because they got associated with racism, taking along the ability of the winners (Union) keep the memory and gratitude to those who gave their lives for. I actually live in a country torn by a civil war (disputed to this day!) and man, it is tragic. The wounds seem to never really heal, they just reopen along line where the scars used to be at the next big dilemma in society.

bee_rider 3y ago
I’m not sure what traditional values you mean… The North and the South had sort of different dispositions. The North grew out of New England and New York, the kernel is sort of Yankee values, and then expanded outwards. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yankee https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yankee I’m not sure what the South’s traditional values are, I mostly associate them with a sort of slow-paced agrarian society, but I’m not sure to what extent that’s just a modern invention.