At 09:20 AM 7/29/2003 -0400, you wrote:On Monday, July 28, 2003, at 09:16 PM, Gautam Mukunda wrote:
--- Bryon Daly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:Oddly, the guy wasn't at all racist, as far as I could tell, and he was from Wisconsin, so I don't think it was about him protecting his southern pride. The only thing I can think of is that some favorite teacher taught him that the Civil War wasn't about slavery, and he'd latched into it and refused to let go despite the facts.
The racism is in the past now, fortunately enough, but it's effects linger, of course. I would blame (and it is _blame_) the claim that the Civil War was not about race on the "Lost Cause" school of Southern historians, who were desperate to redeem their (genuinely) valiant struggle in an equally (genuinely) bad cause, and so decided to claim that it was about something other than slavery, and deified Robert E. Lee (surely the most overrated General in American history, much to the detriment of the truly extraordinary Grant, who can surely make a case for greatest non-Washington general in American history).
I completely agree with you about Grant.
My List of Great American Generals (in order): Washington Grant Sherman Marshall Vandergrift Gray
Feel free to agree or not.
Grant came from hardscrabble circumstances and personal failure to lead the greatest army of its time to complete victory.
john
Didn't we (the list) have the discussion before?
I'd put Pershing above Grant, remove Sherman, add Winfield Scott. I seriously don't know Vandergrift and Gray.
Kevin T. - VRWC
We did have some discussion. Feel free to participate or not in this one.
I once would have put Pershing on this list, but I've changed my mind based on his tactical performance in WWI.
Archer Vandergrift won the Medal of Honor for his leadership of the 1st Marine Division on Guadalcanal, and was appointed Commandant of the Marine Corps shortly thereafter. He was primarily responsible for transforming the Corps from a small force that fought America's "banana wars" into the world's premier amphibious assault force at the end of WWII. Al Gray was Commandant of the Marine Corps in the 1990s, and was responsible for focusing the Corps on maneuver warfare, which they brilliantly carried out in Afghanistan and Iraq.
As for Sherman, his march to the sea is a greater achievement than Scott's march on Mexico City. To give Scott his due, his work in the War of 1812 was brilliant and his plan for defeating the Confederacy in the Civil War (ridiculed at the time) was the correct strategy. But Sherman anticipated and conducted total (or industrialized) warfare decades before any other Western general. Indeed, had *any* of the French or British generals paid the slightest attention to his strategy and tactics, WWI might not have been so bloody.
john
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