Dan Snow's History Hit - Civil War Rivals: Robert E. Lee vs Ulysses Grant

Episode Date: June 12, 2024

100 years ago, in the spring of 1864, the Overland Campaign ignited a ferocious clash between two titans of US military history: Ulysses S. Grant, the rugged and relentless Union general, versus the Confederate general Robert E. Lee, a suave southern officer and master of strategy.Theirs was a hotly-contested rivalry, and the debate still rages on to this day - who was the better general? To help you decide, we're joined by Jonathan D. Bratten, an engineer officer and command historian in the Maine Army National Guard.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW - sign up at https://historyhit.com/subscription/.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

160 years ago, in June 1864, the Overland Campaign was raging. It pitted two of America's most famous Civil War generals against each other. General Robert E. Lee, the southern gentleman from Virginia who led Confederate forces in the East, or his nemesis, his antagonist, the man from a very different background, the man that would go on to become President of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant. And so, in this episode, we decide to figure out who's the best commander. We're going to ask that big question. Was Robert E. Lee quite as effective as many of his fanboys would have us believe? Was Robert E. Lee quite as effective as many of his fanboys would have us believe?

Does Ulysses S. Grant really deserve so much credit for the destruction of the Confederacy? Well, here we go. By the way, I should say this is a listener request from Ed Wolcott. It's a fantastic idea, so don't forget to email us at ds.hh.historyhit.com with any subjects you'd like to hear more about. And it could become an episode or even a series or even a TV show, now that I think about it.com with any subjects you'd like to hear more about. And it could become an episode or even a series or even a TV show now that I think about it. We love hearing from you. So where to start? Well, we could talk about how on April the 9th, 1865, there was quite the to-do in the handsome brick-built home of Wilmer Maclean in the village of Appomattox Courthouse

in central Virginia. Now, interestingly, the owner, Wilmer, had lived very the village of Appomattox Courthouse in central Virginia. Now interestingly, the owner, Wilmer, had lived very near Manassas Junction, much further east, and the first battle of the US Civil War, the first battle of Bull Run, had happened, well, it had raged across his farm, the property that he owned. One of his outhouses had actually been destroyed by a cannonball. To escape the trouble, he'd moved west to Appomattox, but now that war had found him once again. But this time, rather than opening salvo of that war, he would witness its final few minutes. That morning, the first important visitor to arrive at Wilma Maclean's house was General Robert E. Lee, commander of the Army of North Virginia. He was dressed in his best uniform, his ceremonial uniform. He looked characteristically

smart, and he'd said to himself apparently that morning, thinking he was going to be taken prisoner. If he was, he wanted to look his best. Robert E. Lee, by that stage, was General-in-Chief of the armies of the Confederate States, but he was the man who commanded day-to-day the army of North Virginia. By contrast, when his counterpart arrived, he cut a very different figure. Ulysses S. Grant arrived spattered in mud. His uniform was old and threadbare. It was worn. It was government issue.

He had government issue sackcloth trousers, very muddy boots. And the only hint of his rank or his importance was a little tarnished shoulder strap. He was the commanding general of the United States Army. And he was about to complete the task that had been given to him to batter the southern states, the confederate states, into submission. The two men had met before. It had been, well, almost 20 years before. They'd fought alongside each other in the same army, that US army, during the Mexican-American War. And instead of getting straight down to business, they chatted. They did a bit of reminiscing, they talked about their shared memories of the time

when they'd met before. But eventually they got to it, they got down to business. And in that room, that morning, they negotiated the surrender of Robert E. Lee's army, the last serious field army of the Confederacy. The Civil War effectively ended in that room. Grant's terms were generous. The Southerners were not treated like defeated, disdained enemies. They were able to go home with their heads held high. They were to be fed from US government supplies. And as Lee left the house to ride away and break the news to his men, Grant's troops began cheering, but Grant ordered them to stop immediately. They, the Confederates, their defeated enemy, were now once again their countrymen, and Grant said he had no interest in exulting over their downfall.

Now don't forget Wilmer McLean, the owner of the house. He was able to say in later years, the war began in his front yard and ended in his front room. Even with the onset of peace, he still suffered loss and damage to his property. That's because lots of Grant's staff, his aide de camp, his team, basically emptied the front room in which they'd met. As soon as the generals left, they took everything as souvenirs. They picked it clean. Now, allegedly they paid for it, but that's not entirely clear from the records. Grant and Lee would meet again. In fact, they would meet again at Wilma Maclean's house. They sat on the porch talking and meeting with their illustrious and some of their less

illustrious subordinates. They discussed the war that they'd been through. They met men like General Longstreet, like General Pickett, famous for Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg. What I would give to be a fly on the wall for some of those conversations. But eventually they left. They went their separate ways. Lee went back to Richmond, which had been the capital of the Confederacy. Grant went to Washington, D.C. And as they walked off, they also marched into the pages of the history books. Both these two men have acquired reputations as being two of the titans of US military history. And interestingly, they couldn't be more different. Lee came second in his West Point class, from the West Point Military Academy.

He was a hugely polished gentleman. He's the closest you can get in America in the 19th century to a member of the aristocracy. And he's now seen as the embodiment of the sophisticated, skillful, suave, southern officer-gentleman class. Whereas Grant had been a mediocre student. In fact, he was a bit of a failure in his life before the Civil War. He didn't perform that well as a career soldier in his early years of service. He certainly didn't perform that well as a civilian. He was a businessman. It all went wrong. And yet he became a superb, rugged commander. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. He really masterminded the destruction of the Confederacy's military force in the field. And because they were antagonists, because they

both commanded their respective forces, obviously they're frequently compared and contrasted, their personalities, their skills, their qualities, their drawbacks. And so that's what we're going to do on the pod today. It's going to be great. In June 1864, these two men were slogging it out in the terrible Overland Campaign. So now is the perfect time to talk about their respective strengths and weaknesses. And to talk me through it, I've got a great friend of the pod here, a great friend of mine. He's Jonathan Bratton. He's an engineer officer. He's a commandist. He works at West Point. He knows what he's talking about. He's written a wonderful book, To the Last Man, a National Guard Regiment in regiment in the great war 1917 to 19 it's great to have jonathan back on the pod

talking about this massive subject enjoy no black white unity till there is first and black. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Jonathan, thanks very much for coming back on the podcast, buddy. It's great to be back on here again, Dan. It's like coming back home for a visit. Oh, well, thank you for saying that. Well, let's talk about these two.

Well, are they both giants? Let's see. Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee. Let's start with their upbringing, their birth and upbringing. Do they kind of encapsulate the very sort of diverse talent pools that the US military is so famous for? I think that's a fairly accurate representation. I mean, one of them comes from what we'd sort of consider first families of the nation. the idea of really what Thomas Jefferson was doing when he established West Point, the U.S. Military Academy at all from one single background. Of course, also looking at it from a purely objective standpoint, he was also like, well, if I establish it, then all the officers will also be of my political party. So we can ensure that as well. But no, I think you have two individuals coming from two very, very diverse backgrounds, two very almost polar opposite backgrounds. But that is also sort of the American story at that time, is this idea that you can be somehow more than was predicted for you.

So let's start with Lee before we join them together during the Civil War. Let's start with Lee. He couldn't be from a more blue-chip family, as you say. His father was a dashing cavalryman who fought in the revolution, had a political role as well, knew George Washington. He married a distant cousin of George Washington. I mean, as far as the early United States go, you kind of would call him an aristocrat. You would. You absolutely would. I mean, you can make the whole argument that the Southern Confederacy, or even the idea of Southern nationalism as it came to be in the

1840s and 1850s, is predicated around this idea that you have these first families, especially these first families of Virginia, that are as close as the US is going to get to an aristocracy. And that doesn't necessarily mean money, because you have lots of wealth in the North, but it tends to be reflected differently. So Lee is coming from a very privileged background and still, to his credit, he goes and looks at a military career, but he doesn't leave that privileged background behind. Throughout his entire military career, he maintains his land in Virginia and maintains the property that he has, the people that he owns throughout his time in the U.S. Army, going so far as to break some regulations to do so.

He was not authorized an enslaved person at West Point when he was the superintendent because New York was a free state, and yet he brought some property with him, causing no end of controversy then and now. But that part of his upbringing is very pertinent to sort of who he is as a person. And you mentioned West Point, he has a stellar career. Like he was a one to watch even as a student. Yes. Yeah. He did nothing wrong, which is amazing because West Point's really boring. If you ever go there, it's just, everything's gray. There's nothing to do.

So most cadets usually turn to make your own fun with either pranks or alcohol or both. And Lee didn't, which is almost unnerving. I would like for him to show some signs of humanity every now and again, but he doesn't. He does very well academically, graduates, I believe, top of his class, if not the top, and is set up for a very good career as an engineer officer in the U.S. Army. West Point was created to be an engineering school because after this altercation that we had with you guys in the early 1800s, we quickly realized that we didn't actually know how to build forts or make cannons or really do anything. So after the American Revolution, and then also looking at the War of 1812, we had to do a lot of reforms to create a very, very strong engineer corps. Well, after all, as you know, buddy, infantry officers don't need any training. They just

need to learn how to stand bolt upright as the bullets whiz past their ears. Whereas engineers, you've got to train those boys up. So Ulysses S. Grant, he also goes to West Point. But as you said, very different upbringing. His dad was a tanner. And he works as a kid handling horses. He works on farmland owned by his dad. But he does get into West Point as well. He doesn't make as strong an impression there. After teaching at West Point, I would like to say US grad is the average cadet. And they're the ones that I like the most, which is such massive bias. But they're the ones who they don't necessarily fit in there. Because why would you, if you sort of come to that life naturally, and you feel like this is exactly what you want to do, then what you want to do is not have any personality,

not have any free time, not enjoy things like arts or culture or just having fun, enjoy literature. You don't really find joy in anything other than drill, your education, and for most of them, it was a lot of math. Yeah, so Grant doesn't totally fit in. Where he does, it's lonely. He's very far away from his family. He doesn't kind of see himself there. He sees himself more as himself, which I think is important.

I would always tell cadets, don't lose sight of who you are. And he maintains sort of his grasp on who he is himself through riding and through horsemanship. That's sort of his great joy up there on the Hudson. It is very bleak, about like five months of the year. So you have to find something that brings you joy. And so for Grant, it was horsemanship and horseback riding. And he always, his classmates commented on how attuned he was to his horses. They both end up fighting the Mexican-American War. Now, this isn't a podcast about the Mexican-American War. It is fascinating. But just very briefly,

tell me what kind of action the US Army and then these two individuals would have seen during that war. Yeah, so the war sort of goes through two phases. You have the amateur phase and then the professional phase. The amateur phase is directly after Mexico attempts to retake its breakaway state of Texas. Texas declares itself an independent republic and then almost immediately realizes that it's going to lose and asks to be part of the United States. And so there's this flood of volunteers. We have these volunteer armies that are fighting and it goes OK, but it's not the best. The last sort of year of the war, a smaller professional U.S. Army does an amphibious landing at Veracruz. It's sort of amazing. I think the largest amphibious operation the U.S. military ever conducted to that date.

And no one dies in it, which is insane. I mean, usually you're going to have like five people die because a boat tips over, but somehow no one dies, which is amazing. people die because a boat tips over, but somehow no one dies, which is amazing. Lee is a part of that landing operation outside Veracruz as one of General Winfield Scott's engineers, Winfield Scott being the overall commander of the U.S. invasion force of about 14,000 to 15,000 troops. He oversees the placement of batteries for the siege of Veracruz and will continue to be one of Scott's trusted engineer advisors through the campaign. Grant has less direct touch with the high command, so to speak. Lee is right there on the commanding general's staff, so that direct impact. Grant's sort of out there getting little bits of war experience at the battles surrounding Mexico City. So they're both gaining a lot of different experiences. Lee is gaining experience with working with high command.

Grant is sort of realizing that he's pretty decent at war, but also isn't sure that this is what he wants to do with his life. So the Mexican-American War, the War of 1848, as we often call it, is sort of a formative moment for both of them, as it is a formative moment for a lot of U.S. Army officers who are going to find themselves fighting on opposite sides coming up in the next 12 years or so. And so for Lee, it's most formative because it gets him noticed by high command, specifically the guy who's going to go on to become the general in chief of the entire U.S. Army in the 1850s and 60s. Okay, and Jonathan, that Mexican-American War, it's not only important in the careers of Grant Lee and these other soldiers you talked about, but it's a huge moment in the history of the Republic itself, isn't it? Because now America's captured a lot of new terrain off the Mexicans, America's expanding in other directions generally.

and other directions generally. And there's a huge struggle now, existential struggle, over whether these new territories, these newly acquired territories, should be states in which the institution of slavery is legal. And that's going to lead us on the road to war. It is, and it's been there since the get-go. It's been there since the Declaration of Independence. You had individuals walk out not signing it, saying it's not strong enough, it doesn't go far enough, it doesn't condemn slavery. It goes into the Constitutional Convention in 1787,

where basically South Carolina holds the convention hostage until saying that they in the southern states will not ratify until slavery is protected under the Constitution. This is not a new thing. It's sort of baked into the American system. And so you have two schools of thought. You have many of the founding generation believed that slavery would simply fade away. It would just go away. And in fact, one of the sort of the original draft of the constitution, it was meant to be essentially outlawed and the slave trade banned by 1820. This, of course, does not happen. It is far too economically valuable for the upper class in the South, in certain parts of the South. I shouldn't make blanket statements. But through the 1830s and 40s,

as the United States begins to expand West, you know, with the Louisiana Purchase in the beginning of the 19th century, the big question comes, where does slavery go? So if we've decided that slavery is just going to die out, well, it can't if we keep bringing it to new territories. So the anti-slavery factions are trying to prevent it from moving into the new territories, whereas the slavery faction is trying to move it into as many territories as possible. And in fact, there's this wild movement through the 1830s, 40s, and 50s, where random private Americans go off invading Central American countries and Caribbean states to try to take them over and turn them into slave states. taken from in the War of 1848, to include California. The United States is massive, it is touching two coasts, and it is having a significant identity crisis, is a nice way of putting it, that the war brings the slavery issue to a head probably faster than it might have done

as everyone tries to figure out what do we? And how do we prevent conflict? Because slave states had already made threats of conflict going all the way back to Andrew Jackson, South Carolina's first attempt to secede, where he basically said, yeah, you do that, and I'm going to curb stomp you. So with the addition of all these states, now the slavery issue is heating up considerably. now the slavery issue is heating up considerably. So slavery and its extension in a growing America is causing enormous political divides. When does civil war begin? And when is it clear that men like Grant and Lee have to take a side? The on paper fact is that war begins once the 11 seceding states form the Confederate States of America, attempt to form a national government and fire on South Carolina, fires on Fort Sumter on April 12th, I believe, 1861.

That puts the government in a position of, well, we have to do something because now there's shooting. And that something is a call for 75,000 volunteers to put down the insurrection, then beginning in several southern states, which causes a chain reaction of events where slave states that had not seceded, such as Virginia, now do so. And that is putting a lot of pressure on army officers, such as Lee. Now, there've already been a lot of issues inside the army through the 1850s and up to the 1860 election, which is sort of the crux point of the war with slave states believing that President Lincoln is not going to actually uphold the laws, even though he said that he was going to. But, you know, there's no accounting for taste. And what this does is it puts a crisis of conscience on a whole bunch of officers in the U.S. Army, all across the Army. Then you've got a wide variety of reactions, and not all of them are universal. A lot of people look at Lee as a foregone conclusion.

When Virginia secedes, well, he's got to go back to his state because there's this idea that the identity of being from a state is more important than the identity of being from a nation. There were nine colonels from Virginia in the U.S. Army in 1861, and one of them went to Virginia. The rest didn't. That sort of right there is a very stark statement that it was not due to a state identity. Officers across the Army from southern states had a lot of decisions to make, and a lot of them decided that, as one of them said, you know, there's nothing on my commission that says the state of Virginia. It says the United States of America.

Some officers did not see that way. One officer in Texas took his entire garrison and just surrendered it to the Texas authorities, including the arsenal and all of his weapons. And officers had to literally escape to the north to present their services to the Republic at the beginning of the war. And of course, lots of West Pointers who decided the army was not for them. That's fairly common. You know, you do your term of service, kind of see that interwar army, and you're like, man, I don't know if I can stare at another prairie in Nebraska or the Dakotas for another 10 years, which is what most of the army is doing out there, working on the Great Plains in the pre-war period.

And they get out of the army. And that's where Grant was. Grant was out of the army at that point. And so he is presented with also another difficult situation of, what do I do? Do I go and do this military thing again? Do I wait and see? Grant was not a radical abolitionist, but he did believe strongly in the preservation of the union. And so that will eventually see him offering his services as well to the US government. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit,

talking about Grant and Lee. More coming up. Dan Snow's history hit. Talking about Grant and Lee. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries.

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Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. Lee quite rapidly finds himself commanding the, well, one of the main forces of the Confederates, the Army of Northern Virginia, and he enjoys some success and he invades a couple of times the North, trying to bring it into the war by striking at Washington or taking out the nerve center of the Northern states of the Republic.

Grant has a slightly more roundabout route, doesn't he? How does Grant find himself holding senior command? Well, I mean, both are interesting parallels because Lee, well, one, Lee is offered a senior command in the US Army by Winfield Scott, his old mentor from the Mexican War. And Lee waffles on it and then says, you know, I can't do it. I have to stay true to Virginia. Scott, himself a Virginian, says, well, I have no room in my army for equivocal men. So Lee offers his services to Virginia as I think of the two day gap between Lee offering his services to Virginia and Virginia seceding, joining the Confederacy. And so Lee's commission quickly goes from Virginian to

Confederate. He doesn't do well. Lee does not do well in the first year of the war. He gets his butt kicked by George McClellan of all people fighting in Western Virginia. How embarrassing, how embarrassing. And then a freak round wounding another Confederate commander during the American Peninsula campaign, not the OG Peninsula campaign of the Napoleonic era, gives Lee his first opportunity for really senior field command with the Army of Northern Virginia, which he will be tied to for the rest of the war. And he doesn't do great there either. What he does do is he manages to freak out his old opponent, George McCullen, enough that the Army of the Potomac withdraws down the Virginia Peninsula and leaves off its campaign. Lee's greatest strength is probably the quality of the commanders that he has presented and the fact that he is very good at reading the terrain of Northern Virginia, where all of his victories come from. So don't let him leave the state because it doesn't do well. It doesn't go well for him. Grant is given a regimental command. I mean, he starts out literally almost at the

bottom, a regimental command, then a brigade of volunteers. And in 1862, he gives two key victories, taking the river forts on the Tennessee River, Forts Henry and Donaldson. I think we can look at this as being kind of indicative of what Grant is going to do. And we took a look at these two commanders and their qualities, right? And their sort of their nation's strategic objectives. Lee has to not lose. You know, if you look at the Confederacy, they do not have the manpower, they do not have the materiel, they do not have the ability to wage an offensive war against the United States. What they can do, however, is make invasion very,

very costly and basically hope for a negotiated settlement. Really hope that Palmerston over there in England gets so tired of the whole thing that he's like, all right, look, you two stop fighting. We need to buy some stuff from you again. Instead, of course, England just plants cotton in Egypt and India and ruins the entire Southern economic strategy in one go. So, Lee has to not lose significantly. As long as he has an army in the field, much like Washington, he's going to do okay. Unlike Washington, he doesn't seem to understand this. And he continues to fight a defensive offensive war where he is on the defensive. He fights in interior lines. He fights inside

Virginia, but is always attacking, which is very costly in manpower and is very costly in leaders. Searching for that great Napoleonic decisive battle. Grant is looking at terrain and logistics and realizing as the larger national war plans of the U.S. Army and the U.S. Navy are to cut off the Confederacy's lines of supply and lines of communication, most of which are rivers, because the Confederacy's railroad of supply and lines of communication, most of which are rivers, because the Confederacy's railroad is practically nil. So when Grant takes Henry and Donaldson, it's a much needed win in 1862 that the U.S. Army doesn't have a lot of wins in 62. So it

gets heralded as this big deal. What it also shows is the way that Grant is going to be looking at the war throughout, which is strategically. Grant doesn't just see a single theater. Grant sees the war in its holistic parts. He's going to have some missteps, of course, but his great victory is going to be in 1863 when he takes the key fortress on the Mississippi River of Vicksburg, which splits the Confederacy in two. You know, a lot of historians say by 63, the war in the West is practically over because it frees up these two large field armies, U.S. field armies, just go rampaging into Georgia and threaten South Carolina by 64. So Grant is looking at terrain, is looking at logistics, is looking at how do I bring about

all these elements of national power to bear on my enemy. Lee is thinking, how do I gain the one great Napoleonic victory that will bring my enemy to a negotiating table? So you've got Grant out there in the West, Shiloh people have heard of, a very bloody battle in which Grant is successful eventually. He captures Vicksburg and then Chattanooga later in 1863. But now while that's going on, and we'll get to them then head to head in a second, because Grant is then plucked and given the main job over in the East, the main job of taking on Lee and finishing off the Confederacy. But while that's going on in 1863, we've got Lee, I like the way you describe it, another one of his defensive, offensive plays. He marches into the northern states and it ends up

at battle, people will be familiar with the Battle of Gettysburg. How should we judge Lee at Gettysburg? Yeah, that's a great question. So when talking about Gettysburg, especially on the battlefield with participants, if I'm taking groups there, I always ask, why would Lee invade in 63? Strategically, the Confederacy is presented with a pretty serious dilemma. You've got an army penned up in Vicksburg. Surely Lee could have led a relief force. Davis suggested it. Confederate President Jefferson Davis suggested moving Lee and part of his army to that theater of operations to provide some relief. Lee instead makes the decision that he's going to invade. He has this cult of victory going on that's very interesting. A lot of people look at Chancellorsville, which happens in May of 1863 as Lee's greatest victory. It's his biggest numerical disparity. I wouldn't

say it's his greatest victory. I think second bull run in August of 1862 is probably his greatest victory, probably the closest he gets to almost smashing a field army. Chancellorsville, he defeated an outpost of the Army of the Potomac. I mean, half of the Army of the Potomac wasn't even engaged. It was a failure of US generalship, I think more than Lee's greatest victory. Regardless, Lee sees this as he has this level of invincibility. He also needs to get the war out of Northern Virginia. Confederate logistics is so bad that they're having trouble just getting food for the army from Virginia itself, from Southern Virginia to Northern Virginia, let alone from Alabama or Louisiana or Georgia or South Carolina. This idea of a grand battle. So if he can't lose a battle because he hasn't lost a battle since Antietam, and even he didn't consider that a loss, he considered that a draw, even though he failed to achieve a single,

not even one, strategic or operational goal with that. This is what happens when you have a tactics-based mindset where you only see a tactical win as everything. So if he thinks, Lee thinks that if he can get a tactical win north of the Mason-Dixon line, north of Virginia, then he can use that, maybe if he takes a northern city, he can use that as a bartering point with the U.S. government to get peace. There's a little bit of a delusion going on with this. I don't know what he would do. Philadelphia or Pittsburgh or even D.C. itself, that would just tend to get everyone madder. He wouldn't be able to use it as a bartering chip for anything, considering half of the Confederacy is in US hands at this point. And so what he does is he takes the incredibly limited resources of the Confederacy and throws them away in a three-day battle that

reveal a lot about Lee that, more about Lee than I think he wanted people to know. Well, one, he had dysentery throughout, so he was not comfortable or making the best decisions. Two, so his orders were usually discretionary. And you can only do a discretionary-based order system if you've developed a lot of trust with your subordinates, if you're able to kind of mind meld with them a little bit. And Lee was pretty good at this with some of his subordinates prior to the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1863, where he loses his key lieutenant, but also a whole bunch of subordinate officers. It's not just Jackson who gets killed. Several other key Confederate leaders are killed or wounded.

He loses a bunch of division and brigade commanders. So by Gettysburg, he's got all these people in new positions. And so when he tries to issue discretionary orders, he has officers below him who don't know what to do with that. And he doesn't know what to do with that either. He doesn't know how to change his leadership style. And so what he does is he ends up being very static. I mean, he doesn't move around a lot on the field versus his opponent, George Meade,

who's literally at every single point of friction trying to figure out how do we gain victory here at each of these points. Lee is soundly defeated at Gettysburg. Each of his offensives completely fails. He takes massive losses that he cannot replace. He expends so much ordinance that it also cannot be replaced and has to retreat once

more into Virginia. And really from that point on, his army, while potent, a potent threat to be dealt with in Virginia, is not going to be a major threat to the North again. Lee's invasion of Pennsylvania is such a catastrophic blow to the Confederacy's ability to do forced generation, to essentially man their army because of the massive losses that he takes there, that he is doomed to fighting essentially a defensive war inside the Confederacy until the end. And unfortunately for Lee, the man who Lincoln appoints to lead the American army, the American Republic's attack on Lee is Ulysses S. Grant. Yeah, and it's very interesting because Grant does not take charge of the Army of the Potomac. He just moves his headquarters to the Eastern Theater and sort of oversees the war from there. And he's presented with this very interesting, uncomfortable command moment of, hey, Meade, you're still in command of the army. I'm just also here too. Don't worry about it. I'm definitely not looking over your

shoulder. But to all accounts, according to historian Stephen Sears, who's sort of the expert in all the minutiae of Union high command in the East, they got along well, and they sort of saw the war similarly. Grant was not used to fighting in the environment of the East. If you've been around the battlefields of Northern Virginia, they're different from the Western theater. We've got a lot of perpendicular rivers. So you're always fighting along the lines of one river or another. And you also have areas of terrible visibility and line of sight in the wilderness, for example, which is just a large forested area in northern Virginia. It still remains kind of like that today.

And Grant's first fight in this, he's left sort of going, man, why aren't we able to maneuver very well? And they're like, yeah, the terrain we're in, like we didn't want to fight here. It takes him a little while to get his feet under him. in. Like we didn't want to fight here. It takes him a little while to get his feet under him. But the most notable moment I think of the 1864 campaigns is after the three-day fight with the wilderness, which is just horrific. I mean, it's just bloody close-in fighting, troops blundering into each other in the woods, firing into each other, lots of fratricide on both sides. The woods catch on fire. It's pretty horrific stuff. And it leaves nobody holding a

clear advantage. Grant is able to look at the whole thing and go, my object in this is not to hold a piece of ground. It is to destroy Lee's army. That is the center of gravity. And so rather than resting and trying to figure out another route to Richmond, which is what happened most of the time prior to 1864. He begins just moving south again. And there's this great moment where he's got his horse sitting on the side of the road and his troops are marching past and they realize that they're taking the road south. They're not going north. And his troops begin to cheer him because they realize we had a draw, we had a tough fight, but we're going to continue moving south. We're going to continue moving to find Lee's flank, which is what he's going to do to batter Lee into submission and outmaneuver him

from point to point to try to gain sort of that local tactical advantage, while operationally, he's pinning Lee down into that one theater. And so Lee is now confronted with an opponent. He can't just count on them, gives them a bloody nose. They back up, wait a month or two to figure out how they're going to get to Richmond now and then reinvade. Now there's no let up. Now it's a constant battle of maneuver. And of material as well.

Is Grant just relying on the fact that he's just got access to vast reservoirs of troops, of shells, of supplies, and it's just a savage bludgeoning? No, it's not, because they don't. They don't have, the United States doesn't have unlimited access to manpower, manpower being one of the chief issues, because yes, it has massive manpower supremacy compared to the Confederacy, but those people are needed everywhere. I mean, you've got Sherman who's marching through cutting Georgia in half going from Atlanta to Savannah. You've got Thomas's army occupying Tennessee and fending off

a really stupid invasion by John Bell Hood, one of Lee's former subordinates, who really is just, he's a great general for the United States because he loves frontal attacks and just smashes his army into nothing. And then you've got troops that are garrisoning all these captured points. You've got troops that are operating on the coast. So this is a massive army and not everything can be spared just for the Virginia theater. So Grant is often painted as a butcher. Grant is painted as someone who just head on attacks all the time. The attacks at Cold Harbor, in particular, are an aberration. The war in Northern Virginia in 1864 is bloody.

And the campaigns that are waged in what we call the Overland Campaign of 1864 towards the siege of Petersburg are unlike the rest of the Civil War, not because of this attacking head-on. It's just because Grant doesn't stop the campaign. There's no break in the campaign because Grant realized that if he takes a break in the campaign, Lee also gets a break. So he has to carry this on as hard as he can. And the only break that they get is eventually when Confederates are able to get into the city of Petersburg, man the fortification, and the siege

of Petersburg begins. There's a couple of frontal attacks to see if they can do a swift seizure of the fortifications. That doesn't work. They settle in for a siege. And by this point of late 1864, Lee's small diminishing army between 30,000-40,000 troops is penned in in Petersburg while there are Union armies just rampaging through the rest of the Confederacy. For all intents and purposes, the Confederacy is defeated by late 1864. Lee makes an attempt to break out of Petersburg. That goes horribly. Lee discovers what everyone discovers with French warfare, right? Just because you overrun the first line doesn't mean that you've won anything. He overruns the first line and then discovers that there's whole divisions in the second and third

line. There's no breakout that way. And so he has to slip out of Petersburg and try to carry on a war of maneuver, which is bad because that's what Grant is good at. Grant is actually very good at a war of maneuver because while he was holding Lee in Petersburg, he'd had subordinates out smashing Confederate armies in the Shenandoah Valley. He actually absolutely strips the Shenandoah Valley, making it no longer a logistical haven for the Confederacy. They'd operated there at will for four years. And so he's basically cutting out all these shaping operations that are aiding Lee while Lee is stuck there in Petersburg, unable to do anything, and also unable to see that he's been defeated. And I think this is one of the biggest things for me is when you're really looking starkly and honestly looking at the situation for the Confederacy by the end of 64. I mean, they are way worse off than Germany in 1918.

Like they are, a bunch of their key cities are in enemy hands and the ones that aren't are suffering from bread riots. There's mass desertion. Unionists are sort of ascendant in a lot of these places. The Confederacy is breaking apart and Lee is continuing to hold an army in the field. apart. And Lee is continuing to hold an army in the field mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes.

Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. Why does Lee have such a high reputation?

So this is one that a lot of historians argue about because we like to argue about everything, right? So Appomattox in April of 1865. Finally, you know, Lee has broken out of Petersburg and he's trying of Petersburg and he's just trying to get to any of his supply lines. And he can't. He's countered at every turn. He tries a disastrous attack at Sailor's Creek, which causes thousands of casualties. And then he is beaten to Appomattox Station by US cavalry. And he's penned in on all sides. He's leaking deserters by the hundreds and the thousands per day. He has this core element of his army that is almost at the point of delusion. Soldiers are writing home to their families at Appomattox saying, we think just one good push and we'll get those Yankees on the run. And they're literally surrounded on all sides. If Grant

had wanted to, he could have just said, yeah, exterminate the entire army of Northern Virginia, and it would have happened. But he doesn't. And in fact, he sends a message to Lee that says, you know, to prevent the further effusion of blood, suggest that you come to terms to end hostilities. Lee does not, is not the one to go forward and say, all right, I've been beaten. You know, I have to give up now for the good of my troops, for the good of the nation, for the good of everybody. The killing has to stop. It's Grant who does it. And then Lee surrenders. So this guy who's painted as the butcher, as a drunkard, turns out to be the one who actually can think strategically and also has empathy and magnanimity and is looking at the health of the nation and what's best for the nation in that moment. And Lee is not. So why is Lee considered a great general? Well, he's not at

first. He's given a lot of respect from his West Point classmates for what he's able to do in the war, for how he's able to hold off multiple U.S. commanders in the first few years of the war. But when he dies in 1870, I was reading through a lot of his obituaries in the North, and he's sort of rated as a decent tactician and a failed strategist, an obit sort of running an Army-Navy journal said, Lee wanted to be Napoleon, but could not think strategically, and so could not be Napoleon. And then in the years afterwards, Lee's reputation just continues to grow. And a lot of that is due to several different factors. One, the idea of reconciliation, the nation coming together, trying to find commonalities and bring everyone closer together. Well, you have to find

commonalities on all sides. So let's make Lee this great general, this great leader. People in the US, you know, we take a page out of British books. We kind of like losers. We like the stories of the cool failures, you know, and we like the underdog. So Lee sort of has this image of, yeah, you know, he was wrong, fought for a terrible cause, but, you know, he was really good at it. He seemed like a good guy. Over time, this becomes, well, you know,, fought for a terrible cause, but he was really good at it. He seemed like a good guy. Over time, this becomes, well, he fought for an honorable cause, and he was a virtuous and honorable gentleman. And in the South, his cult of personality is just obscene.

His grave looks like a, it's like Westminster Chapel, but like, make it gaudier. Like, more white marble. Even more. Make it even more pure lily white. Definitely no symbolism there, but the cult of personality takes off. And in the U.S. Army, there's a cult of personality with him as well, because he was a great tactical winner and we want to look at how to win tactically, often avoiding his inability to think strategically, tactically, often avoiding his inability to think strategically, his many, many operational and strategic failures. And then as an individual and as a person, you know, he was whitewashed for a good part of his life. You know, no one mentioned how he acted as a slave owner really until this century when people began to highlight, hey, you know, this guy was pretty rotten. He managed to

get two years off on the government's dime to go home and manage his enslaved property, which is not a thing most people got to do, even just managing any property. You don't really get to take a lot of leaves of absence. And then also looking at how he helped in the development of the lost cause, this idea of American narrative myth that the Confederacy, you know, it was, it's got a couple of threads. One, it was lost from the beginning. They never had a chance. The North had all the overwhelming resources, and there's no way whatsoever that the Confederacy could ever, ever, ever come to terms on equal terms. And he plays a role in that with his last message to his troops at Appomattox, where he tells them to go

home and says, you know, you were defeated by overwhelming resources. And this is a huge theme, you know, the Confederacy defeated by overwhelming resources. Confederacy was defeated because of some really hard marching, hard fighting U.S. Army personnel and a much better strategist and much sounder economic and foreign policy. Because, you policy because the little old George Washington and the Continental Army managed to hold off this massive power of Great Britain for eight years and gain independence. So it was definitely not a lost cause had the Confederates actually had any good foreign policy, economic policy, or strategic policy. The other piece of the lost cause is this idea that the war was not over

slavery. The war was for states' rights, and the war was for honorable purposes, and the southern states, it was their prerogative to secede. And this propels Lee into even more of a greater position of prominence as one of these chief lieutenants of the Southern Confederacy. And so he gets wrapped up in all these different narratives and he's a fascinating individual. And so people like to study fascinating individuals. And so this is why Lee gets sort of considered so strongly and looked at so strongly. It's very striking that revisionist history on Lee seems to have taken us closer to what contemporaries thought of him and his obituaries than many of the history books that have gone in between. It's fascinating how historiography goes. History is itself just always revising because times change, people change, not everything just

remains static. But yes, I think we're sort of coming into a more closer approximation of him as his contemporaries would have seen him. One great obit basically just said, yeah, he was a pretty decent general inside Virginia. Just don't let him leave the state. Fascinating. Well, thank you, Jonathan, for that discussion of these two towering figures in U.S. military history. What do they think of each other? They seem to have had a lot of respect for the other. Although Grant does have this great line in the Overland campaign when the staff officers are running around wondering where Lee is going to strike them next. And he just sort of loses his temper and says, Bobby Lee, Bobby Lee.

I'll hear about what Bobby Lee is going to do. I hear it as if he's going to do a double somersault and land in my rear. Let's talk about what we're going to do to him. Just the way that his mind worked was very resilient, you know, always looking at the next step and the next step and the next step, not just what's happening in the moment. They're very polite to each other. Lee dies in 1870. Grant goes on to become president of the United States. His tenuous presidency is tarnished by some corruption. He makes some poor decisions with cabinet members. But also, he's the guy who defeated Robert E. Lee. And there's a whole

section of the United States that was always going to resent him for that and going to try to tar him with any brush that they possibly could. Grant, his role in the lost cause narrative or how he's painted is as the butcher, as the drunk, as the incompetent guy who only defeated the valorous and chivalrous Lee because he had more manpower. Whereas if you look at it, why does he have more manpower? Well, because he's actually able to wage war, and it's something beyond a tactical level. And he turns out to be the magnanimous chivalrous one, as we see at Appomattox. And so their legacies are very interesting, Grant being sort of the everyman of the American story. And you would think more

people would be attracted to that, but no, a lot of people attracted to the sort of moonlighted magnolia is the idea of an aristocracy. Let's be honest, everybody wants, half this country just wants the royal family back. And this is the best we can do, I guess. Brilliant. Well, anytime you guys decide, you're more than welcome back into the fold. No, no, we're okay. We're okay. You guys keep them. You guys hang on to them. Thank you very much for coming on the show again, bud. Much appreciated. Thank you. It's always a delight and honor to to be able to do this you