Are Sherman and Grant the first modern generals?

Are Sherman and Grant the first modern generals?

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Grant, sure. Sherman's "Hope the enemy keeps running away and extending your supply lines while burning shit down" strat would have gotten memed on pretty hard if he was fighting people who could actually threaten his flank.

Sherman gets that designation because he supposedly was the first general to destroy the enemy's economy in a war.

I'm highly skeptical of that claim, hence my use of "supposedly".

I've never heard of Grant described as a particularly modern general.

I should say Grant could be considered the first modern AMERICAN general. Pretty stupid to say that Civil War generals were in any way "modern" compared to their European counterparts.

Well I'll be motherfucked.

Shut the thread down boys, we have our answer.

>implying

Sherman didn't decide to march to the sea willy nilly.

He got the census data from the 1860 census, as well as agricultural yields from 1850-1860 from the . Sherman tallied up the numbers, figured out that his army could live off the land, and marched them through the most agriculturally productive areas of Georgia. As far as I know, that's the first times that a general used hard data for the execution of a battle plan.

However, I think this is just because Sherman had the chance to do it first. Helmuth Von Moltke created far more detailed operational plans based on even more data. But Von Moltke didn't get to pull the trigger on his plan until after Sherman's march, although the planning was done before the American Civil War even started.

>Pretty stupid to say that Civil War generals were in any way "modern" compared to their European counterparts.
Idk man if you're an uber patriot you could make a case for the proto-trench warfare that they arguably started. As well as Sherman's "hit them where it hurts" strategy, and being fueled by a titanic industrial backing compared to your adversaries.
Perhaps they were the first modern American-style generals.

I don't think Grant has much in common with modern American generals. He fought sieges, and didn't really care if his men died if the enemy army lost a greater percentage of their men.

That kind of attitude has been unacceptable in American generals ever since.

>Grant the butcher meme
reeeeeeeeeeeeeee Grant continued to try to flank the Army of Northern Virginia and finally sieged Petersburg because if Petersburg fell Richmond fell
Sherman's hit them where it hurt strategy was a horrible idea because Grant was already sieging Petersburg by that point in the way anyways in Lee was going to surrender sometime in 1865 for sure. All he did was burn down land that was just going to be back in the Union a year later. That is in hindsight however, I liken Sherman's decision to the dropping of the atomic bombs, he saw it as the fastest way to end the war with the least suffering.

No.
And there may be some other dudes I forgot, but Sherman and Grant didn't bring nothing in warfare.

>He got the census data from the 1860 census, as well as agricultural yields from 1850-1860 from the . Sherman tallied up the numbers, figured out that his army could live off the land, and marched them through the most agriculturally productive areas of Georgia. As far as I know, that's the first times that a general used hard data for the execution of a battle plan.
Ah, that helps explain the "first modern general" claim

Napoleon was the king of enlightenment era warfare, but he wasn't a modern general.

how is 1860s line infantry warfare considered modern

*cucks you with artillery*

Mehmet II attacked Constantinople with artillery, does that make him a modern general?

muh gatling guns that's why

Get the fuck out of here with your 3rd grade argumentation skills.

except without sherman's campaign lincoln's election was going to go terribly and there might have been a good chance of the copperheads winning the election and the US getting bifurcated.

>I don't know what modern means so I resort to name calling

Because there's more to war than the way people shoot at each other. In this case, the two biggest contributor's to the war being "modern" were the importance of the railway networks and the importance of manufacturing centers. It's hard to wage war when your troops are slower to the front, so is their food & equipment, and you run out of guns & uniforms because you don't make shit.

Yes, also Grant is severely underrated. Currently reading the new Grant biography. The man was brilliant when not suffering from alcoholism and failing at everything except marriage and war

maybe, both were masters of logistics and attrition warfare. many of their contemporaries were still obsessed with the idea of the decisive battle as the means of winning a war even though the nature of the American civil war made such a battle virtually impossible.

Joe Johnson on the Confederate side was also skilled with logistics and attrition.

The Atlanta Campaign, probably the biggest Union victory of the war, was wrapped up about 2 months before the election.

Sherman's March was important because it quashed the idea in Confederate minds of wide-spread guerrilla warfare.

10/10....Grant and Hamilton are probably among the most underrated US figures.

No but what they achieved is still so sweet.

>Shermancunt shows up to bait Dixiefags
Can you please not ruin at least one Civil War thread.

>how is 1860s line infantry warfare considered modern

The Civil War wasn't "modern" because of its line infantry and such, that was still mostly Napoleonic in nature.

It was the first modern war because of trains, telegraphs, photography and all kinda other modern stuff.

Grant was the best general of the Civil War desu. All the "Butcher Grant memes" spouted by Sherman posters and Dixiefags trigger me.

> The Cletuses entered this thread under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bait everyone else, and nobody was going to bait them. In the last thread, the thread before that, and half a hundred other threads, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.

Nigga what the fuck? I have not seen one Dixiefag in this thread, and then you come in here baiting and shit. Do not get me wrong, I hate you both the same. You both larp as men better then yourselves. You are pretty much Wheraboo tier larping as men better then yourselves. For real man why do you guys have to come in EVERY Civil War thread and turn it into a shit show?

Oh, almost forgot, you, that is Shermancunts, remind me of those Tankies who tout Zhukov as the greatest general in the war while ignoring people like Rokossovsky

Not true at all. Lee and Johnston telling their men to not do that is what stopped that from happening.

>dixiefags eternally anally annihilated based uncle billy ran a union train up their tender rear echelons

Mang, there are no Dixiefags in this thread (yet) please just don't summon NBF and ruin a pretty okay thread with your shitposting.

I'm not so sure about modern for Grant, but he was a significantly better general than McClellan.

>claims user has 3rd grade argumentation skills
>all he's done so far is post memes and name-call
hmm

>The man was brilliant when not suffering from alcoholism
Even the alcoholism thing is highly overblown, and was basically a meme invented by Southern historians.

Grant basically got drunk in front of the wrong people (like McClellan), and officers being the jealous heel biters they are, spent a lot of time rumoring about his drinking.
Also
>While his victories at Henry and Donelson earned Grant higher command, they also carried the accusations of his drinking to a wider audience. Reporters and officers jealous of Grant’s fast rise, as well as disillusioned civilians, used the perception of Grant as a drunkard in an attempt to explain the horrific losses suffered at the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862.
>Shocked by the casualties of what up to that point was the war’s bloodiest battle, many newspaper reporters wrote articles critical of Grant’s command. These criticisms fed the rumors that Grant, who many believed had been forced from the Army because of his love of the bottle, had been caught drunk and off guard by Confederate General Albert Sydney Johnston’s surprise attack
historynet.com/ulysses-s-grants-lifelong-struggle-with-alcohol.htm

Grant made it a business to never get drunk before, during, or after a battle or when performing his duties as a soldier.

US Civil War noob here.

I thought Lee was the best General in the war, what did Sherman and grant do that made them more modern than him? I've heard it said that if the CSA had half the industry the union did, Lee and Jackson would have wiped the floor with the north?

Lee was far too focused on winning a decisive battle that would force the North to surrender. Grant and Sherman realised that decisive battles are usually not possible in a modern, industrial war. The only way to win, as they figured out, was to grind your enemy down by destroying his manpower and his industry. Grant's siege at Petersburg and Sherman's March to the Sea were perfect examples of this.

Sherman aimed to destroy the confederacies economy, as such that "Scavengers flying overhead would need to carry rations with them."
Grant would invest much more of his army into battles and wouldn't balk nearly as much at causalities as other union generals, and as a result many battles he was in had higher casualties for both sides, grinding out confederacy manpower. The butcher title comes from taking 52,788 casualties in the thirty days in the Overland Campaign.

>Hamilton

Grant did not want to take that many casualties but the terrain and how experienced the Confederates had become at building entrenchments made taking high casualties an inevitably. Many Union generals would have simply retreated if they took so many casualties. Also, Grant repeatedly tried to flank Lee but Lee kept redeploying in time to stop him. That is until Grant was able to get close to Petersburg and Lee was still able to get there in time to prevent the city falling immediately. Grant was probably the best general at maneuvering an army at a strategic level and was not even that much worse at the tactical level than Lee. Look at the West were Grant was actually doing pretty well casualty wise vs his Confederate counterparts. When he gets put in command of the East he accomplishes in less than a year what multiple Union generals could not do before him. Bringing Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia into a fight that it cannot win. Yes it was bloody but it was never not going to be given the terrain and what he was up against, probably the most experienced army during the war and Lee, a general who was most certainly Grants equal. Also people tend to forget Lee lost a higher percentage of his army, just over half of it infact, does that mean Lee does not care about casualties? No it does not, it means Grant knows he HAS to win this campaign, it means Lee knows he HAS to stop Grant.

As another side note, I can almost not believe how absolutely hostile the Northern press was at almost every general that was appointed in the East.

Except Germany and Denmark was fighting trench warfare in 1864, which supposedly saw the first use of barbed wire in war.

Vicksburg turned into trench warfare in 63, so it's a coinflip.

Essentially. My own view on the matter has been that the 1860-70s shaped the way WW1 was fought, looking at the American civil war and the various border wars between Germany and their neighbors.

McClellan was good at training the army and from stopping it from collapsing after the First Battle of Bull Run but he just did not want to fight

Lincoln didn't win because of Sherm, he won because the DNC was a fucking shit show and McClellan was as always a moron who adopted a peace platform despite not even wanting to.

To be fair an astonishing number of the Union generals were actual shlubs who invited contempt. it's not surprising that there were some false positives in the media's running assclown diagnosis protocol.

>Scott
old and fat and sick as fuck, literally could not sit a horse (even though his grand strategy was fine)
>MccLELlan
where to even start with this guy? fucking egotist psycho, laughable pussy who rode public opinion to the top job and procrastinated endlessly until repeatedly threatened with being fired. never came within ten miles of a fight if he could help it
>Halleck
"a first-rate clerk" --Abe Lincoln
>Buell
ditto
>Rosecrans
how do i moved divisions
>Pope
moron
>Porter
the Salacious Crumb to McClellan's Jabba the Hutt
>Banks
>Butler
>McClernand
gibe comand pls i report yuo to DNC

Yes

>implying it wasnt Thomas Jackson

If you are going to list a Confederate general I think Forrest has a better claim to that. Sad that his name is now being used by one of the worst posters on this board.

Forrest was a great cavalry general but by that token, I don’t know how you can call him modern. More of a throwback really.

>Napoleonic in nature
At the beginning. Towards the end it became more what you saw in WWI

The only difference that unlike WWI, it was still somewhat possible to do a frontal assault, albeit bloody, and with enough numbers you could prevail.

I mean how he sought to cause havoc behind enemy lines by destroying supplies and disrupting communication. Putting emphasis on "Getting there first with the most" and rapidly moving around the enemies flank.

Rokossovsky is one of the most underrated generals in all history, tough bastard survived being arrested in the purges just to be ignored

It’s for sure a good cavalry tactic and one he made great use of, but I don’t know that I’d call it modern. It’s late medieval chevauchée or razzia by any other name.

That is fair enough, I was just saying what he was doing seemed more modern than what Jackson was doing. Honestly I do not really see any of the generals of the Civil War being very "Modern" sure the the type of trench warfare they fought later in the war could be considered modern but I do not consider the generals themselves to be that.

I wanted to say that but i didnt want to invoke the namefag

>Hamilton

That's not how that word works

That's a tactic that's as old as shit. Khalid Ibn-Al-Walid back in the 7th century was doing exactly that.

Grant and Sherman are modern generals because they understood that destroying the enemy army in the field was just a contributor to winning the war. By the 1860's, states had grown robust enough that destruction of field armies alone was not enough to cause a country to sue for peace. Industry and army organization had grown to an extent that armies could be trained and raised very quickly.

Lee was a great battlefield commander, but he was utterly unable to convert his battlefield victories into political victories. Then when you look at Lee, he overly prioritized destroying the Army of the Potomac to the detriment of other major war objectives. He's still under the idea that you destroy the enemy field army and they sue for peace.

Not him, but it's far from clear how Lee could have pursued any other course of action. What "Major war objectives" could the CSA have gone for instead?

After the First Battle of Bull Run push on to DC

Lee was not in command at First Bull Run.
Also you are wrong, destruction of field armies is what ended the war, not Sherman's march. Lee was going to surrender in 1865 and the war would end without Sherman because Grant had cornered Lee. The war ended because Lee surrendered to Grant which caused Johnston to surrender to Sherman. The capture of Lee's army ended the war. All Sherman did was make it harder for the South to get back up on it's feet after the war. I do not blame Sherman for this though as in his eyes he believed that it was necessary to end the war with the least amount of suffering possible.

Lee could definitely be much more conservative with his very limited supply of manpower. In a number of his "victories", Lee only lost slightly less irreplaceable men than his Union opponent.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Days_Battles

Lee "won" the peninsula campaign, but he lost as many men as the Union did.

The South lost after Vicksburg, which was a prolonged siege rather than a field battle. Rather than trying to relieve Vicksburg and pincer Grant, Lee marched into the North looking for a fight with a superior force.

They could have "won" if Lincoln lost the 1864 election but even if he did I doubt a peace could have been made. Also, what came with losing Vicksburg? Losing 33k men. You cannot just damage the enemies industry and win. It is especially stupid to damage an enemies industry that you want to take back anyways. Also do you propose Lee goes to Vicksburg and leaves Virginia undefended? At best he could send one corps and I doubt that would be enough to relieve the siege, if it even gets there in time.

"won" "victories" Lee won (without quotation marks) those battles yes. Just because he took high casualties because he had to does not detract from them. It is like saying Napoleon "won" Wagram because he took high casualties. Or Grant "won" the siege of Petersburg.

And then what? So now the war drags on longer, and Union losses are less, weakening what resistance there is to their own war weariness. How does this put the CSA in a better position? What's the plan, and how is making a longer, less intense war in pursuit of it?

The seven days are commonly acknowledge as tactical blunders, but losing the cap would have been an even worse one.

>he supposedly was the first general to destroy the enemy's economy in a war.

wrong on so many levels

>he won because the DNC was a fucking shit show

They were competing without most of their states, it'd take massive blundering for the repubs to lose that election.

>Then when you look at Lee, he overly prioritized destroying the Army of the Potomac to the detriment of other major war objectives. He's still under the idea that you destroy the enemy field army and they sue for peace.

So you are saying he should have fought a war of attrition against an enemy with vastly superior logistics? A decisive victory early in the war invalidates the north's long term advantages. Those advantages only deepen the longer the war progresses. The "Decisive Battle" phenomenon isn't just a bunch of old generals meming for the hell of it, this is a plan borne of desperation.

A long war of attrition is unwinnable for the south because of the North's greater pools of manpower, industry, and wealth. Those are distinct from logistical advantages (which they held as well, most notably in the form of a much more developed railroad system).

Please do not use the term military logistics if you don't know what it means.

> > Napoleonic in nature
> At the beginning. Towards the end it became more what you saw in WWI

Field fortifications had been in use since forever, it was primarily the non-military technology like trains and telegraphs, that made the Civil War the 1st modern war.

But for the Union and Confederate troops slugging it out on the front line, it wasn't much different then it had been for Napoleon's troops, until breech loading rifles came on the scene in large numbers at the end.

Was the war in the eastern theater a meme? Seems like kazillions of people and southerners died over there in a bunch of useless ass attempts to take capitals, while the confederacy got fucking choked to death by failing to defend the Mississippi because all its good armies and generals were off shitting all over Virginia.

It was only two attempts, three if you count Early in 1864.

Attrition just refers to a rate of loss, which can be applied to any quantitative measure, there's no reason to be this pedantic.

It wasn't a meme, it was just a draw for the most part. Either side taking the capital of the other would be serious, maybe even decisive. Plus, especially for the CSA, Virginia is by far the wealthiest and most populous state and the easiest one to project force around. You can't afford to leave your defenses there weak, for either side, and there's not that much area you can move in, what with the extensive field fortifications being dug everywhere.

That doesn't make it unimportant, it just makes it impossible to progress.

It annoys the hell out of me when people use the term logistics for some vague out of battle factor, as opposed to what it actually means, which is nothing more or less than the ability to transport men and material. Even if the north did not have "vastly superior logistics", a long war of attrition is unwinnable for the south.

You seem to be misunderstanding. Logistics is the ability to transport men and material; the point of attrition is the exceed that ability.

Not necessarily. The point of attrition is that SOMETHING breaks by the constant destruction of men and machines. The transportation capability is not necessarily the weak point, and quite honestly, was not the one for the CSA.

Consider the siege of vicksburg. A siege by definition is the interdiction of logistics. Consider the Anaconda Plan. Once the Union blockade was completed, the entire confederacy could be considered under siege. You forgot that resources can be obtained by trade. The Confederate armies were notoriously under supplied, surely they could have used the extra food or clothing or boots that world markets could provide in exchange for cotton, which they had absurdly decided to stockpile just before the blockade went into effect. You don't have to interdict supplies from reaching the front if you moved up the chain and prevented them from reaching the enemy in the first place.

>Once the Union blockade was completed, the entire confederacy could be considered under siege.
No, because they had freedom of internal movement. They were well, blockaded.

>You forgot that resources can be obtained by trade
No, it's simply irrelevant to the point.

>The Confederate armies were notoriously under supplied, surely they could have used the extra food or clothing or boots that world markets could provide in exchange for cotton, which they had absurdly decided to stockpile just before the blockade went into effect. You don't have to interdict supplies from reaching the front if you moved up the chain and prevented them from reaching the enemy in the first place.
You seem to be missing my point. I am not saying that CSA's logistics were unhampered, nor that the failing of such was a detriment. But ultimately, it is not why they lost the war.

Consider the closest thing to the CSA having a plan of wearing out the northern will to fight. That's not a logistical limitation. Consider how when Lee finally surrenders, there isn't any manpower or resources worth mentioning to send, even if they had the transportation capacity.

A war of attrition does not necessarily have to be won by the side with a logistical advantage. And there are numerous other points of possible failure, of morale, of manpower, of overall equipment and industry, of territory, of political will, of diplomatic credibility, etc; all of which can be worn down by attritional combat and all of which are distinct from logistical realities.

The statement that a war of attrition favors the north because of a "vast logistical advantage" is incomplete at best and inaccurate at worst.

If the Union lost DC, it would be a disaster. Same for the confederacy losing their capital.

> it wasn't much different than it had been for Napoleon's troops

It's considerably different, since rifled muskets are accurate out to 300+ meters while Napoleonic muskets were accurate only out to 75 or so if you are lucky. Napoleonic battles usually had more deaths from melee and routing than shooting, while the vast majority of Civil War deaths are by gunfire.

> > it wasn't much different than it had been for Napoleon's troops
> It's considerably different, since rifled muskets

The point being, they were still armed with single shot muzzle loaders and still marching in mass formations straight into massed musket and artillery fire, just like Napoleonic troops.

Rifle muskets didn’t make the Civil War modern, railroads, telegraphs, ironclads, etc. did.