The Generalship of Ulysses S. Grant

This is an older book by the British military historian J. F. C. Fuller. You can download it for free here.

He starts by telling us, “The greatest event in European history was the discovery of the New World : to-day [sic] it could only be rivalled [sic] by landing on a habitable planet. The greatest event in American history was the Civil War; greater than the Rebellion, because separation from England was sooner or later inevitable. The man who most greatly influenced this war was Ulysses S. Grant; not because he was so clear-sighted a statesman as Lincoln, or so clever a tactician as Lee, but because he was the greatest strategist of his age, of the war, and, consequently, its greatest general.” [p. xi] I think there’s a lot of truth to this.

In another cogent observation, he talks about how the great Union generals of the war developed. “Youth is a tremendous asset to generalship. When in war old men command armies, republics rock and kingdoms totter, for war demands the audacity and energy of youth. In the Civil War, the ablest generals were men who had been educated at West Point, and who had breathed the atmosphere of war in Mexico. Men of no formal school, no fixed doctrine, and of no set ideas. Men who in many cases, notably Grant and Sherman, had left the army years before the war, and m place of being asphyxiated by mess life had gained independence in the struggle for existence. The cramping military discipline of European armies, fettered by worn-out traditions, was unknown to them. The war found these men ignorant and unprepared, but seldom lacking in courage. They plunged Into errors in place of avoiding them, and were sufficiently young in mind to learn and profit by their mistakes, Grant is a wonderful example of this: of how a man of forty could begin with a Belmont and end with an Appomattox campaign. He was for ever learning, although not endowed with outstanding genius, through sheer industry, perseverance, and self-education he accomplished his end far more thoroughly than many a more brilliant but less determined general would have done.” [p. 8]

In discussing the reason for the war, Fuller wrote in 1929 what most historians today would no doubt agree with: “We now come to the real cause of the war, the necessity of slavery to the existence of the patriarchal and agricultural society of the South. The squabble over the meaning of the Union, the interpretation of the Constitution, and the liberty of each State to decide upon its own government, were but the weapons whereby slavery could be maintained or abolished. Slavery was not a secondary issue as many suppose, but the main issue, confronted by a new world order, namely, the culture of the Industrial Revolution. Here we are faced by two tangled sets of problems the ethical and the economic. Ethically, slavery cut the Southern States adrift from not only the rest of America but from the whole of Europe. Slavery was repugnant to the nineteenth century, and though the war was not fought to abolish slavery, but to put down resistance to the National Government, without slavery the war could not have taken place. Jefferson Davis, in his book, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, maintains that the South was fighting for equality and not slavery. The whole mass of Secessionist literature contradicts this statement, and Alexander H. Stephens, the Confederate Vice-President, himself declared that slavery was the corner-stone of his government.” [p. 22]

Fuller gives us a discussion of tactical development from Frederick the Great to the Civil War, including the effect of rifle muskets loaded with the minie ball. Theoretically his evaluation of the latter is correct, though in practice, as Professor Earl Hess’s book tells us, it wasn’t as much of an innovation. He then gets into the Civil War itself and discusses the actions in it. Regarding the conquest of Fort Henry, he writes, ” ‘There was one general always ready to move on receipt of orders’ — this was Grant. For the battle of Belmont he started within twenty-four hours of receiving orders; on his recent demonstration he had done likewise, in spite of the rain; for as he himself says: it “will operate worse upon the enemy, if he should come out to meet us, than upon us.” Now he did so again, and within twenty-four hours the embarkation of his troops began.” [p. 83]

Fuller looks at the battle of Shiloh and assesses blame for the United States forces being surprised by the confederate attack: “Whoever is in supreme command is ultimately responsible for failure. Halleck was in supreme command, but I consider that, as he was at St. Louis and had only recently taken over the Department of the Mississippi, it would be very unfair to blame him. Grant was at Savannah. He should most certainly have ordered his subordinate commanders to entrench themselves, and though he must share the onus of failure with Sherman, Sherman’s reports entirely misled him. Grant is to blame for not entrenching; for not appointing a second in command to act for him when he was away from Pittsburg Landing, and for not issuing instructions as to the action to be taken in the event of an attack. He was, however, not to blame for the surprise itself. In his Memoirs General Sherman writes: ‘I always acted on the supposition that we were an invading army; that our purpose was to move forward in force, make a lodgment on the Memphis-Charleston road, and thus repeat the grand tactics of Fort Donelson, by separating the rebels in the interior from those at Memphis and on the Mississippi River.’ All this is excellent, but then he adds: ‘We did not fortify our camps against an attack, because we had no orders to do so, and because such a course would have made our raw men timid.’ Such an excuse cannot be accepted, for the first order Sherman issued after the battle was that: ‘Each brigade commander will examine carefully his immediate front, fell trees to afford his men a barricade, and clear away all underbush for 200 yards in front, so as to uncover an approaching enemy. With these precautions we can hold our camp against any amount of force that can be brought against us.’ Sherman, rightly, was in the habit of sending out daily reconnaissances, and this fact makes his obsession all the more extraordinary. On the 4th, it was reported that the enemy were in considerable strength at Pea Ridge. A prisoner corroborated this information, but he would not believe him. On this same day one of Colonel Appier’s pickets was fired on, whereupon Appier ordered his regiment, the 53rd Ohio, into line, and sent his Quartermaster to inform Sherman of the fact. Sherman said to him : ‘Tell Colonel Appier to take his d-d regiment to Ohio. There is no force of the enemy nearer than Corinth.’ On the 5th, when Johnston’s leading troops were but two miles from his camp, Sherman wrote to Grant: ‘I have no doubt nothing will occur to-day more than the usual picket firing. The enemy is saucy, but got the worst of it yesterday, and will not press our pickets far. I will not be drawn out far unless with certainty of advantage, and I do not apprehend anything like an attack on our position.’ Grant was so misled by Sherman’s confidence, that when General Nelson arrived at Savannah on the 5th, and suggested that his division should cross at once to Pittsburg Landing, Grant promised to send transports on ‘Monday or Tuesday, or some time early In the week,’ as ‘there will be no fight at Pittsburg Landing; we will have to go to Corinth, where the rebels are fortified. If they come to attack us, we can whip them, as I have more than twice as many troops as I had at Fort Donelson.’ And, that evening he wrote to Halleck: ‘Our outposts had been attacked by the enemy apparently in considerable force. I immediately went up, but found all quiet. . .  I have scarcely the faintest idea of an attack [general one] being made upon us.’ ” [pp. 105-107] Thus, Fuller blames Sherman for the surprise and faults Grant only for not ordering entrenchments. Sherman was the commander on the scene, and he was reporting to Grant. Grant didn’t have any indications from Sherman of an attack, even though Sherman should have interpreted his ample warnings as showing confederates were in the area.

Fuller identifies eighteen actions Grant took on April 6, 1862:

[begin quote]
(1) Remembering his lesson at Fort Donelson, he at once organized ammunition trains.
(2) The 23rd Missouri regiment he hurried forward to reinforce Prentiss.
(3) The 15th and 16th Iowa regiments he directed to form line, arrest the stragglers, and reorganize them as a reserve.
(4) He then rode to the front after sending word to Lewis Wallace and Nelson to advance forthwith.
(5) He visited Hurlbut’s, W. H. L. Wallace’s and Prentiss’s divisions.
(6) At 10 A.M., he visited Sherman and McClernand, and finding them short of ammunition sent an aide back to send more forward.
(7) He next formed up a large number of stragglers, and, constantly under fire, visited every part of the field.
(8) Then he sent back to urge on Lewis Wallace and Nelson. The first had taken the wrong road, and the second in place of marching at 7 A.M. did not start until 1.30 P.M.!
(9) To make up for their delay he sent an order to General Wood of Buell’s army to march his division with all speed to Savannah, and arranged for transports to meet him there.
(10) He wrote a message to Buell to urge him on.
(11) He ordered two Iowa regiments to reinforce McClernand.
(12) Between I and 2 P.M., he returned to the Landing, and met General Buell on the steamer Tigress.
(13) Then he once again rode to the front to Snake Creek, and sent an aide to find General Wallace and guide him to the battlefield.
(14) At 3 P.M., he ordered forward the 81st Ohio regiment, and placed it in position.
(15) Then he once again visited Sherman, who, in his Memoirs, says: He ordered me to be ready to assume the offensive in the morning, saying that, as he observed at Fort Donelson at the crisis of the battle, both sides seemed defeated and whoever assumed the offensive was sure to win.”
(16) After this he rode back to the Landing and was present on the left when the final attack was made.
(17) Then he placed in position the two leading regiments of Nelson’s division.
(18) Finally, at nightfall, he sent an order to all his divisional commanders to be ready early on the 7th to push out a heavy line of skirmishers followed by entire divisions at supporting distance, and to engage the enemy as soon as found.

Here we have eighteen important movements and actions carried out in the space of about nine hours. Many of these are not such as might be expected of a general commanding a highly trained army. But Grant’s army was far from being highly trained, he had no staff worthy of the name, and very few trained subordinate officers. That, in the circumstances, “he left the division-commanders entirely to themselves” shows his wisdom; and to me it seems, that had not this half-crippled man, who on the night of the 6th/7th slept among his men in torrents of rain, and could get no rest because his ankle was much swollen, acted as he did, the battle would have been lost. Before he was engaged, his oversights were many; but, during the turmoil, his activity and generalship appear to me, In the circumstances which surrounded him, to have been quite wonderful.[end quote] [pp. 111-113] This is, in my opinion, a very adept analysis of Grant at Shiloh. Fuller criticizes Grant for failing to pursue the beaten confederate forces due to a failure to prepare to pursue them.

Fuller follows Grant through the Civil War. In talking about Grant’s performance in the Vicksburg campaign, Fuller writes, “The losses in this campaign are instructive, for quite unjustly Grant has been handed down to history as a butcher of men. Since April 30, he had won five battles, had taken Vicksburg and occupied Jackson at a cost to himself of 1,243 killed, 7,095 wounded and 535 missing, a total of 8,873 casualties. He had killed and wounded about 10,000 Confederates and had captured 37,000; among these were 2,153 officers, of whom 15 were generals; also 172 cannon fell into his hands.
The disparity between the losses of the contending forces was entirely due to Grant’s strategy. Basing his plan of campaign on surprise, and accepting risks which nothing but surprise could justify, in the first eighteen days after he crossed the Mississippi, he defeated the enemy at Port Gibson, established a temporary base at Grand Gulf, marched 200 miles, and won the battles of Raymond, Jackson, Champion’s Hill and the Big Black river these four within the space of six days. During the whole of this period his men had but five days’ rations, and for the rest lived on the country. Well may Greene say: ‘We must go back to the campaigns of Napoleon to find equally brilliant results accomplished in the same space of time with such small loss.’ ” [p. 158] In evaluating Grant’s generalship up to his taking Vicksburg, Fuller tells us, “Grant never intrigued; further still, he never overlooked the political situation, and the necessity of conforming to it. When McClernand, quite wrongly, was given command of the river expedition, Grant, in place of butting his head against Lincoln’s, at once modified his plan. When in the late winter of 1862-1863 political conditions in the North were desperate, he waged three months of toilsome warfare in the swamps of the Mississippi because these conditions demanded activity, and simultaneously he converted this waste of tactical energy into a strategic smoke cloud to cover his eventual advance. Finally he accepted the surrender of Vicksburg on terms, because he felt that the political situation demanded it.” [p. 184] Further, we learn, “Grant’s common sense is so remarkable, that in itself it constitutes a military lesson of no small importance, namely, that the art of war strategy and tactics is nothing more than action adapted to circumstances. This goes to prove that all theoretical systems of war must be so flexible in nature that they can be easily moulded to whatever circumstances confront a general. In 1861, Grant possessed no theory of war, not for five minutes could he have argued on strategy with Halleck, I doubt whether he could have ever done so, even in 1865; but when he was faced by a problem, he could look at it in an eminently common sense way, and in so detached and unselfish a manner, that throughout his life he seems to have been quite oblivious of his genius; for common sense is genius and of no common order. Grant was not, as we have seen, a great artist of war; for his tactics were frequently crude and remained so throughout his career, but as a natural scientist of war he was of the type who, so I think, would have pleased Thomas Huxley, for this philosopher defined science as ‘organized common sense,’ common sense being in his opinion, ‘the rarest of all the senses.’ Had Grant possessed a love for war, which he certainly did not; that is, had he been so fascinated by war as to examine it, study it, and live with its idea as the one controlling influence of his life; and had he belonged to a military people in a warlike age, he might well have risen to a place among the Great Captains of history. But he disliked war, looking upon it in no romantic light; for to him it was the necessary retribution for evil done. In spite of the fact that his wife kept slaves, slavery was an evil institution, the war with Mexico was a dishonourable act, consequently the Civil War was the exorcism Nature rightly demanded to banish the evil and to re-establish the good. It was a great national purification in which he had to play his part; yet the astonishing thing is that except as a soldier Grant failed in every peaceful work he undertook. Throughout his life he never seems to have realized that In his native common sense and in his personality were the raw materials of great soldiership. His common sense was such that he possessed the inestimable gift of being able to learn from his own mistakes, as well as from the mistakes of others. He was in no way bound by conventions or by traditions; he had a horror of precedents and formalities, and at times, such as during his advance from Port Gibson, he would cast them aside in order to speed up his work. He was a stubborn man, yet always willing to listen to the suggestions of his subordinates, so much so that many have considered that such men as Rawlins, his chief of staff, were his brains. I can find no proof of this in his campaigns, for in them he appears to have been his own law, his text book being the war itself. Though a slow thinker he studied this book minutely, and particularly the chapters concerning his own operations.” [pp. 185-186]

Fuller gives us examples of Grant’s learning from his experiences and mistakes and applying those lessons: “conditions and not rules governed his actions. He did not resist circumstances, instead he analyzed them. At Belmont he had no real reserves, at Donelson he had, but here his administrative arrangements were of the most meagre, and not only did the men suffer but the battle suffered. At Shiloh he was mentally as unprepared for the battle as his men were physically so. Thus far he had never been fullheartedly attacked, now he was, and his first action was to push forward ammunition, a lesson he learnt at Donelson; next to form up the stragglers and broken units into a reserve, another lesson he had learnt at the same place. At Shiloh his main lesson was the value of a general reserve, that is, of a formed body of fresh troops which can renew the attack against an exhausted enemy. Further, he learnt the value of establishing a defensive base to an offensive operation. These lessons may be considered extremely elementary, but this does not detract from their value; for, as Clausewitz says, ‘It is the simple which is difficult in war.’ Throughout the experimental period of the war the value of a strong reserve had escaped the notice of McDowell, McClellan, Buell and Burnside, as well as most of the other generals. Lee never mastered the use of reserves until his defeat at Gettysburg; but Grant did so after Shiloh, as may be seen in his Corinth, Vicksburg and Chattanooga campaigns. In the last of these, his centre, Thomas and the Army of the Cumberland, was kept in reserve throughout the first day of the battle; and at Vicksburg Grant’s columns were so distributed that any one of them could act as a mobile reserve to strike the enemy in flank or rear, a lesson he had tested out at luka and Corinth. At Holly Springs, Van Dorn’s raid taught him the enormous advantage of living on the country, a lesson applied in his campaign south of Vicksburg, and one upon which Sherman based his march through Georgia. At Shiloh he was surprised, at Vicksburg he prepared one of the most elaborate and successful surprisals ever effected in war. At Chattanooga he again applied it, and had he made better use of his cavalry, had he, in place of sending them off to destroy the railway, ordered them forward to co-operate with Sherman in seizing Tunnel Hill, Bragg’s army should have been annihilated. The true use of cavalry he had not yet mastered, though Shiloh might have taught him this lesson. In brief, Grant’s lessons may be grouped under three headings, namely, those which concern the instrument, the method and the conditions of war; such as ammunition supply, the rear attack, and the political factors. From these he built up his art of war, in which he excelled in protected-mobility, that is in strategical action, rather than in protected-offensive power tactics. In this respect he resembles Napoleon, whose tactics were frequently faulty.” [pp. 187-188]

Fuller goes into Grant’s physical and personality attributes that affected his generalship as well. After discussing Grant’s physical and moral courage, he writes, “Courage begets energy, but unless a general is bodily and mentally active, and unless he is endowed with a will to press on, the energy of courage is apt to effervesce. In war, energy may be, and frequently is, misdirected ; but even waste of energy is better than lethargy, that unforgivable sin of generalship. Grant’s energy is quite extraordinary: fit, or sick, nothing can stop him. He is always ready to act, he is never obsessed by difficulties, he never exaggerates difficulties, or paints mental pictures of imaginary situations. At Belmont, he is reputed to have said: ‘Don’t be too anxious about what the other fellow is going to do to you, but make him anxious about what you are going to do to him.’ At Shiloh, though half crippled, and all was in tumult, he moved everywhere. His ride to Chattanooga is an epic of energy, and men who can create such epics, are those who may be called born leaders. In them is an enormous source of power which will out, and in spite of ignorance it often happens in war that the man of energy is the man of destiny. He is like a hurricane he is the true thunderbolt of war. Courage and energy will sometimes sweep a general off his feet Men, like Charles XII of Sweden, cannot stand still, for battle intoxicates them like strong wine. This wild enthusiasm for glory is entirely foreign to Grant; to him it would have appeared ridiculous, for of all the generals of the Civil War with the possible exception of Thomas he was the coolest and the most perfectly balanced.” [pp. 190-191] Fuller also analyzes Grant as a strategist and as a tactician.

The last half of the book analyzes Grant’s performance after his promotion to lieutenant general and becoming general-in-chief of all United States armies. Grant was then confronted with not only the direction of a single army, but the direction and coordination of all the armies. “In brief his central idea was concentration of force from which he intended to develop a ceaseless offensive against the enemy’s armies, and the resources and moral[e] of the Confederacy. This demanded unity of direction in its full meaning; consequently, having been appointed generalissimo, he intended to act as such. Further still, he saw that a pivot to his whole strategy could only be established by fixing Lee; he determined, therefore, simultaneously to become de facto commander of the Army of the Potomac, leaving the detail of executive command to Meade. Frequently he has been criticized for this action; yet had he remained as Halleck did at Washington, it is difficult to believe that Meade would have brought Lee to book; and had he replaced Meade, it is equally difficult to see how he could possibly have simultaneously directed the strategy of the war. In the circumstances, not only do I consider that Grant was right to act as he did, but that he showed remarkable courage in shouldering the whole onus of the war, and in fixing the responsibility of defeating Lee} or being defeated by him, on his own shoulders. This arrangement was not a perfect one, and Grant realized it; but he saw that he was confronted by a choice of evils, and what was so characteristic of him was, that in place of seeking for an ideal solution, he chose what he believed to be the lesser evil of the two, and at once set to work, leaving all detail to Meade the man on the spot.” [p. 212]

Fuller understands Grant far better than a number of writers, especially of the confederate heritage persuasion. He tells us, “Grant’s object was to destroy Lee’s army; he knew that the Southern cause was waning ; he knew that in the Confederate armies desertions were growing apace, and that what Lee feared most of all was a heavy casualty list; for power to stay the war out was now the aim of the grand strategy of the South. Grant’s grand tactics were based, therefore, on the attrition of Lee, an attrition which was to lead to such an attenuation of his strength that he would be compelled to use his entire force on the defensive; this would deny him freedom of movement, and would consequently fix him. Grant had to fight Lee, and as he himself says: ‘It was better to fight him outside of his stronghold [Richmond] than in it,’ so consequently he had no alternative to attacking hastily constructed entrenchments and inflicting casualties, except that of manoeuvring Lee at small cost to him into the fortifications of Richmond. As Humphreys, Meade’s chief-of-staff, says: ‘But move as we might, long-continued, hard fighting under great difficulties was before us, and whatever might be the line of operations adopted, the successful execution of the task of the Army of the Potomac could only be accomplished by the vigorous and untiring efforts of all belonging to that army, and by suffering heavy losses in killed and wounded, and that the whole army well understood.’ In brief, this was the essence of Grant’s plan: All four armies were to attack simultaneously; but all four attacks were not to develop an equal degree of force. This continued movement Grant hoped would prevent any one Confederate army reinforcing the other. Sigel’s attack was, as we have seen, based on a defensive idea, and Butler’s and Sherman’s on that of manoeuvre. Meade’s attack, the pivot of this combined operation, was otherwise. It was to be an attack in such overwhelming force that Lee would suffer so heavily that the Confederate Government would be unable to reinforce any other army this, it was expected, would have a demoralizing influence on Johnston. It was also to be a continuous attack, in order to prevent Lee’s army recuperating, and to impede his sending men on furlough or to work in the fields or the workshops, as had frequently been done during the intervals between battles in the past.” [pp. 224-225]

Fuller definitely grasps what Grant was doing during the Overland campaign, something that has eluded many writers and just about all neoconfederates. “It will be remembered that Grant’s overland campaign was the pivot of a series of campaigns the security and success of which depended on the Army of the Potomac holding Lee. The most important of these subsidiary operations was Sherman’s advance from Chattanooga, which was strategically so closely related to the campaign in Virginia that it is quite impossible to appreciate the one without reference to the others.” [p. 304] He tells us how Grant took the presidential election into account. “To magnetise the North into supporting Lincoln was at this moment Grant’s political object, his tactical one, as we have seen, being to hold Lee, so that Sherman’s strategy might attain full liberty of movement.” [pp. 305-306] Fuller continues, “On May 5, 1864, Grant opened the throttle of his great
combined campaign. He hoped that before the summer had run its course the war would be ended, but he in no way founded his strategy on this hope. His grand tactical idea of holding and encircling has already been explained; but because it demanded, not an exorbitant but a continuous loss of life in Virginia and a crowding of these losses into a brief period May and June its costliness appeared exaggerated, and undoubtedly had an adverse influence on the political mind. Realizing this, Grant was faced by a dual problem, namely, how to maintain the strategy of his combined campaigns, and simultaneously gain such tactical successes as would raise the moral[e] of the North and consequently assure Lincoln’s re-election. Because of his able strategical distribution, as long as Lee could be held within the Richmond fortifications, which meant that a sufficiently powerful army must constantly threaten the city, it was possible for Grant to divert a large force to the Valley, which simultaneously prevented the Confederate Government diverting reinforcements to Johnston. By a shifting of force towards the circumference, Grant was able, without destroying his centre of gravity, to solve the intricate grand strategical problem which grew more and more intense as the autumn approached.” [pp. 329-330]

In his evaluation of Grant’s generalship as general-in-chief, Fuller demonstrates an understanding of the writers who are critical of Grant as well. “In my opinion, few periods in military history have been so misunderstood as the one under review; and consequently few generals-in-chief have suffered greater injustice than Grant. The reason for this misunderstanding is obvious, directly it is appreciated that the Civil War was the first of its kind; by which I do not mean that it was the first of all such wars, but the first of all modern wars; and though strategically it can be compared to wars which preceded it, tactically it can only be judged correctly by those which followed it. In fact, a writer who possessed no knowledge of the tactics of previous wars, and some knowledge of tactics since 1865, could not possibly have displayed so intense an ignorance of the nature of the tactics of this war as has been done by so many of the learned yet purblind historians who have obscured the very nature of the war through excess of strategical knowledge and paucity of tactical understanding.” [p. 356]

Fuller next gives us a very cogent analysis. “In reviewing Grant’s generalship during the last year of the war, it is all important to keep his object clearly in mind, and especially so because those who criticize his strategy and tactics frequently overlook it. It was to establish unity of strategical direction and to end the war in the shortest possible time, because, as we have seen, the political condition of the North brooked no delay. Had Grant felt certain of Lincoln’s re-election, his problem would have been a less difficult one; but not knowing this, his aim in May, 1864, was to end the war before the presidential elections took place. Throughout this period, the spring and summer of 1864, politics dominated strategy as strongly as topography dominated tactics, and though Grant never failed to realize this, many of his critics have, and by forgetting the political foundations of his campaign, they have suggested strategical edifices, which, in the circumstances, either could not have been built, or would have toppled over at the first shock. To bring the war rapidly to an end demanded concentration of force against the decisive point, which does not mean concentrating against the front of the enemy’s main army, but against its rear. To effect this concentration, the Army of Northern Virginia had to be held as in a vice, and we have seen how Grant held it, and this holding did not depend only on hitting, but also on an elaborate combination of manoeuvres carried out on the James and in the Shenandoah Valley, as well as a frequent shifting of the main base of supply under protection of the fleet. … failing the annihilation of Lee’s army early in the campaign, the whole of Grant’s strategy depended upon his ability to hold this force, the various movements he carried out and ordered become clear. He opened his campaign by a manoeuvre round Lee’s right flank, and he ended the war by a similar movement, a movement so ably and speedily carried out that the pursuit of his enemy to Appomattox Court House remains a model of its kind. As the summer advanced, his strategical problem became more and more intense. By holding Lee, which meant hitting Lee, he was able to detach large forces to the Valley when Early threatened it. It may be said that this shows that his holding operation had failed, for Sheridan was only sent there because Lee had detached Early. Strategically this is correct, but tactically Early’s force was never strong enough to compel Grant to abandon his campaign; and had it not been for Lee’s losses In the Wilderness and at Spottsylvania [sic], this might not have been the case. Further, it must not be overlooked that throughout this campaign, Grant’s subordinates missed opportunity after opportunity. Butler, Smith, Meade and Sheridan, each in turn failed to take advantage of circumstances which seldom occur in war, until at length Grant’s strategy was almost overwhelmed by impatient popular opinion. In the late summer and autumn these failures compelled him to carry out a number of operations, not only to maintain the direction of his strategy but to stimulate the moral[e] of the North. His attempts to strike the Richmond railways may be compared to his Bayou campaign before he moved south of Vicksburg ; for they had a dual aim to hold Lee and to maintain political enthusiasm. Had he simply laid siege to Petersburg, he would have been accused of doing nothing.” [pp. 359-361]

Finally, Fuller considers Grant’s tactics. “As a strategist Grant has been understood, but as a tactician he has been misunderstood, because critics will separate these two branches of the art of war, examining each as if it were enclosed in a water-tight compartment. It is possible to develop an offensive tactics from a defensive strategy, as Hannibal did; equally is it possible to develop an offensive strategy from a defensive tactics, as was done by Quintus Fabius; but normally a general who is called upon to conquer a foreign land, or a hostile people, is compelled by circumstances to act offensively in both these branches of his art. This is the point which so many critics of the Civil War have overlooked. It was not an ordinary war, a war in which victory depended on the vanquishing of the enemy’s armed forces, but a war against a nation in which the will of the people had to be broken. The one highly trained army corps, suggested by Lord Wolseley, had it existed, and had it defeated the Confederate forces in 1861, and had it occupied Richmond, would have been no nearer winning the war than Beauregard was, or would have been, had he occupied Washington after the battle of Bull Run. What soldier critics, even more so than civilian, so frequently fail to understand is, that in most modern wars, and certainly so in such wars as the Civil War, there is a vast difference between gaining a victory and winning a war, because a war in Its full sense can only be won when the defeated nation, or people, agree to accept the will of their conqueror, and not merely acknowledge that his army is more powerful than their own. This was the reason why wars originating from religious causes were so long and so terrible. … When examining his tactics, it is generally overlooked that to him the physical attack was but one of three forms of attack, the other two being the moral[e] and economic (or material) attacks; attacks which were waged against the will and resources of the Confederacy, and not merely against the strength of her armies. The attacks of Sheridan in the Valley and of Sherman in Georgia and the Carolinas were in nature moral[e] and economic, whilst his own in Virginia was a physical onslaught so unrelenting and fierce that it shielded these attacks from physical interference. To turn a fertile valley into a wilderness has little effect on the civil will, should the invader be driven away and the wilderness be occupied by a friendly army. This Grant understood, but what he did not realize was that as the Confederacy possessed few industries, and was consequently dependent on Europe for most of the luxuries and many of the necessities of life and of war, In place of destroying vast quantities of cotton the ‘gold’ of the South it would have proved far more economical had he tightened up the blockade and left the cotton bales intact, to help towards paying for the war once peace was re-established.” [pp. 363-364]

While a good portion of Fuller’s historical analysis has been overcome by more recent scholarship, his strategic evaluations and most of his tactical evaluations remain insightful and useful. I can highly recommend this book for students of the war and anyone who wants to understand Grant as a general.