Why the South Would Have Won With Grant or Sherman

It was actually the South's war to lose.

by Rod D. Martin
July 18, 2021

Would the South have won had it had Grant or Sherman? It’s a long topic, which I cannot address fully here, though I won't just say "look who won and who lost".

Bobby Lee made multiple critical errors, the biggest of which was making the defense of the South Virginia-centric (thus allowing Grant and Sherman to divide the South in three, taking the Mississippi and then splitting Georgia). He was wedded to his beloved home state and made it a waste as a result; and he completely missed the overall strategic picture.

The second critical error was his persistence, indeed insistence, on fighting a war of attrition from a position of inferior manpower and supply. It's worth remembering that Lee consistently lost the largest proportion of his men per battle of any Civil War general. He did not have those men to spare, and (as just noted), the other side did, but didn't waste them as wantonly as Lee. This dramatically and needlessly increased the manpower gap over t…