Steely Glint
Posts: 580
Joined: 9/23/2003 Status: offline
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My ancestor? I'll PM you a clue, but he is no one to be particularly proud of. The Union had a bigger and better economy, better armaments, better logistics, more troops, and a far better railroad system. Despite this they could not manage to win the war until 1865, and the war could very well have ended in a draw. How could this have happened? Leadership. The South's leadership advantage over the North was immense. Whether it was Lee et al at the army level (leaving the abominable Braxton Bragg out of this), Jackson et al at the corps level, Mahone et al at the division level, or Forrest et al with the cavalry, the superb leadership of the South consistently enabled outnumbered, outarmed, and outsupplied men to not only hold their own against vastly superior forces time after time, but to defeat them over and over again. Until the advent of Grant, whose strengths lay in his refusal to quit and his willingness both to take risks and to engage in a war of attrition on a shocking scale, the Union never had a prayer.
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“It was a war of snap judgments and binary results—shoot or don’t, live or die.“ Wargamer since 1967. Matrix customer since 2003.
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