Grant and Lee: Victorious American and Vanquished Virginian

Edward H. Bonekemper III

Des 2007 · Bloomsbury Publishing USA

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Grant and Lee: Victorious American and Vanquished Virginian is a comprehensive, multi-theater, war-long comparison of the commanding general skills of Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee. Unlike most analyses, Bonekemper clarifies the impact both generals had on the outcome of the Civil War - namely, the assistance that Lee provided to Grant by Lee's excessive casualties in Virginia, the consequent drain of Confederate resources from Grant's battlefronts, and Lee's refusal and delay of reinforcements to the combat areas where Grant was operating. The reader will be left astounded by the level of aggression both generals employed to secure victory for their respective causes, demonstrating that Grant was a national general whose tactics were consistent with achieving Union victory, whereas Lee's own priorities constantly undermined the Confederacy's chances of winning the war.

Building on the detailed accounts of both generals' major campaigns and battles, this book provides a detailed comparison of the primary military and personal traits of the two generals. That analysis supports the preface discussion and the chapter-by-chapter conclusions that Grant did what the North needed to do to win the war: be aggressive, eliminate enemy armies, and do so with minimal casualties (154,000), while Lee was too offensive for the undermanned Confederacy, suffered intolerable casualties (209,000), and allowed his obsession with the Commonwealth of Virginia to obscure the broader interests of the Confederacy. In addition, readers will find interest in the 18 clean-cut and lucid battle maps as well as a comprehensive set of appendices that describes the casualties incurred by each army, battle by battle.

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Edward H. Bonekemper, lII is an adjunct lecturer of U.S. military history at Muhlenberg College. For over 34 years he served as a Federal Government attorney , including 11 years of active duty with the U.S. Coast Guard and 17 as the senior hazardous materials transportation attorney for the U.S. Department of Transportation. He is a retired commander in the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve. He is the author of How Robert E. Lee Lost the Civil War (1998), A Victor, Not a Butcher: Ulysses S. Grant's Overlooked Military Genius (2004), and McClellan and Failure: A Study of Civil War Fear, Incompetence and Worse (2007).