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One of the long-running "facts" taught in the history of the American Civil War is that the Confederacy, on average, had better generals than did the Union. This stems largely from the Lost Cause school of Civil War historiography, with Southerners wanting to see their generals as knights in shining army who only lost the war due to superior Northern numbers.

So, what's the real answer? Obviously, both sides had gifted commanders and some very lousy ones. But taken in total, did the Union or the Confederacy have the superior generals?

For the Union, you have some outstanding army commanders like Grant and Thomas, along with some solid ones like Meade and McPherson and those who get little attention like Ord. (Sherman and Sheridan have always struck me as being greatly overrated.) Even Hooker and McClellan had some strengths in their position, primarily in terms of organization and logistics. Hancock is certainly one of the war's greatest corps commanders and Logan was also very good. On the division level, you have several outstanding leaders like Gibbon and Buford, and some mid-level ones like Schofield. On the division and brigade level, most of the Union commanders are not especially bad but not especially good.

But then, of course, you have walking disasters like Burnside, Banks, Butler, Kilpatrick, and others. The fact that major commands were still being given to the likes of Burnside and Butler at the opening of the 1864 campaign reveals how weak the senior leadership of the Union armies actually was.

On the Confederate side, Lee certainly was a gifted army commander but his reputation over the last century-and-a-half has been greatly inflated by Lost Cause mythology. He was tactically and in some sense operational very good, as Second Manassas, Chancellorsville, and the Overland Campaign prove, but he lacked strategic sense and was far too aggressive given his limited resources. Of other army commanders, only Joseph Johnston can be described as competent and he lacked the aggressiveness necessary to achieve strategic objectives (when it came to caution vs. boldness, a halfway medium between Lee and Johnston would have been ideal). Beauregard had some military gifts, but other Confederate army commanders like Bragg and Hood were walking disasters. On the army command level, I don't really think the South had much of an advantage over the Federals.

To me, it's on the corps and division level that the South military talent really shines. On the corps level, Jackson, Longstreet, Hardee were very good. Early was an outstanding independent commander of a corps-sized unit. Hill would have been better kept at the divisional level and Ewell should have been retired after his 1862 wound. There are obvious exceptions such as Polk, of course. In the cavalry, I think the long-established view that the Southern troopers were better isn't actually that far off, for they had Stuart, Hampton, Forrest, and Morgan at their head (others, like Wheeler, were quite overrated). On the divisional level, you have outstanding leaders like Cleburne and Gordon and brigade leaders like Cockrell, who were better than any comparable Union leaders.

So if I had to choose, I would say that the military leadership of the South was better than that of the North, though not nearly so much as the Lost Cause myth-makers would have us believe and concentrated on the division and brigade level. The problem for the South was that it was not enough to compensate for the North's material leadership, or the immense gap in political leadership at the top between Lincoln (and his brilliant Cabinet) and Davis (with his mediocre Cabinet).

What are your thoughts?
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