Does it really matter?
If OTL is anything to go by, it will be a long string of mediocrities until Grant can be brought east. Do the exact names make a lot of difference?
Yes, because the Confederacy was broken in the East by that "long string of mediocrities", and Grant was a pretty awful general whose one saving grace was the inability to recognise defeat.
The thing is that nobody managed to use McClellan's deadly weapon to deadly effect until Grant.
McClellan, hampered by political problems among other things - the debates about his abilities notwithstaning, failed to make much of an impact of Joe Johnston, was driven away from Richmond by Lee and removed from command after his very successful campaign in Maryland because he had lost the trust of Lincoln.
Burnside foolishly squandered the initiative and allowed the Confederates to entrench but attacked frontally anyway. Joe Johnston said of Fredericksburg "What luck some people have. Nobody will ever come to attack me in such a place."
Hooker, talented in many aspects and possessing the abilities to use the army to deadly effect, choked and lost control at the crucial moment allowing Lee to secure his greatest victory.
Meade performed well enough to win at Gettysburg but then muddled around in the Mine Run Campaign and failed to utilize the army fully.
Not until Grant arrived with his single-minded determination to engage the enemy whenever and wherever they met until the enemy could no long engage was the Army of the Potomac utilized as the deadly weapon it was trained to be.
"McClellan, by all odds! I think he is the only man on the Federal side who could have organized the army as it was. Grant had, of course, more successes in the field in the latter part of the war, but Grant only came in to reap the benefits of McClellan's previous efforts. At the same time, I do not wish to disparage General Grant, for he has many abilities, but if Grant had commanded during the first years of the war, we would have gained our independence. Grant's policy of attacking would have been a blessing to us, for we lost more by inaction than we would have lost in battle. After the first Manassas the army took a sort of 'dry rot', and we lost more men by camp diseases than we would have by fighting."
- Robert E. Lee
- unattributed Republican Confederate General (almost certainly James Longstreet) to Hugh McCulloch, 1874
Grant wrecked the Army of the Potomac. It may have been justified (eggs, omlettes etc.) but he certainly did wreck it.
I have to agree that the Union's failure to make use of their naval superiority to outmaneuver the ANV was probably their biggest mistake in the entire Eastern Front. With the state of civil war weaponry, an attack through northern Virginia could not be anything other than a nasty, bloody affair that would cost too many Union lives. Instead of using their navy to bypass some of the Confederacy's best defensive terrain, (or at least launching a two-pronged attack) Lincoln insisted and trying to sledgehammer through it.All these can be laid at Washington's door. Their obsession with operating via Fredericksburg hamstrung operations. Even Grant had to operate with that restriction, and indeed HAD to pay the butchers bill since his preferred plan (move around the seaborne flank to the James and enact McClellan's July 1862 plan against Petersburg) was blocked.
Might a more aggressive general, with the enemy's plans as happened in OTL have actually trapped Lee after Antitham in 1862?
If that did not happen might the Democrat in 1864 have been a more obvious copper head and lost more heavily