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Preface FOR FORTY-SIX DAYS in May and June 1864, the American Civil War's foremost commanders, Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, fought a grinding campaign through Virginia from the Rapidan River to Petersburg. Encompassed in that brief span were several of the war's bloodiest engagements— the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House, Totopotomoy Creek, Bethesda Church, and Cold Harbor. Maneuver stepped to center stage as Grant tried to flank Lee out of fortified lines with turning movements across the Rapidan, the North Anna, the Pamunkey, and finally the James. Ingenuity also figured in the tale as the Confederates countered Grant's every move and magnified their defensive power several fold with cleverly sited earthworks. Adding spice and color were cavalry brawls among the likes of Philip Sheridan, George Custer, "Jeb" Stuart, and Wade Hampton. History never gets more exciting. No two military figures have stirred popular imagination more than Grant and Lee, and none have been more thoroughly misunderstood. The ghost of "Grant the Butcher" still haunts Civil War lore. The Union general, the story goes, was fond of attacking earthworks, averse to maneuver, and unmoved at the prospect of massive casualties. "General Meade, I wish you to understand that this army is not to maneuver for position," Grant is said to have announced before crossing the Rapidan and to have inflexibly adhered to that dogma throughout the campaign. Grant "avowedly despised maneuvering," according to northern journalist William Swinton, and relied "exclusively on the application of brute masses, in rapid and remorseless blows." After the war, Virginia newspaperman Edward Pollard took up the cry, asserting in his popular book The Lost Cause that Grant "contained no spark of military genius ; his idea of war was to the last degree rude—no strategy, the mere application of the vis inertia; he had none of that quick perception on the field of xii PREFACE action which decides it by sudden strokes; he had no conception of battle beyond the momentum of numbers." Northern historians followed suit. Grant, John C. Ropes informed the prestigious Military Historical Society of Massachusetts, suffered from a "burning, persistent desire to fight, to attack, in season and out of season, against intrenchments, natural obstacles, what not." In the mid-1970s the noted Grant scholar E. B. Long decried the popular depiction of the general as an "unfeeling martinet who ruthlessly threw thousands of men into the belching death of the cannon." Long conceded, however, that "Grant the butcher is a hard myth to extinguish."1 Contrary to the image urged by Grant's detractors, the general's campaign against Lee reveals a warrior every bit as talented as his famous Confederate counterpart. Grant understood the importance of seizing the initiative and holding tight to his offensive edge to keep Lee off balance and prevent him from going on the offensive. The very nature of Grant's assignment guaranteed severe casualties. He made mistakes, many attributable to awkward command relationships within his army. Sometimes he acted precipitously, launching the Union force on operations with inadequate preparation. Other times he moved lethargically, frittering away advantages won by hard fighting and maneuver. He rarely used cavalry to advantage and tolerated laxness in the army's command structure that plagued his operations. But despite Grant's stumbling, the overall pattern of his warring showed an innovative general attempting to employ combinations of maneuver and force to bring a difficult adversary to bay. In its larger features, Grant's operations belie his "butcher" caricature. Judging from Lee's record, the rebel commander should have shared in Grant's "butcher" reputation. After all, Lee lost more soldiers than any other Civil War general, including Grant, and his casualties in three days at Gettysburg exceeded Union casualties for any three consecutive days under Grant's orders. Yet Lee's public image is the opposite of Grant's. The Confederate general, his many admirers have argued, possessed Olympian qualities. Lee's aide Colonel Walter H. Taylor noted that the "faculty of General Lee, of discovering , as if by intuition, the intention of his opponent, was a very remarkable one." Nowhere, southerners claimed, were Lee's talents better displayed than in his campaign against Grant. Even while the campaign was under way, a Confederate newspaper correspondent expressed amazement at the "way in which [Lee] unravels the most intricate combination of his antagonist, the instinctive knowledge he seems to possess of all his plans and designs."2 The real Lee, however, fell considerably short of the...

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