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Search - McClellan, Sherman, Grant

McClellan Sherman Grant
Author: T. Harry Williams

Liner: T. Harry Williams, widely known as a major historian of the Civil War, takes a fresh approach to one aspect of that immense subject: he discusses three Union generals in terms of their characters and speculates about how their personalities affected their generalship. Mr. Williams believes that a great general must have, in addition to in... more »telligence, judgement, and technical skills, the temperament for command and that quality of the human spirit described as moral courage. George McCellan had an eighteenth-century view of war as something like a game conducted by experts on a strategic chessboard. Superb at turning mass of green recruits into a disciplined army, he was shattered by the necessity of risking their lives in battle. When, in 1864, Sherman took over command of the largest field army in the West he brought a new and terrible kind of war to America and the world. In a campaign of seventeen weeks he moved the military front over one hundred miles southward and won Atlanta. But he failed to destroy the Confederate Army and did not succeed in bringing the enemy to a showdown battle. "The plan could have come only from a mind like his," Mr. Williams writes, "a mind that nourished mystic concepts of authority and natural unity and that was capable of indulging in the most violent excess of thought and of translating these excess into action.... Other Northern generals would grasp and employ the concept of war against civilians, but none would ... understand its implications as he did or place it on the same broad philosophical level. While Sherman represented a progression beyond McClellan's kind of general-ship, his was not the final step. "Still another general would be required," Mr. Williams points out, "before the nation could marshal its resources for final victory." Of Mr. William's three generals, the first two were plagued by some form of self doubt and one lived, as Sherman wrote of Grant, with "Simple faith in success." It was Ulysses S. Grant who struck the blow that won the war. The author sums up by saying, "No general could do what he did because of accident or luck or preponderance of numbers and weapons. He was a success because he was a complete general and a complete character. He was so complete that his countrymen have never been able to believe that he was real." Mr. Williams is on the faculty of Louisiana State University. He has published 'Lincoln and the Radicals', 'Lincoln and His Generals', ' P.G.T. Beauregard in Mexico', and several volumes on aspects of Lincoln's papers.

ISBN: 469657
Publication Date: 1962
Pages: 113
Rating:

0 stars, based on 0 rating

Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Book Type: Hardcover
Members Wishing: 1
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Genres:

History >> Military Science

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