I prefer my GM to be like the stolidly deliberate, unassuming, but determined, unflappable, relentlessly effective, and egregiously underappreciated George Thomas. Which current or past GM best fits that mold?

(More importantly, let's talk about Civil War generals! Currently re-reading the magisterial Foote trilogy, and I can't say enough good things about it.)

Foote is outstanding. I also enjoy Bruce Catton's work.

I forgot that George McClellan ran as a Democrat during the civil war against Lincoln after previously being his commander in chief in the war. And ran on a anti-civil war platform that basically called to end the war and let the Confederacy secede. No way that happens today.

Foote is outstanding. I also enjoy Bruce Catton's work.

Foote work is almost like Gibbon's for me, in that because of its combination of length and majestic prose, I always feel like re-reading it once I've gotten all the way through. Gibbon is truly in a class of his own, to be fair (I've gone through The Decline And Fall four times, and am a third of the way through #5, it feels new each time), but Foote is the closest American analogue for me. His accounts of Shiloh, Murfreesboro, Vicksburg, and Gettysburg are just unimpeachable. And I love how his novelistic, narrative approach allows him to paint the characters as they were at the time and in the moment, as opposed to a distortingly global retrospective view. (For example: Rosecrans is an incomparably brave, unflappable hero at Murfreesboro, but he's utterly lost and confused at Chickamauga. That's true not only to history, but to the complexity of human character.)

eh, Foote's a homer.

And count me as one that isn't overfond of the sports/war metaphors. Not pearl clutchingly so, mind you, but they are not really instructive or in particularly good taste.

I forgot that George McClellan ran as a Democrat during the civil war against Lincoln after previously being his commander in chief in the war. And ran on a anti-civil war platform that basically called to end the war and let the Confederacy secede. No way that happens today.

By 1864 the time for that had passed. Two years earlier he might have had a real shot at it, but the Emancipation Proclamation (which achieved its primary purpose, keeping Europe from recognizing the Confederacy) and the victories in the West slammed that door shut.

-- MWE

stolidly deliberate, unassuming, but determined, unflappable, relentlessly effective, and egregiously underappreciated

Sounds like Terry Ryan or Pat Gillick.

More importantly, let's talk about Civil War generals!

Which GM is most like Abner Doubleday? Is it Billy Beane the mythical inventor of Moneyball? Would that make Sandy Alderson Doc Adams?

I forgot that George McClellan ran as a Democrat during the civil war against Lincoln after previously being his commander in chief in the war. And ran on a anti-civil war platform that basically called to end the war and let the Confederacy secede. No way that happens today.

He actually ran as a candidate who repudiated the party platform. He also conducted what may have been the most racist presidential campaign in history. Which is saying something given that Strom Thurmond ran in 1948 and George Wallace in 1968.

Dayton Moore as Custer? (I know, I know)

Or Dayton Moore as Gomer Pyle?

Billy Beane should never have fired on Fort Sumter

eh, Foote's a homer.

I always hear this complaint about Foote, and as a born-and-bred Northeasterner I'm acutely attuned to such things, but I honestly just don't see it in the Civil War trilogy. If anything, I appreciate the fact that he treats the Confederate armies and generals as something other than Designated Bad Guys. I'm more of the view of Ulysses S. Grant himself, which is to say that even though the Confederate cause was "one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse ... I do not question, however, the sincerity of the great mass of those who were opposed to us." Or, as Foote wrote -- in one of those great bits of historical color that characterize his work -- for most Rebel soldiers the answer to the Unionist question of "why are you fighting us?" was "because you're down here."

For the vast majority of the Confederate soldiers, that was their reason, however wrongheaded and myopic we now understand it to be in retrospect. Therefore, I really appreciate an approach such as Foote's, which finds the humanity in BOTH sides (I never, not once, detect him denigrating the Union's soldiers or their cause, and I've combed over his material obsessively), which is important given that it's our CIVIL WAR we're talking about here. It operates as something of a corrective on my natural Blues Brothers-like "Southerners...I hate those guys" instincts.

That said, I do sometimes have to skip or skim the chapters on the Peninsular Campaign and Chancellorsville, because it just chaps my ass to see those Johnny Reb f**ks winning over and over again. I far prefer reading about Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga. The last is direly underappreciated and Foote's account is, again, magnificent. Missionary Ridge FTW.

I like Foote, read the trilogy and really enjoyed his input to the Burns Civil War doc. But his close friend Walker Percy is the shiznit. Lost in the Cosmos and The Message in the Bottle are amazing.

Foote not only is a homer, but did you ever notice that there aren't any footnotes in his trilogy? Or wonder why?

A much better read is James McPherson's BATTLE CRY OF FREDOM. No, it's not novel-like. It's just tremendously accurate instead.

And I do think that Moore = McClellan

McPherson's book is excellent but is in essence an abridged history of the Civil War. It's just too short. There aren't too many footnotes in Catton either, and it doesn't keep him from being brilliant. Foote is telling a story and it's a damn good story. Supposedly Foote is the southern counterpoint to Catton's northern perspective, but I have never seen much bias in either. Foote certainly does not go in for the marble man stuff on Lee, he is critical of luminaries even like Stonewall when appropriate. I like Stephen Sears' work tremendously, also Harry Pfanz's books on Gettysburg are wonderful. Saw "Lincoln" today; very impressive. Godwin's book is terrific and Speilberg was very smart to tackle one small part of it.

Dayton Moore doesn't fit as McClellan. McClellan was a dandy and a pu$$y when it came to a fight; Moore is neither. I'd say Braxton Bragg would be a better fit. Irascible, a fighter, an occasional gambler, a blunderer. As for my GM give me Grant, who "wore the expression of a man about to put his head through a brick wall." (Catton)

McClellan had two great flaws:

1) He was inclined to reach a conclusion based on very little evidence, and was always inclined to believe that the worst possible scenario was the truth
2) One he reached a conclusion, that became, to him, and unassailable fact, and anyone who questioned his conclusion was personally attacking him, and was his enemy.

McClellan was convinced that he was heavily outnumbered. He was not alone in his belief, many -- perhaps most -- Northern officers thought that the Confederates had more men than them, because they felt that conscription had been more successful in the South than it actually was. McClellan's estimates were more wildly inaccurate than most others, though. If you view his actions from this standpoint, he always made the correct move. His sole advantage was, in his view, in artillery. The way to win was to avoid being overwhelmed by the enemy's infantry, and blast them apart with your heavy guns.

He made decisions from the standpoint that he could only win if he did not make any mistakes. Lee made decisions from the standpoint that he could only win if his opponent made mistakes, and so he "assumed the agressive" -- limiting the choices his opponents had, and limiting the time they had to make them, increasing the probability that they would make a mistake.

After outflanking McClellan out of his Beaver Dam Creek position and breaking his line at Gaines' Mill, McClellan was actually in a pretty good position on the fourth day of the Seven Days, considering that he had already decided to change base to the James (though this meant giving up the siege). Lee's army was divided, the direct route to Richmond was weakly defended, and most of McClellan's army had been barely engaged, so they were in good fighting shape. It was not dissimilar to a year later in Pennsylvania, when the Confederates won a major victory on July 1st, but at the end of the day the the Federals were in a strong position south of Gettysburg.

But unlike Meade, who stayed and fought on July 2nd, McClellan decided that his army was on the verge of being destroyed and he had to get under the cover of his gunboats as soon as possible to save it. "If I save this Army now I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or any other persons in Washington — you have done your best to sacrifice this Army," he wrote to Washington (though Stanton and Lincoln never saw that message, as the clerk at the War Department edited it out). In fact, by withdrawing from the Chickahominy, McClellan in fact exposed his army to destruction, and had Lee's attacks the next few days been better coordinated (there are dozens of reasons they weren't, not the least of which is that it's very, very hard to do that in a perfect circumstance, which the Seven Days was not), the Army of the Potomac would have been destroyed on the Virginia Peninsula.

Pope was bluster and aggression, but not a good general. Burnside was unsuited to army command. Hooker was aggressive and smart, but when he lost the initiative he became indecisive. Meade was slow to take the offensive but masterful at responding to his opponent's moves -- on July 2nd, 1863, Dan Sickles handed him a #### sandwich to eat, and he ####### ate it like a boss. Meade should be on the same pedestal as Grant for July 2nd alone, but he's largely forgotten by non-Civil War buffs.

Grant was hardly perfect, but he had two great qualities: when he made a mistake, he always learned a lesson from it and applied it, and when his plan didn't work out like he wanted it to, he just moved on to the next plan and did whatever was necessary to win the war, because that was the only thing that mattered.

Tried to get through the Wilderness without a fight, couldn't. So he fought the battle in the Wilderness, and lost. So he moved around to his left, tried to get around Lee at Spotsylvania, couldn't. So he fought at Spotsylvania, and couldn't make any headway. So he tried something else. It cost him men. It gave him a reputation as a butcher and an imbecile. But it limited Lee's options, forced him to decide quickly without making mistakes, and it won the war. Which was the only thing that mattered.

Dayton Moore = McClellan if he runs for commissioner vs. Selig on a no government financed stadium platform.

I'm a HUGE military history buff, but I just can't get into the Civil War. It's like WWI (before 1918), unrelenting slaughter with barely a hint of interesting strategy or tactics.

Recent reevaluation has shown that McClellan was outnumbed at the Seven Days, by about 110,000 to 100,000, albeit not by the 2:1 ratio McClellan believed.

snapper, first of all I love the 19th century. Think of life in 1800 and life in 1900. Buckskins to business attire. In 1815, the Battle of New Orleans was fought 6 weeks after the peace treaty was signed. By the Civil War, people read about faraway battles the next day. Travelling across the country took 3-4 months in the first half of the century, but 1869 it would take 5 days or so. Electricity in the home, telephones, you name it, life changed dramatically.
For the Civil War itself, you have the following points of interest:
1. The personalities. While Lee is boring mostly, figures like Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, Chamberlain, Stonewall Jackson, Jeff Davis, JEB Stuart, heck this is the first appearance of Custer. The friendships that crossed lines such as Grant and Longstreet, Hancock and Armistead.
2. The geography. Richmond and Washington were so close. The Shenandoah to move armies back and forth.
3. The new technology that was applied, especially with ships, both sea-going and riverine. The use of the railroads. The change in weaponry.
4. The politics -- North and South and international.
5. The (mostly) Union bunglers, as Larry M. highlights.
6. I'm sure I'm missing something else. :)

But if your real love is battlefield tactics, then yeah, then I can see where you would find this one not so interesting.

I do not question, however, the sincerity of the great mass of those who were opposed to us." Or, as Foote wrote -- in one of those great bits of historical color that characterize his work -- for most Rebel soldiers the answer to the Unionist question of "why are you fighting us?" was "because you're down here."

This is actually one of the passages that gets cited most in criticisms of Foote for his continuing commitment to "Lost Cause" mythology. The "sincerity" of the South was indeed real, but it was also sincerely white supremacist. Not to a man (there were significant movements, especially in the upper South, of unionism), but the ideology that drove secession for both elite and ordinary soldiers was about the necessity of keeping blacks in bondage. You can see this most clearly in the racial violence of the counter-revolution following the war.

An interview with Shelby Foote:

INTERVIEWER
Had you been alive during the Civil War, would you have fought for the Confederates?

FOOTE
No doubt about it. What's more, I would fight for the Confederacy today if the circumstances were similar.

He continues by claiming that "emancipation" was nearly as great a stain on the nation's history as slavery, whitewashing Fort Pillow, romanticizing the early, relatively non-violent(!) Ku Klux Klan. Foote was a great writer, and his books are better than his apparent underlying beliefs, but this is not the perspective of a man who gets the moral question addressed in the war, or a man who can empathize with white and black southerners equally.**

**Think of all the great, indelible characters you remember from Foote. How many of them were black? The Civil War as a war which blacks helped to instigate, for which black Americans were major and central advocates,*** in which black Americans fought and died at incredible rates, is a war that mostly does not show up in Foote's work.

***Which is probably my primary problem with Lincoln. The pressure put on Lincoln by black Americans (in particular in the massive camps of escaped slaves in Washington DC itself) is mostly hidden from view after the first - brilliant - scene. Obviously there weren't any black folks in the Congress itself, but that is not the only kind of politics that exists, and blacks as political actors get lost after the first scene.

Was Foote a lost cause guy? I haven't read his work, but I didn't find him to be that sort at all in the Ken Burns documentary. I thought he was enormously fair.

Edit: wow, looks like I'm gonna need to read this interview.

He continues by claiming that "emancipation" was nearly as great a stain on the nation's history as slavery

That is a THOROUGHLY DISHONEST characterization of what Foote says in that interview. I was appalled at the thought that Foote would have expressed such a sentiment, clicked through to check, and found that the meaning he was expressing was literally the exact opposite of what you implied (Foote's point: it was grossly unfair to African-Americans to simply emancipate them and then abandon them to their own devices, and the cruel victimization of Southern whites, after centuries of slavery.)

Holy crap, MCoA, that's damn near slanderous of you.

EDIT: Foote's quote from MCoA's linked interview:

There’s a second sin that’s almost as great and that’s emancipation. They told four million five hundred thousand people, You are free, hit the road. And we’re still suffering from that. Three quarters of them couldn’t read or write, not one tenth of them had a profession except for farming, and yet they were turned loose and told, Go your way. In 1877 the last Union troops were withdrawn after a dozen years of being in the South to assure compliance with the law. Once they were withdrawn all the Jim Crow laws and everything else came down on the blacks. Their schools were inferior in every sense. They had the Freedmen’s Bureau, which did, perhaps, some good work, but it was mostly a joke, corrupt in all kinds of ways. So they had no help. Just turned loose on the world, and they were waifs. It’s a very sad thing. There should have been a huge program for schools. There should have been all kinds of employment provided for them. Not modern welfare, you can’t expect that in the middle of the nineteenth century, but there should have been some earnest effort to prepare these people for citizenship. They were not prepared, and operated under horrible disadvantages once the army was withdrawn, and some of the consequences are very much with us today.

Does that sound like a racist Southern revanchist to you? Or does it sound more like MCoA is being, oh, maybe just a tad disingenuous?

A much better read is James McPherson's BATTLE CRY OF FREDOM.

My favorite book about the war, and one of my favorite books period. And my family adn upbringing are about as Deep South as you can get.

Does that sound like a racist Southern revanchist to you?

Yes, it does.

The economic position of black Americans in the 1880s had almost nothing to do will their supposed ill-preparedness for freedom. Freed blacks were not "waifs", they were not "unprepared" for a freedom they had been fighting for over decades, and the suggestion that they were sounds more than a touch racist. They were free men and women whose rights and property were stripped of them by a massive counter-revolutionary, fully and abominably racist movement in the South following the war.

The idea that "emancipation" was to blame for any of the problems of blacks in America in the later 19th century is purely offensive. The whitewashing of legal and extra-legal terrorism in the fight against Reconstruction is awful history and more awful morality.

The "Lost Cause" shows up nowhere as clearly as in the ignorance of the actual history of reconstruction and counter-revolution.

EDIT: How exactly do you square this reading of Foote as alluding to the justice of reconstruction (which I do not think he is doing) with his quite explicit sympathy for the counter-revolution against reconstruction in the person of Forrest and the KKK? How do you square this reading of Foote with his clearly expressed belief that the cause of the Confederacy was a cause he would still fight for today?

I'm with MCA on that one. Maybe not what Foote says in a single interview answer, but there are decades of thought along the same lines that are inherently racist, essentially saying that they're better off being slaves because they can't take care of themselves. Read that quote again, it's written like the problems after emancipation were inherent, when they're caused by white southerners. The solution to that is to let the South form it's own country?

Sorry MCOA but it really seems like you are reaching. Foote seems pretty clearly that the failure was not doing enough other than freeing the slaves and walking away and this is pretty clearly true, enough was not done. He believes more education and Northern enforcement needed to be done and I don't think that is racist. He is not saying that are incapable of being citizens, just that the circumstances at the time made it very hard for them - put simply being a slave is not the best preparation for being a productive and empowered citizen, especially when the entire power structure of the South is arrayed against them.

He may have more than a little pro-Confederate bias, but his comments about emacipation and the aftermath of abandonment don't really support your specific case. You don't have to square one belief with another. People are complex entities, able to belief many things and able to have blindspots in some areas and not others, able to be enlightened in some ways and horribly backward in others. Suggesting his pro-Confederacy bias taints everythign about him is simplistic.

It is (IMO) a mark against him, but so what? No one is pure.

NOTE: I am not saying I agree with Foote or his understanding of what needed to be done post-emancipation, however claiming it is racist to believe a slave may not be completely ready for full citizenship is not racist even if it is wrong.

I'm with MCA on that one. Maybe not what Foote says in a single interview answer, but there are decades of thought along the same lines that are inherently racist, essentially saying that they're better off being slaves because they can't take care of themselves. Read that quote again, it's written like the problems after emancipation were inherent, when they're caused by white southerners. The solution to that is to let the South form it's own country?

That's not what he's saying. He's saying that the North ended Reconstruction and abandoned the freed slaves without helping them. He's saying they needed to invest money in education, jobs programs, etc., instead of pulling out and letting white Southerners impose Jim Crow. Um...I literally don't see what is objectionable about that sentiment. It seems, instead as if you and MCoA are reading extra elements into it in order to slant it as being 'racist' or whatnot.

I like Foote, read the trilogy and really enjoyed his input to the Burns Civil War doc. But his close friend Walker Percy is the shiznit. Lost in the Cosmos and The Message in the Bottle are amazing.

The Moviegoer as a novel of ideas that dramatically incorporates a philosophical stance, a rare thing done successfully at the highest level, is of the highest order. John Fowles's The Magus is another along those lines. Thinking in those two novels is made flesh. They make Sartre and Camus's attempts at it look pallid in comparison.

17:

Excellent summation.

They had the Freedmen’s Bureau, which did, perhaps, some good work, but it was mostly a joke, corrupt in all kinds of ways. So they had no help. Just turned loose on the world, and they were waifs. It’s a very sad thing. There should have been a huge program for schools. There should have been all kinds of employment provided for them. Not modern welfare, you can’t expect that in the middle of the nineteenth century, but there should have been some earnest effort to prepare these people for citizenship. They were not prepared, and operated under horrible disadvantages once the army was withdrawn, and some of the consequences are very much with us today.

I don't think Foote is exactly a Lost Cause guy for lots of reasons but I also don't think that puts him on the same position as McPherson, who is a giant.

Let's break down this paragraph:
1) the begrudging "perhaps" that the Freedmen's Bureau did some good work. This is just an absurd statement. The bureau distributed hundreds of tons of food to starving people (including ex-Confederates), established hospitals, helped establish or support thousands of schools, adjudicated thousands of cases involving freedpeople who were barred by law from testifying in state courts, regulated labor contracts, etc etc.

2) "it was mostly a joke, corrupt in all kinds of ways"--This is a stupid statement unworthy of a serious person in Foote's era. Again the above. Second the corruption in the Bureau was a key feature of the anti-Reconstruction portrayal that celebrated the paramilitary takeover of the South between the 1870s and 1890s but it's based on flimsy evidence. There are a few cases of corruption out there in an agency that covered 750,000 square miles, but the Bureau was nowhere near as corrupt as the Treasury department or Indian Affairs. To call it mostly a joke is just stupidity.

3) "There should have been a huge program for schools." In fact Republicans tried several times to pass through federal education bills and the Southern Democrats blocked them.

4) "Just turned loose on the world, and they were waifs....there should have been some earnest effort to prepare these people for citizenship. They were not prepared, and operated under horrible disadvantages once the army was withdrawn, and some of the consequences are very much with us today."


Here there's more room for ambiguity but not all that much. It's not clear--and Foote was never clear in talking about Reconstruction as he was in talking about the war--what Foote is saying. It seems to be that we should take for granted that white Southerners were barbarous murders, so it is the fault of the nation for not restraining them? There's something to that, but there's also some limits to it, since it's not clear in his writing that he really follows the implications of thinking that white Southerners were barbarous murders. If they aren't wild men--if they have the kind of capacity for judgment that he portrays in the war era--then they of course deserve a good bit of the responsibility for what they did, yet that disappears.

Beyond that is the portrayal of emancipation. Black people did in fact prepare themselves for citizenship. They met during and after the war to talk about politics and the responsibility of citizenship. Some northerners--white and black--toured around, but in lots of places people constituted themselves as soon as they could...and in return white Southerners slaughtered them for doing so. It wasn't that they weren't prepared for citizenship; it's that they were actively and at first violently and then legalistically prevented from exercising it. Some of this stuff came out after Foote was active but much of it was coming out in the heart of Foote's writing period and was known to people much less plugged in and intelligent than he is.

Blacks weren't a sad lost people shuffling around at the end of the war; in fact many people were amazed at how quickly plantations got going, and 1865--shockingly--was not such a terrible harvest year. They didn't need an employment program or classes in citizenship. They needed--and got--schools, and the right to exercise their rights in terms of labor bargaining which meant--since labor relations were established by lien laws--the right to engage in politics.

There's lots of room to be critical of the nation, but in fact Reconstruction--which Foote portrays simultaneously as some shocking tyranny that whites had to revolt against and a weakly ineffectual surrender--did those things by and large.

What the nation could not figure out how to do was how to defend those written rights against the various ways that white Southerners worked to empty them out. It's fair to be critical of the nation on that ground, but that's not what Foote is saying. And his pleading that he pities black people misses the entire point of what was going on in emancipation and what came after.

In terms of Ken Burns, when Burns presented his video to PBS they were appalled and ready to cancel since they thought it was so shockingly pro-Confederate based in part upon the extensive screen time given to Foote. And then they made him--with an editor imposed upon him--splice in later interviews with Barbara Fields and the early section on the South fighting not for home but for slavery.

That said, Foote is not a celebrant of all things Southern, and sees lots of flaws and stupidity in the South, and he like Catton is part of a generation following on Bell Wiley and getting interested in the social history of regular people int he war.

But there were always variants in pro-Southern thought; there's no one playlist. The Lost Cause itself posited defeat as a tragic necessity to make the nation, even though it romanticized Confederates in a way that Foote doesn't. The Dunning School of Reconstruction considered secession flatly stupid and traitorous but also portrayed Reconstruction as an outrage, and this is the line that Foote picks up on. Foote also picks up on another part of early 20th century pro-Southern thinking on the war, that made the war a failure of political compromise, something he says over and over, and in the process downplayed the idea that the war was about--on both sides--principles that could not be readily compromised.

As I think back on it, I think the people who were appalled by Burns' Foote usage were not at PBS but at the NEH, which essentially pays for the vast majority of his work, and who then demanded and oversaw the changes that produced the version we now all watch.

GregD's #33 is a much more measured and thoughtful critique than MCoA's earlier one. I'll buy into large parts of that.

Incidentally, I too saw Lincoln and was thoroughly impressed. Not just by Daniel Day Lewis as Lincoln, but also by David Strathairn's performance as William Seward, which was every bit as marvelous and true to life. As a student of the era, I could nitpick about several inaccuracies, but the overall spirit of the film -- and the sheer moxie of making a major big-budget epic about what is essentially talky, arcane political negotiations -- is so true that I feel small-minded criticizing it. Honestly, I think it's the best thing Spielberg has done in decades.

Actually, Lincoln is the reason I'm re-reading Foote's Civil War trilogy. We walked out of the theater, and I went straight home to my books and cracked them open. McPherson and Catton are on the shelf right now too -- I'm turning to them when I'm done.

Foote is outstanding. I also enjoy Bruce Catton's work.

Still haven't found anybody whose work I like more than Catton's -- and while I've cut back in recent years I used to read an awful lot on the ACW.

Grant was hardly perfect, but he had two great qualities

The two you list are important, but I think you miss a very important third quality. is plans were based in reality. He didn't make a grand plan and then demand the resources to carry it out.

He also adapted well to the necessities. He didn't quibble when it was demanded that he send some veteran troops to deal with Early. In fact he detached his best available commander and gave him the resources to not merely contain Early but crush him.

He also had generally good judgement of his subordinates and basically left them to their own devices. (But see Dana on the Thomas situation. He was seriously considering relieving Thomas -- not really understanding the local conditions)

Incidentally, I have a few issues with Battle Cry Of Freedom:

1.) Even at 800 pages, it's too damn brief. My favorite section is actually the ~240pgs worth of pre-war scene-setting, critical political and socio-economic context that is absent from Foote and deeply informs the reader about the underlying cross-currents in America prior to the war. But his account of the actual fighting and course of the war is too compressed, and there's nothing on Reconstruction at all.

2.) For a guy whose scholarly bread and butter is the Abolitionist movement, it's bizarre to my mind how McPherson fails to adequately discuss or credit the pivotal role of American Christian sects and Protestant religious values (particularly Quakerism and New England Episcopal and Puritan strains) in driving the Abolitionist cause. He nods towards this, of course, but fails to provide it with the proper weight.

3.) His writing style just doesn't do it for me. Foote makes me want to keep reading, even in places where I'm actively thinking "gee, this is depressing, who wants to read about Bedford Forrest doing something awesome?...I hate that guy." I read regardless, carried along by the effortless flow and charm of his prose. McPherson, meanwhile, isn't exactly "dry" but nor does his language lift off the page either. He's an academic, with all the good and bad that entails.

That said, these are quibbles. It's a magnificent work, and I don't see it as being any more "biased" towards the North (which is a claim people often make) than Foote is towards the South.

but the overall spirit of the film

My absolute favorite moment in the film is the fit Stanton throws when Lincoln starts to tell anonther story while they're waiting for the news from Wilmington. And Lincoln's reaction. Both feel very true to what I've read of the men.

If you are a Civil War buff, you must read Grant's Autobiography. For me it was a slog, like a Robert Caro book, but eminently enjoyable and well worth the investment.

I'm no McClellan fan but there a few important caveats:

1) No one was better at drilling shopclerks into a real Army. This was not an insignificant attribute in the war's first years when Regulars made up less than 5% of the Army.

2) Despite the severity and discipline #1 required, few people were more beloved by their men.

3) McClellan's failure is something we shouldn't swallow too easily. Yes, he hated to lose battles, but he also really hated to lose the soldiers he had worked so hard to mold. That isn't perhaps the ideal quality in a general but it's not clear to me that it is a general moral failing or proof of cowardice. I don't think he was at all a coward in regard to himself; he was overly cautious about his men, but that's not at all the same thing as cowardice. The coldness that Grant and Lee and S Jackson and Sherman felt about the death around them made them effective but isn't the only measure of morality.

4) McClellan was too young for what was put on him too quickly. The ridiculous letters to his wife are partly failings of his personality, partly just immaturity. Had he served under a serious commander in the field, he might have learned to temper himself (or might not) but having been given the Army so quickly it isn't surprising that he began to think of himself as Napoleon.

5) McClellan was opposed to federal emancipation but he was not a surrender monkey, and he ran against the Democratic platform. In the most-racist campaign in US history, yes. And he probably would have taken terms from the South after inauguration if he won, as Lincoln did not. All of which would have been disastrous. But he was not a Peace Democrat. And for that matter, when the orders switched to helping speed emancipation, he enforced them. He would never have devised them but he was not committed to blocking them.

#38 I had lots of minor issues with Battle Cry, but even so, well worth the read.

Killer Angels is also superb. The books by his son less so (though basically readable)

I find Foote to be extremely long winded. Hard to read.

For more on McLellan I would recommend 'Long Road to Antietem' by Slotkin.

As Edmundo says, Grant's Personal Memoirs are excellent. I particularly like the chapters on the Mexican War. (His training mules section is some of the funniest material I have ever read.) It bogs down late when his writing was abbreviated by his health. Dying does sort of make you be brief.

Downloadable for portable devices from Project Gutenberg.

I didn't think Grant's Memoirs were that much of a slog at all, actually. His prose style is crisp and to the point (very much like the man himself, it would seem), and I greatly appreciated the fact that spared the reader a bunch of uninteresting pre-war biographical tofu-filler, instead more or less cutting straight to the Mexican War and then the Civil War.

My only issue with Grant's Memoirs is a historical one, insofar as the overwhelming popularity of his account played a role in what I consider the unjust obscuring of George Thomas and George Meade's accomplishments during the war. (Then again, Thomas shouldn't have burned all his damned papers right before he died, either...what a self-abnegating move.)

Still haven't found anybody whose work I like more than Catton's -- and while I've cut back in recent years I used to read an awful lot on the ACW.

I've been listening to David Blight's Civil War lectures on YouTube, and he sighed at one point that people these days don't read Catton like they used to. That's surprising to me, since his writing is so engaging.

His arm is likely toast, so I don't blame the Cardinals for releasing him, but I'm going to miss Kyle McClellan facing all the guys named Lee.

3) McClellan's failure is something we shouldn't swallow too easily. Yes, he hated to lose battles, but he also really hated to lose the soldiers he had worked so hard to mold. That isn't perhaps the ideal quality in a general but it's not clear to me that it is a general moral failing or proof of cowardice. I don't think he was at all a coward in regard to himself; he was overly cautious about his men, but that's not at all the same thing as cowardice. The coldness that Grant and Lee and S Jackson and Sherman felt about the death around them made them effective but isn't the only measure of morality.

This is a really damning trait in a General.

It's one thing to not be a butcher, that's admirable. But, to fear losses so much that you lose all agressiveness, is completely self-defeating. Especially in an era when camp disease killed many times the number of men battles did. If McClellan had pressed home the attacks and won a decisive victory at Antietam, an extra few thousand dead that day might have saved hundreds of thousands of deaths by ending the war years earlier.

Patton and MacArthur are excellent examples of American Generals who maintained agressiveness while avoiding meat-grinder tactics. The contrast between MacArthur's losses, and the butcher's bill paid in the Central Pacific Navy-run campaign are striking.

but I'm going to miss Kyle McClellan facing all the guys named Lee.

Ah, he just intentionally walked them.

All this commentary on Civil War generals and names, and no one has noted that it began with a piece written by Sickels (though, really, I'm not sure he has a leg to stand on).

All this commentary on Civil War generals and names, and no one has noted that it began with a piece written by Sickels (though, really, I'm not sure he has a leg to stand on).

If you RTFA (or rather, the comments to TFA), it's brought up there. The spelling is different, however. The incompetent political general was Dan Sickles.

This is a really damning trait in a General.

Oh I agree. The commentary on McClellan even in this thread often turns to damning him as a person as a coward; that's not correct, in my view, and it worries me when people take caution about sacrificing lives as a sign of moral failing. In his case it's a professional failing, and a huge one. He had enough other personal failings.

If you RTFA (or rather, the comments to TFA), it's brought up there. The spelling is different, however. The incompetent political general was Dan Sickles.

Pretty fair general in overseeing Reconstruction, as it turned out.