Grant Vs Lee Who Was The Better General?

hey my name is Justin with infused library and today I'm breaking down the book grant and Lee a study in personality in general ship by JFC fuller so I'm about to tell you the six things I learned about this book but before I do that I just want to give a breakdown of the personalities of grant and Lee before I go into that so grant was a very very simple common sense guy he would always find the simplest solution to pretty much any problem that showed up in his way he would always cut through these complex things that were happening and find just the craziest most simple things to solve them as an example when he got accepted into the military academy West Point he arrived and found out that his acceptance papers had his name wrong if he wanted to correct that he'd have to send the papers to Washington have them corrected in the need to be mailed back and this would take a few months instead grant just decided to change his name and he got into West Point that same day that kind of crazy out-of-the-box simple thinking would really really help him throughout the war and he was a very unambitious guy he wanted to stay in the background and he really did he was a bit shorter he was a little common looking his voice didn't make him stand out he wasn't a very charismatic guy I also believe he was a bit of an introvert as well but his simple clear thinking even under extreme stress is what really made him be promoted over and over again what would happen is that grant would show up into a situation where just it was really bad stressful things were happening but instead of getting wrapped up in the stress in this fog of war and everything that was happening grant would still have the simple clear concise thinking that he'd have in normal happy sunny situations and that set him apart from all of the people that he was working with and around and the fact that he could take lots of tiny little bits and pieces of information and throw them all together in his mind and get a clearer picture of everything that was happening on the battlefield across all kinds of different states you could remember a lot of things that were happening and just draw it together as a clear picture and this really gave him the advantage over whoever he was fighting so let's look at Lee this guy was extremely modest in kind and wanted to lead by example he would actually eat regular arm food actually most of the food you would eat was worse than the rations that his men were eating he would send all the good food that showed up at his tent and he would send that to the wounded tents and he would also sleep in a regular army tent he was trying to lead by example showing that he would do what he asked his army to do Lee was riding his horse through a battlefield that was you know a couple days old or a couple of hours old and apparently Lee rode past a wounded northern soldier that was lying on the ground the northern soldier was trying to be all defiant it was yelling hurrah for the Union and Lee stopped his horse dismounted walked over to the man the soldier on the ground actually thought Lee was about to kill him but instead Lee leaned over grabbed the man's hand and said my son I hope you will soon be well and this affected the soldier so much that as soon as Lee walked off and got on his horse again he said he cried himself to sleep there on the bloody ground and Lee took his kindness and ability to forgive nearly anything to such an extreme level it would actually hurt him as a general and I'll probably talk about that in a minute but what really motivated him were cause honor and God and those were all the same thing to him he thought this was a holy war and he was appointed by God to be the general and no matter what obstacle would show up in Lee's way Lee believed that he would eventually always prevail he had an enormous faith in this because if God was on his side and this was a holy war maybe the war would be long maybe it would be hard but he would eventually prevail because this was a holy war and another thing about Lee was that he valued his state more than his country that's why he was the general of the Confederates but the funny thing was he was actually courted by both sides to be the head general the Union wanted him to be the general the Confederates wanted him to be the general but he saw that his duty was to his state of Virginia and Virginia had decided to form a new country along with some other states and that's why he fought in the Civil War on the Confederate side even though he was very very conflicted and didn't want the war to happen anyway so the first thing I learned in this book is that the leg ability if someone is linked to how they will be remembered a lot of history books will tell us that Lee was a military gene and that grant really wasn't and he just won because he had all the money on his side he had all the numbers on his side he had better guns and that's why he won but according to the research of this author general fuller this is completely untrue grant was actually the brilliant tactician and leave really did not lead his army very well by comparison but that doesn't really matter sometimes because in history the more likeable person will be remembered more favorably and Lee was just a more likable guy like I said he was very very kind he set great example for his army he had a legend that surrounded him he was the heart and soul of the Confederate Army they held him in such high esteem that he could have been a dictator of the new country if he had wanted to and thrown his weight around and another reason why history is so kind to Lee was that he was facing a lot of very incompetent generals over the years as Lincoln went through general through general trying to find grants he went through a lot of very bad generals that were controlling the Union Army and Lee really looked very good in comparison to all those generals and the fact that he had less money to work with he had less men to work with and the men he was controlling were not very disciplined and all of this it makes Lee look pretty good but when Grant comes along and shows what a true general can do history needs to be a little more favorable to Grant and that's what this book points out the second thing I learned was that the Confederates were chained by their own Constitution when you start your own country based on states rights it makes it very hard to be the head of the government of all of those states because you don't want to step on the toes of the states because they joined you because you told them that you would give them more rights so Jefferson Davis was always afraid to do pretty much anything Davis wouldn't dare tax the new country because what right did he have to do that he was fighting for states rights so the states needed to tax themselves so that he could get more food for the army and more men for the army even though in reality the citizens wanted to be taxed so they could save the Confederacy but states rights was the cause and downfall of the Confederacy and the lack of money really made it hard to feed the army and give the army well arms even when the new car passed a bill to draft people into the army it had tons of restrictions and again this is because of states rights the states would put in different clauses that would restrict certain people from having to be drafted become federer C was basically crippled by the beliefs that they were founded on and that is one reason why the Confederacy failed funny thing is they were fighting to be free but they wanted such a large degree of freedom that their freedom actually was what made them go back into the Union when the North won the fourth thing I learned was that both grant and Lee made very very large mistakes the big difference is how they dealt with them as a general grant made enormous mistakes at the battlefields of Belmont Dolson and Shiloh and Lee made giant mistake that were just as bad in his West Virginian campaign but the difference was grant learned from those mistakes and he never repeated them again the problem with Lee was that he just kept repeating those mistakes over and over and over again while grant constantly grew as a General Lee was pretty much the same guy before and after the war Grant had less time to grow as a Supreme Commander Lee had more time so this is again a problem with Lee's leadership he'd never grew and also didn't help that Lee would give vague open to interpretation verbal orders because he hated paperwork meanwhile grants would give simple direct orders written out and that right there also helped grant win the war the fifth thing I learned from this book was that the rifle changed everything it had just been invented and no one knew how to use it in fact during the entire war neither side actually used it to its potential so the previous guns - these were the ones you'd see in the Revolutionary War they were smoothbore and they were accurate up to about 30 to 100 paces that is not a very long distance at all bayonets were the name of the day they were actually used a lot because you would shoot at very short distance the other army was running at you you had to stab them now these new rifles could be accurate up to 500 paces suddenly walking straight at the enemy was five times as dangerous and yet they just kept doing it they kept throwing bodies in a straight line walking across fields at the army but the really weird thing was grant averaged a loss of ten to eleven percent men each battle so if you had 100 men ten would die Lee would average about twelve to sixteen percent lost four hundred so an average battle 100 men would go in and twelve to sixteen would die the weird thing about this was not only that grant had a lower loss per 100 men but the weird thing was that most of the time Lee's men were actually in defensive situations and losses are always bigger for the attackers so even though grant was attacking he lost less men than Lee he was just a better general and even at the end of the war he never really learned how to use rifles to their advantage they still believed in using bayonets for some reason funny thing was there was a doctor in the Civil War that wrote the only bayonet wound that he really had to sew up was when a soldier accidentally bayonetted his friend so yeah they weren't even really being used because at 500 paces most people died before they ever got to hand-to-hand combat and a sixth thing I learned from this book was that least oould for liberty and grant stood for authority and this led to a several facts throughout the war Lee could not and would not force the new government to do anything even when he would ask for supplies who would say them in such a nice roundabout way that those requests for new men new shoes new blankets they would be swatted away and he refused to be involved in politics as much as humanly possible even though he could have muscled his way in becoming a dictator both president and general of this new Confederacy if he really wanted to but that was totally against his personality and beliefs he wouldn't even fire a bad general because if God had ordained these men to be part of his holy army and ever giving their lives every day who was he general lead to criticized how they did their jobs he was glad that they were just doing their jobs in his holy army to begin with and if we look at the South they were totally unprepared when they went for war they had bad roads no manufacturing which made it hard to make guns again grant standing for authority when they were in occupied territory his army had to come more disciplined because they were always in the enemy's territory someone was always spying for General Lee and so they had to be very very disciplined and another funny thing that comes from Lee standing for liberty and grant standing for authority was the way they fought um Lee's army was very very undisciplined Lee's army wouldn't actually run and fight in a straight line it would zigzag and run around more in a guerilla style than marching his straight lines arm and arm like the Union soldiers would and the funny thing was even though Lee's armies were so undisciplined they were actually better fighters than the Union soldiers final thing I learned from this book was that grant would act when Lincoln was going through all of those generals in the early days of the Civil War a lot of those had generals that he would promote would come to him with the battle plan and ask for permission to go and act on this plan meanwhile grant would just say this is what I'm going to do and he would go do it he acted like a soldier and Lincoln was so relieved finally he had a general a real soldier someone that would act not just keep asking for permission to do plans that they thought would possibly fail Lee would always be asking Davis for his opinion on plans and how to make them better and this actually slowed him down grant would plan and plan and plan and when he'd come to a really good plan he would act very swiftly on that and those are six of the things I learned from this book both grant and Lee were excellent excellent men I'm not trying to talk down about Lee it just turns out that Grant was the superior general thank you for watching if you like this video be sure to subscribe on my channel I make a new video every other Sunday and eventually I want to bring that to a new book every single week so be sure to check out those videos and I will see you guys next Sunday

Channel: Infused Library

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Rating: 4.4201922 out of 5

Keywords: JFC Fuller, Grant and Lee Book, Grant Vs Lee, Which general was better grant or lee, A study in personality and generalship, civil war general vs, Lee was a kind general, grant was decisive, Grant was clear headed thinker, stress civil war, Grant was the better general, why grant was a better general than lee, Grant and Lee Contrast, Grant and Lee book, grant and lee, animated book, animated condenced book

Id: 8YTEbnj4v0U

Length: 12min 50sec (770 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 17 2016