"West Pointers and the Civil War" by Dr. Wayne Hsieh

[@CAROLUSPRIMA]

The more I learn about the War the more I am convinced that officers at the brigade, division, and corps levels had more influence overall than the commanders we usually think of - particularly those at the corps level. When a young colonel who had been on Grant's staff stopped in at his headquarters, Grant said, "This Army [of the Potomac] has a terrible glitch. What's wrong? How do I fix it?" The colonel replied: "Get Ely [Parker, a full bloodied Indian on Grant's staff] drunk and tell him to scalp every corps commander you have." This is obviously overstatement and there are exceptions, but it's hard to study the Overland Campaign and the battles following it without coming to a similar conclusion. Earlier the Union had gone a long ways toward correcting this problem as the second tier of generals rose, but by that time the really good corps commanders such as Meade (now commander of an army), Hooker, Reynolds (dead), Hancock (still suffering mightily from a terrible Gettysburg wound), and Sedgwick (killed early in the Campaign, his death according to Grant equaling the loss of a division) were no more and Grant was stuck with the same, earlier problem.

[@CAROLUSPRIMA]

Thanks for the presentation. Really good. For what it's worth, forty percent of West Pointers from VA remained loyal to the Union, which seems to me to be an astonishingly high number. I have no way of knowing but perhaps (and this undermines Lee's reasoning) they may otherwise have stayed loyal to VA but swearing fealty to a different country was a bridge too far. The Southern concept of a man's word being his bond is not a myth so perhaps this large number from VA who had sworn loyalty to the Union staying with the Union should not be too surprising. Finally, he mentioned George Thomas who for reasons I won't go into here is not mentioned among the top three Union commanders but in my view is inexcusably overlooked by history and well should be considered so.