Now that the dust has settled, can we admit his strategic "contributions" were so bad as to be almost on a level with Churchill? His whole vision for winning the war comes off as unfocused, getting sidetracked with minor targets and political goals instead of appointing the right men to just strike at the heart of the Confederacy. The contemporary perspective that he was a superior warlord to Jeff Davis is just plain wrong imo.
>>18268153In the early part of the war yes, Lincoln wasn't a great strategist simply because he was totally inexperienced with running a war, in fact nobody in America had ever experienced a war of this scale.
>>18268153Lincoln had some strategic obsessions like moving into Unionist East Tennessee and attacking mostly irrelevant Texas to make a statement against the French in Mexico. He was stuck with some political generals he had to tolerate and early in the war he played hardball with the border states, especially Maryland, while placating them with “it’s not about slavery, trust me bro”. Overall though he let the warfighters do the fighting while maintaining ending the bigger picture.
>>18268153He was addicted to BBC
>>18268194He was relieved that Grant could mostly run the war without him while previous generals seemed to not want to accept any responsibility and would push everything onto him and Stanton, and neither of them knew anything about war. Lincoln's confidence in Grant was such that he never asked him about his exact plans.
>>18268194Halleck finally did convince him to stop appointing political generals, although the ones they already had like Banks and Butler couldn't very easily be gotten rid of and they were kind of stuck with them.
>>18268194The Trans Mississippi stopped mattering at all after Vicksburg was taken and Grant knew it and that they shouldn't bother with the place except as a mopping up once the Confederacy east of the Mississippi was conquered.
>>18268153Lincoln pretty much turned secession from a relatively orderly LARP into a full blown Civil War by refusing to let go of a minor military fortification with no civilian population because he was afraid to look weak in front of the press.
>>18268198Outside a few exceptions like being unable to remove Banks and Butler due to their political importance Grant had a very free hand for the most part. However he later acknowledged that the hammering of Lee's army in the Overland Campaign was not what he'd wanted to do, he would have preferred a campaign of maneuvering like in Vicksburg but did not know the Army of the Potomac that well and was also a bit risk adverse due to 1864 being an election year.
>>18268235I almost made the point that he single-handedly started the war, but I omitted it because I wanted to talk about strategy instead of making a Lincoln seethe thread. But it is the most major mark against him.
>>18268245Really weird to see his fans spin his campaigns against Lee as some brilliant affair. It's like trying to be an apologist for the Red Army in WWII when the most obvious conclusion is that yes he really did just brute force it and got a lot more men killed than necessary. But like Lincoln he has become a Saint in recent years and no one wants to admit his career after Vicksburg was a letdown.
>>18268321as he said, Grant was new to AOP and didn't know its generals well, and AOP also had an incredibly toxic culture thanks to McCuck's legacy that made it hard for them to be the efficient, instantly responsive instrument the Army of the Tennessee had been. they were slow, always defeatist, always psychologically intimidated by Lee.
>>18268235How was South Carolina's seccession from the Union a LARP? Are you suggesting that they would have just came back after negotiations or that it should have just been allowed to happen?
Jefferson Davis was 5x worse of a strategist.
