Gary Gallagher: belief

Transcript context

…… because again, victory for the Confederacy was stop the war. Stop the war. Neither side has an advantage in terms of its leadership. The generals all come… You often used to read frequently Confederates had better generals than the… And, but this is the first war where West- where West Pointers are in charge. They were subalterns in Mexico. The West Point is the United States Military Academy where the professional officer corps gets its training. It was established under Jefferson. It’s the premier engineering school in the United States. And I mean, West Point-trained engineers are very, very prominent when they get out of the army and even when they’re in the army. But by the time of the Civil War, it is West Pointers who were lieutenants and captains in the war with Mexico are now gonna be the people in charge. Almost every army commander, almost every corps commander, which is the next level, are West Point graduates. They took the same classes from the same professors, read the same textbooks, served under either Winfield Scott or Zachary Taylor in Mexico. They bring the same background and body of doctrine and training to the table. It would’ve been weird if one side or the other had an inherent advantage in leadership. The one place where the US ends up with an advantage is that over the course of the war, it found, in my view, four men who could command armies effectively: Grant, Sherman, Philip Henry Sheridan, and George H. Thomas. The Confederacy only ever found one, and that’s Lee. And they had more than one army, so that’s a problem. If you have more than one army but only one really good army commander, that puts you at a disadvantage. In what ways were the two sides balanced militarily equal militarily? So the, the passion, like we mentioned, of the, of the fighting force, the soldiers, the dedication to the fighting.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.