{"id":499,"date":"2006-01-02T15:13:00","date_gmt":"2006-01-02T15:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/2006\/01\/02\/499\/"},"modified":"2006-01-02T15:13:00","modified_gmt":"2006-01-02T15:13:00","slug":"499","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=499","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

I just had a rather pleasant week at home from work, skimming thru Doris Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals”<\/span>, her new biography of Abraham Lincoln<\/span>. I’ve got to return to work tomorrow; what a bummer. But back to Lincoln and the early 1860s. Lincoln had terrible luck in getting good generals in the early part of the Civil War. There was George McClelland, who fought a good defensive battle at Antietam, but otherwise just didn’t want to fight. After Lincoln finally canned McClelland, he went through a couple of other losers – Ambrose Burnside, Joseph Hooker, and George Meade (as with McClelland, Meade fought a great defensive action at Gettysburg; but he failed to go on the offensive against Lee’s weakened forces after that battle, as Lincoln had ordered). Only later in the war did the industrial-strength Union generals finally emerge: Grant, Sherman and Sheridan. <\/p>\n

My theory on this is as follows: it was probably apparent to the early Union generals that a full-tilt battle effort against the south was going to be incredibly bloody and inhumane, like no battle in the course of human history. Technology was behind this; there were now railroads to bring lots of troops to the fronts, telegraphs to coordinate their movements, musket rifles that could shoot longer distances with greater accuracy, bigger artillery guns, trench warfare techniques, land mines, crude forms of machine guns — all kinds of stuff that only recently became available to both the north and the south. <\/p>\n

It was not far from the quandary that nuclear weapons created in the 1940s and 1950s: the stuff was so deadly that you didn’t want to use it. So I can see why the first Union generals were so squeamish about getting into big battles. They had never been through such kind of warfare, although they could see how bad it would be. <\/p>\n

The generals who were finally able to put up with routinely sacrificing 25,000 or more soldiers on each side on a given day came up through the ranks in such battles. They must have gotten hardened to it. And the kid soldiers who would be put through such a meat grinder would probably only respect guys like Grant, Sherman and Sheridan, who had gone through it themselves. <\/p>\n

I do thank the heavens that I can have a pleasant week at home reading about this stuff, and not experience it for real. Virtually every human being knows how dreadful war is, but there seems to be very little that we can do to stop it from happening. It’s kind of like the weather; it just happens, it’s too complex to control. The storms of war continue to rage today in places like Iraq and Sudan and the Congo and Bolivia. Thus I can’t help but wonder: in the coming centuries of human history will this peaceful little patch of suburban New Jersey, which I know so well, yet see armed conflict?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I just had a rather pleasant week at home from work, skimming thru Doris Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals”, her new biography of Abraham Lincoln. I’ve got to return to work tomorrow; what a bummer. But back to Lincoln and the early 1860s. Lincoln had terrible luck in getting good generals in the early part of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}