Cecily Zander

You know, after after a battle, he writes to her that it was a masterpiece of art.

I mean, he just he genuinely thinks of himself in these kind of grandiose ways.

Yeah.

Fortunately for us as historians, his wife received all these letters, I assume read them, sort of shook her head, rolled her eyes, and then put them in a box.

And then after he died, she published them so that we could all suffer with her.

Yeah, and I think, you know, that was still, again, it's an important point about this being the early days of the war.

They didn't yet have a sense that those were, I mean, truly small numbers compared to the casualties that would come later.

And, you know...

One of the chief criticisms that's leveled at Ulysses Grant after the war was that he was a butcher, that he sacrificed men unnecessarily.

I think if McClellan had ever been labeled a butcher, it would have crushed him.

But just to sort of offer some contrast to listeners, when Grant undertakes his initial attacks at Cold Harbor at the very end of the Overland campaign...

There's about 7,000 casualties in 20 minutes of an assault on the first morning of that day's fighting.

And so those numbers within a couple of years are going to change quite drastically.

Grant is crushed by what he caused at Cold Harbor, but they were casualties by that point in the war that both sides were sort of willing to sustain.

Early on, when McClellan is talking during the Peninsula campaign, those are numbers that are still really, really shocking to both military officers and the American people.

Yeah.

I mean, when you think from the very beginning that you should have been the guy they put in charge and they pick somebody named George Washington, you're going to have a problem.

And you're going to spend the rest of the revolution trying to convince anyone you can possibly get the ear of that they made the wrong choice.

He had more experience.

I think genuinely coming into the American Revolution, you wouldn't have found a soldier willing to fight for the American side with more sort of genuine battlefield experience than Charles Lee.