Chapter 1: Who was the worst American army general of all time?
It's 2 a.m. on a March morning in 1847 during the Mexican-American War. Under a canvas canopy somewhere in the countryside, a U.S. Army captain sleeps fitfully. Around him in their own tents, his troops snore and breathe and mutter in their dreams. Out on the camp's perimeter, the night watch whispers to each other. There's all the normal sounds of night.
Crickets, cicadas, frogs, an owl hoots in the trees. And then there's that hissing under the captain's cot. He bolts upright, dives into the night a split second before a 12-pound artillery shell detonates, shredding his tent with shrapnel. Enemy attack? Hardly. In fact, one of his own men had planted the explosive with intention to harm, if not kill.
How awful do you have to be at leading men for one of your own to try and murder you? And how does such a dreadful officer live to lead another day, only to be finally named general? General. Hey, it's American History Hit. Thanks for listening. I'm Don Wildman.
Across the span of America's wars, in which so many citizen soldiers have courageously fought and died, the leaders of those wars, the generals, are so often brilliant at executing strategy, supply, and even political maneuvers. Today's episode isn't about them.
Instead, it's about the blunderers, the overreachers, the outmatched and outsmarted, the disastrous decision-makers who put their forces and their nation into harm's way with what proved to be, well, general ineptitude. Who were America's worst generals? Today, we look at a few outstanding examples of those who, if history is our guide, had no business calling the shots.
And we'll proudly do it with a returning voice in such matters, Professor Cecily Zander of the University of Wyoming, author of a new book just out there on the horizon entitled Abraham Lincoln and the American West coming out at the end of this summer. as well as Army Under Fire, Anti-Militarism in the Civil War.
She is an expert in Civil War history, who has joined us for a number of previous episodes about U.S. Grant, as well as others. Welcome back, Cecily Zander. Ready to dive into the inglorious leaders we'd rather forget?
Hey, John, it's great to be back. Unfortunately, I think I've spent most of my career studying these guys and not the good ones. So, yeah, I'm absolutely ready.
Yes, they always get the attention. We've got a list of six. There could likely be more. But if a great general is, in the broad sense, one who sees the field, the tactics of forces, the terrain, the time of battle, who makes the decisions of clarity and conviction, ours today, as I mentioned, did not. So what qualifies a bad general in general?
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Chapter 2: What made Braxton Bragg a hated general during the Civil War?
You know, like I have always thought of that before I started reading a lot more for this. And I realized that it might just be a curse, you know, that this guy just thinks too hard about things. And he is a bit of a coward, I think. But above coward, I believe he's maneuvering for the future at all times. And within himself, he sees a future for himself because he does have a big ego.
And he probably sees himself as president at some point.
Yeah, I mean, if you read the letters that he wrote to his wife, who I am always delighted to inform students was named Ellen McClellan. I mean, it is amazing the way he sort of describes his achievements. 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.
Oh, my God. That's funny. He was called Little Mac by his soldiers. Let's talk about the Battle of the Seven Pines. Union casualties had exceeded 5,000 on May 31st and June 1st of 1862. McClellan's whole role in the Civil War was really the early days of this before he gets sacked by Lincoln. And he writes to his wife one of those letters.
I am tired of the sickening sight of the battlefield with its mangled corpses and poor suffering wounded. Victory has no charms for me when purchased at such cost. I can imagine myself writing that. Not quite those word choices, but, you know, there's a human being here. We can't fault him for that.
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.
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