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Sept. 16, 2025

War Fighting: The Case of Ulysses S. Grant

Thomas Bruscino

ABSTRACT: This article argues that American military professionals must focus on war fighting in publishing about military history to bring their unique military perspectives to the study of war. Most writing on military publishing offers general encouragement without providing focus to military writers. This article uses the historical example of American professional military writing and teaching from the American Civil War to World War II about General Ulysses S. Grant to demonstrate the value of analyses focusing on war fighting, especially relative to popular and academic histories of Grant’s military leadership. This study’s conclusions will assist future US military writers and publishers as they invigorate professional military writing.

Keywords: military publishing, professional military education, Ulysses S. Grant, military leadership, military strategy

 

Several young US Army officers initiated an effort in 2023 that they called the “Harding Project” to invigorate writing by military professionals and in military publications. Chief of Staff of the Army Randy George, has made the initiative one of his priorities, and the early efforts have been promising. The Harding Project’s mission to renew professional military writing is important in ways the project’s strongest advocates might not realize. Military professionals publishing works on military history provide perspectives that are useful to practitioners and corrective and stabilizing to popular and academic military history. But, the writing is only useful if the military professionals play to their greatest strengths, which means focusing on war fighting.1

Military professionals who produce works of military history are usually focused on understanding and teaching in a way that can help military professionals do military jobs. Militaries exist to fight and win their nations’ wars. A military’s main job is war fighting: how to fight and win wars strategically, operationally, and tactically. As a result, military professionals, especially in military schools, regularly produce military history content with valuable insights on war fighting keyed toward the appropriate levels of command. Unfortunately, little of this military history gets out to the wider world through broader publications and, all too often, when military professionals publish for wider audiences, the professionals adopt popular or academic approaches, losing sight of the practical war-fighting perspective.

Professional Writing on Grant

The example of the history and memory of Ulysses S. Grant as a military commander is instructive. As a commanding general, Grant had to defeat enemy military forces in the field. Grant had to take away their ability to use violence to achieve their political aims, allowing for a peace in line with the aims dictated by his political masters. Military professionals writing and teaching in the decades between the American Civil War and World War II studied Grant with these tasks in mind. In those years, the US Army engaged in a historically undervalued program of professionalization, in part driven by limited resources in men and materiel.2

Although proponents of preparedness publicly argued for a better standing force, they also quietly prepared for war with what they had (a small, dedicated officer corps and a professional military education system) to prepare the officers. The proponents also had clear-eyed ideas of what those officers would have to do in the event of a major war. They knew that in war, the small numbers of regular officers would be promoted to the highest ranks, where they would be in command or on the staffs of corps, field armies, and theater and national headquarters. The officers needed to be prepared well, given all the Army’s shortcomings, to fill those roles, especially in mass modern war.

Military history provided examples to study, with Napoleon Bonaparte and others as part of the curriculum at the Command and General Staff School and the US Army War College. Until and after World War I, Grant was the great American example. Military professionals studied Grant in the course of their writing and learning in the schoolhouse, drawing heavily on primary sources from the war. Before World War I, the published, official records were rarely used by civilian historians; “however, the impetus given to the study of the Civil War at our Leavenworth Schools has started many of our younger officers to a realization of how to study military art. The demand for O.R. [official records] sets is a constant one among graduating Staff College students.” They studied Grant from the perspective of his decisions and actions as a commander of armies in the field. Commanding the armies meant grasping the situations and gathering, moving, and maneuvering mass, combined-arms formations in theaters of war and on campaign. Their teachings and publications, which were generally isolated in the schoolhouse, are remarkable for their steadiness. Put more simply, the Grant studied in the schoolhouse was always the great military commander who led the campaigns, directly and indirectly, that destroyed the rebels’ ability to wage war and forced them to surrender.3

A review of all these studies of Grant would go beyond the scope of this article; instead, focusing on two aspects of Grant’s command in 1864 will illustrate the point. The first involves Grant’s role as the overall commanding general, including his involvement in the operations assigned to General William Tecumseh Sherman. The military professionals taught about Sherman’s March to the Sea as part of Grant’s broad, strategic approach for 1864, including at least five mutually supporting campaigns, all moving toward, in Grant’s earliest orders, “a common center.” Three or four were in the Virginia theater: an advance up the Shenandoah Valley along with an attack over the mountains from West Virginia; an assault up the James River toward Richmond; and the “Overland Campaign,” as it later became known, which was aimed directly at the Army of Northern Virginia, with the additional goal of linking up with the James River assault. The other two were to be in the American Southeast: one landing and attacking north from Mobile, Alabama, and one moving from Chattanooga, Tennessee, toward Atlanta, Georgia, and beyond under Sherman.4

Grant intended these last two campaigns to connect. Regardless of whether they linked up, Grant made clear to Sherman the capture of Atlanta was preliminary to future operations to destroy or isolate Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston’s main rebel field army in the theater and to keep it from joining Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. From this position and, if necessary, Sherman was to join up with the rest of the federal forces in Virginia to complete the destruction of Lee’s army. Such a move would be complex because it would require Sherman to move to the east to get between Johnston and Lee, while also securing the Ohio River line from a counterattack by Johnston. More importantly, as Grant knew and the military professionals taught, Sherman’s ongoing operations after Atlanta would necessitate him establishing a new base of operations because his lines of communication had grown far too long.

Arthur L . Wagner, a Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and US Army War College instructor, said it best in a lecture on strategy: “Much has been written, related, and sung about ‘The March to the Sea.’ Its object is clear to military men, but in ordinary histories it is made to appear as simply a march of devastation, in which the only object was to sweep the hostile territory with a besom of destruction.” Not so. “It was a great and successful change of base, to which object all destruction of the enemy’s resources was subordinate and incidental.” Indeed, part of the reason Sherman tore up the Georgia railroads on his march was that he was changing bases. Sherman had no intention of using these railroads to extend his lines of communication, which were already too long.5

Military professionals like Wagner understood the march to Savannah, Georgia, was always preliminary to a march north, as directed by Grant. The professionals also understood such a move required the development of new bases along the coast. Grant worked with his various staffs to launch the army and navy in multiple efforts to seize the bases and supply the troops and materiel Sherman needed at Savannah and as he headed north through the Carolinas toward his directed concentration with the federal armies in southern Virginia. One prominent instructor pointed out that on Sherman’s march in North Carolina, “Sherman was joined by Major General Schofield, whom Grant had sent from the north.” Grant gave Sherman latitude, especially in his choice to go toward Savannah and leave General George Thomas to defend in Tennessee, but the march north was always Grant’s intent.6

The various departments, army groups, and field armies and their campaigns were the means and ways of Grant’s national military strategy for the last year of the war. The professionals at the Army schools taught that Grant gave initiative to his subordinate field commanders through letters of instruction focused on ends, prescribing “little else than a general objective, namely, the hostile armies, and concert of action in attacking them.” Yet, professionals also understood that fixing mistakes and exploiting successes required Grant’s constant direction of ways and support in means: “In this way General Grant, from his headquarters at City point, directed a million men over an area half as large as Europe.” Grant’s command was a master class in the overall military direction of a war in multiple theaters, converging on one.7

Since Grant sat at multiple levels of command simultaneously in the last year of the war, the military professionals also studied how he operated on campaign as a field army (really, an army group) commander with the Army of the Potomac as the main effort. This strategy was more traditional—today, it would be called “operational art”—executed in the Overland Campaign. Most accounts credit Grant’s persistence in the campaign, noting the value to federal morale of his famous decision to send the troops southeast and carry on after the Battle of the Wilderness. The military professionals studying the campaign recognized Grant’s tenacity and the psychological effects. They were less concerned about Grant having continued the campaign than they were about how he did it, though.8

For the military professionals, the direction of the advance after the Wilderness mattered most. Before the campaign, Grant had multiple choices for engaging with the Army of Northern Virginia. Grant eventually rejected the indirect approach of repeating General George McClellan’s peninsular campaign of 1862 because the risk of uncovering Washington was too great. Therefore, the direct approach remained. Grant, however, still had to choose whether to advance to the west or the east of the Army of Northern Virginia. A lecture at the US Army War College described the choice as follows:

[T]he Wilderness had to be turned or passed through. Because of the rivers and lack of maneuver space on the east, it could be turned on the western flank only, but this committed the Army to long railroad lines of communications which would require a large force to hold, and it led the Army away from a direct junction with General Benjamin Butler’s forces [the James River operation]. On the other hand, to take the direct road towards Butler and Richmond meant passing through the Wilderness where Lee could bring on a battle advantageously; however, it allowed Grant to avail himself of the less vulnerable and surer lines of communication by water which the Federal command of the sea ensured. He decided on this route.9

There are important issues embedded in this analysis.

Foremost, it displays a clear understanding of Grant’s realization that a decisive battle—war or even campaign ending—was a thing of the past. Modern, mass, combined-arms field armies had proven highly resilient. They simply could not be destroyed in single battles. Whereas the ground west of the Wilderness may have been more favorable for single battle, no such battle would force the capitulation of the Army of Northern Virginia. Likewise, whereas the Wilderness presented the enemy with favorable ground for a single battle, Grant knew he could accept this risk because the Army of the Potomac would survive. Grant had no illusions. Destroying Lee’s army on favorable terms would take seizing and retaining the initiative through a series of deliberately linked battles—now called a campaign.

The second issue is that General George Meade’s army would only be able to advance after a difficult battle if the army could maintain the massive supply requirements of a field army on the offensive. Grant understood, and the military professionals subsequently taught, that supply mattered as much as or more than clever maneuvers. While Grant and Meade were certainly proficient at the complicated task of moving and maneuvering mass field armies, Grant especially excelled at the equally complicated mechanics of supplying these armies.

It was not just that Grant and Meade moved their forces where they could be better supported, Grant also directed the arrangement of the supply system. As one Fort Leavenworth text stated, “Grant was able to keep his own communications, the wagon-roads back to Brandy Station and the railway thence to Washington, covered; as soon as he should put his army across the Rapidan, he could change his base to Fredericksburg and Aquia Creek. That is exactly what he did.” Aquia Creek, which was the first of multiple ports in Virginia that would serve as supply depots along Grant’s intended line of operations, was followed by a detachment from the railroad and the use of, successively, Port Royal (on the Rappahannock River), White House (on the Pamunkey River), and City Point (on the James River) as main supply ports.10

Grant oversaw the planning and execution of this massive, joint supply effort through the War and Navy Departments to support his relentless campaigns. Of course, Grant sent the men to the southeast after the Wilderness. That was what he prepared to do all along. Being tenacious was necessary but not sufficient for a commander of modern field armies on campaign. Grant and his staff members had to, and did, build real physical resiliency into those armies. This understanding was common among the military professionals at professional military education institutes from the Civil War to World War II.11

Military Implications

The military professionals’ focus on Grant’s main responsibilities and approaches as a military commander had real effects on the Army’s conduct of war. The lessons taught about Grant’s overall strategy for 1864 and his conduct of the Overland Campaign were evident in the Army’s operations during World War I.

When the Americans began moving into France in 1917 and 1918, unity of command and effort was lacking among the Allies on the Western Front. General John J. Pershing and his staff suggested unified command, but they had to figure out how to fight under the existing arrangement. One of the first tasks for Pershing and his staff was to identify where on the front an American field army could operate under its own command and have the greatest effect on the war. They selected the Alsace-Lorraine region and prepared for an offensive east from the Saint-Mihiel area toward German lines of communications and resources around Metz. This planned campaign was isolated from the rest of the Allies’ efforts on the front, both physically and in intent.

The German 1918 Spring Offensive forced the Allies to appoint a supreme commander in Ferdinand Foch. The Americans were happy to accede to Foch’s requests for American troops (as divisions) to stem and push back the Germans in the summer of 1918. In the meantime, Pershing kept building First Army with the intent of attacking toward Metz. In the late summer, Foch saw an opportunity for a unified strategy to end the war that called for multiple concentric campaigns aimed at the center of the great German salient in northeastern France and Belgium. The Americans would attack north into the southern face of the salient.

Pershing and his staff agreed—as long as First Army remained a coherent force under American command. Why would they so readily abandon their previous planning for an attack east toward Metz? Put simply, Foch’s overall strategy for 1918 looked like Grant’s successful strategy of 1864. First Army and earlier I Corps commander General Hunter Liggett directly compared prior allied disunity to the Civil War, quoting Grant: “As Grant said of the Union Armies before he took command, they had acted ‘without concert, like a balky team, no two ever pulling together.’ ”12

Charles Roscoe Howland, a veteran, in a book of lectures delivered at Fort Leavenworth, wrote a detailed comparison. He argued that a single so-called decisive line of operations, like the attack toward Metz, “might have been successful,” but, “[T]he limitation of the Allied and American effort to a blow along one or even two direction lines would not have given sufficient opportunity to take full advantage of the Allied and American preponderance of force and resources.” The German advantage of having impassable flanks and interior lines “could be neutralized . . . by extending the offensive effort to include the whole front from Metz to the sea.”

Howland continued, “Through unity of command,” Foch “illustrated that type of the offensive by the operations on all fronts, and in a way very similar to the manner in which General Grant illustrated the offensive of exhaustion in his 1864 and 1865 operations that defeated the Confederacy.” More specifically, operations in the Middle East corresponded to the operations against Mobile. The fighting in the Balkans looked like Sherman’s campaign. Operations in Italy looked like operations from West Virginia. And finally, the “Allied and American operation on the Western front corresponds to General Grant’s operation against General Lee in front of Richmond. And, in that operation, General Pershing’s cutting off of the German line of communications and of retreat corresponds to General Sheridan’s cutting off of General Lee’s line of communications and retreat at Appomattox.” This type of overall strategy, Howland concluded, “brought the two greatest of modern wars to an end: i.e., the World War under the direction of Marshal Foch, and the American Civil War under the direction of General Grant.” See figure 1 for a side-by-side comparison of the offensives of exhaustion in World War I and the Civil War.13

Similarity of offensives of exhaustion in World War I and the American Civil War
Figure 1. Similarity of offensives of exhaustion in World War I and the American Civil War
(Source: Charles Roscoe Howland, A Military History of the World War, vol. 2 [General Service Schools Press, 1923], Map 150.)

A few early accounts by correspondents, influenced by the American officers, made similar comparisons. More recent military historians have rarely, if ever, compared the strategic leadership of Grant and Foch. The reason for this gap relates to the difference in perspective of military professionals at senior levels. Academic and popular military histories that compare the Civil War to World War I almost exclusively focus on tactics and technology and lessons not learned, especially regarding firepower and entrenchments.14

This realization leads to another key lesson learned by military professionals about planning and executing campaigns. A recent academic book chapter noted that it would make sense for Americans in World War I to compare their situation to the trench lines at Petersburg, Virginia, though little evidence exists that Americans did. The author does well to follow the evidence. Still the question is caught up in a popular and academic preoccupation with explaining the tactical difficulties and individual suffering of trench warfare.15

Those issues were not the primary concerns for the military professionals learning about high-level command on campaign. The leaders of the American Expeditionary Force and First Army did not bring up Petersburg for two reasons. First, Petersburg was mainly a siege, not a moving campaign. Second, most English-language World War I accounts have been heavily influenced by British experiences in trench warfare, which had similarities to Petersburg. Regardless, Americans in World War I did little fighting in terrain and trenches that looked like the Petersburg battlefield.

The military professionals in World War I did make a comparison to the Civil War. Leaving aside non-trench defensive fighting and counterattacking in summer 1918, the American large-scale campaign came in the battles of the Meuse-Argonne. For the military professionals who had learned at Fort Leavenworth and the US Army War College, the terrain and the operational problem looked familiar. They compared the Meuse-Argonne to the ground from the Wilderness to the James River.

Liggett led the way, calling the Argonne itself a “natural fortress beside which the Virginia Wilderness in which Grant and Lee fought was a park.” Pershing made the geographic comparison while discussing the movement of men in and out of the terrain: “The number of troops moved in this change was greater than the entire Northern Army in the battle of the Wilderness.” A senior American Expeditionary Force officer said of the region, “General Pershing and his troops fought here a greater Battle of the Wilderness.” First Army staff officer Colonel George C. Marshall wrote, “I imagine that we were in much the same situation as Grant’s army in the Wilderness campaign.” A headquarters correspondent followed the trend, describing Pershing as “perhaps a little like Grant in the Wilderness campaign. Some compared the Meuse-Argonne to the Wilderness.” The Argonne “is a thick growth very much resembling the Wilderness in Virginia, only the Wilderness is fairly level while the Argonne is full of steep hills and ravines,” wrote another. The official Army statistical summary of the war maintained, “In some ways the Meuse-Argonne offers an interesting resemblance to the Battle of the Wilderness. Both were fought over terrain covered with tangled woods and underbrush.” The emphasis in this study was on the vast resources required for the fight.16

These military professionals clearly had Grant’s Overland Campaign in mind. They understood that their campaign, like his, would not be won in any single decisive tactical battle. Major General Eben Swift, an instructor at Fort Leavenworth and the US Army War College, later reviewed a book on so-called “decisive battles,” arguing:

Perhaps the “Decisive Battles” would be treated in a more satisfactory way if we were able to abandon the extravagant significance which has been given to it. In its last analysis a decisive battle is one in which the offensive power of one combatant has permanently disappeared. Such a definition would eliminate Vicksburg, Mars-la-Tour, and the Marne,—substituting therefor The Wilderness, Sedan, and The Meuse-Argonne.17

All the substitutions were campaigns, as the American Expeditionary Force and First Army leaders understood. In their campaign, they made countless decisions to build, organize, train, direct, and supply the First Army deliberately so it could keep fighting in a prolonged campaign made up of a series of linked, tactical actions. As one observer at the time wrote, “[I]t was not the example of swift results in a day at Antietam, or the brilliant maneuver of Jackson at Chancellorsville, but the wrestling, hammering, stubbornly resisting effort . . . in the Appomattox campaign which was to call upon our heritage of fortitude.”18

Popular Academic Writing on Grant

Professional military teaching and writing on Grant’s command proved astute and had direct and indirect inspiration on American conduct of World War I and World War II. Nevertheless, these sorts of professional accounts began to fade after World War II and never had much influence outside the US Army. The two trends were related. In the aftermath of the massive mobilization and destruction of the world wars, capped off by dropping the atomic bombs, war seemed to enter a new epoch. The detailed study of the workings of conventional theater campaigns and field armies became part of a bygone era. More and more, the forestalling of war, especially through nuclear deterrence, appeared to be the main job of senior officers. The schoolhouses that prepared senior officers focused increasingly on broader policy issues. As US Army War College Commandant Major General Eugene Salet wrote in 1967, the “rapid and dynamic developments of the post–World War II years,” especially in “advances in science and technology,” made previous concepts and curricula “outdated.”

These changes brought realization, also, that the professional soldier no longer could restrict his professional development to the study of arms and armaments, of tactics and techniques. Whereas his grandfather could be content with mastering the use of his individual weapon, learning to ride a horse, and controlling small conventional forces, today’s military professional, while first and always a soldier, must also be a diplomat, an economist, a scientist, a historian, and a lawyer. The complexity of the military arts and sciences has expanded into many other disciplines and professions.19

The study of these other disciplines and professions crowded out the detailed study of outdated wars and campaigns. Military history in the schoolhouses turned toward broader themes and increasingly relied on academic and popular histories that by their nature did not regard Grant and his campaigns in the same way.20

The issue relates to the focus and intent of popular and academic history. Meant for wider public consumption, popular historical works retell the stories of familiar historical events or provide accountings of unfamiliar tales about the past, and they appeal to the market of contemporary, broader cultural trends. Academic historians focus on making original arguments in their publications. This revisionist focus is good; it injects energy and innovation into the study of the past. Nonetheless, it has its problems, including the tendency to lose sight of persistent truths.

In these works, Grant’s historical reputation as a general fluctuated over time. After the initial postwar celebrations of his military accomplishments, he came to be dismissed as a drunken butcher prior to World War II. Grant had a brief revival after the war, but around the time of the Vietnam War, his reputation again dipped when prominent histories and biographies portrayed his drive for victory as the result of callousness and personal ambition. In recent decades, coincident with the end of the Cold War and a greater focus on civil rights, newer books have argued Grant was a military genius.21

Much of the writing about Grant has been shaped by the historical context of the authors writing at the time. To fit their times and audiences, popular and academic historians of Grant, whether pro or con, have often focused on their primary concerns, not his. How much did Grant drink, and how did his drinking affect his performance? How callous and brutal was he? How did he handle race issues? What were his political ambitions? Was he aligned with the commander in chief ’s vision of reconstruction? Did he wage so-called total war? All these questions and more are important for grasping the whole Grant. They absorb the authors’ focus yet are largely peripheral to Grant’s key responsibilities and performance as a field army, theater, and commanding general in the Civil War.22

Even more favorable works that fully engage with Grant’s generalship still tend to underemphasize the concerns of the old military professionals. The two examples of Grant’s overall strategy for 1864 and his conduct of the Overland Campaign illustrate the point. Many popular and academic historians have recognized Grant’s planned unified approach, citing Abraham Lincoln’s description of the strategy as “if a man can’t skin, he must hold a leg while somebody else does.” Still, these historical accounts usually tail off their attention in execution, with Grant focused on the Overland Campaign and Virginia theater and exercising limited control of, or support for, the rest of the campaigns.23

For example, in popular memory and most histories, Grant instructed Sherman to defeat Johnston’s army and capture Atlanta. After seizing Atlanta, the story goes that Sherman, sometimes on his own initiative, launched his famous (or infamous) march of destruction to Savannah, with the explicit intent to take the war to the Southern people. Gallons of ink have been spilled about this subject, lauding or condemning Grant and Sherman for initiating this total—or hard—war aimed at breaking rebel will on the home front. The usual argument holds that Grant left Sherman on his own to be the innovative genius or bloodthirsty criminal. Most accounts ignore or underplay the jump in base of operations to the Atlantic ports, and many fail to mention that it was Grant who provided Sherman with the resources when he got to Savannah, and the reinforcements and resources as he headed north to complete Grant’s original intent.24

Similarly, even favorable accounts tend to treat the actions of later 1864 and early 1865—Sheridan’s operations in the Shenandoah Valley, Thomas’s fighting in Tennessee, the operations around Mobile and in Alabama, Butler’s and General Alfred Terry’s attacks in North Carolina, and the various movements of Schofield’s small army, among others—as independent stories. The earlier military professionals rightly saw all these actions as Grant did: deliberately, actively, and continually coordinated and assessed based on the initial planning in 1864 and with the original purpose of multiple campaigns moving toward a common center.25

Likewise, most popular and academic accounts have overlooked the military details of the Overland Campaign, choosing to focus on Grant’s tenacity and persistence. Critics have used the costly 1864 fighting as an example of Grant’s simplistic brutality—his willingness to feed superior numbers into bloody and indecisive battles in a war of blind attrition. Even those favorable to the general follow a similar line. Grant was a commander willing to “fight it out on this line if it takes all summer,” no matter the cost, because doing so was required to win. All accounts emphasize the second attack at Cold Harbor, Virginia, what Grant himself called his greatest remorse of the campaign, which critics call emblematic of his callousness, and even apologists regret as him going too far. All then credit Grant’s maneuver over the James River before the missed opportunity leading to the siege at Petersburg.26

Even though Grant deliberately planned and coordinated the basing and supply in advance, popular and academic accounts do not give this impression. Most note the importance of waterborne transportation but do not emphasize Grant’s anticipated combinations of maneuvers and establishment and protection of successive bases of supply—Fredericksburg/Aquia Creek, Port Royal, White House, and City Point—that made the sustained campaign possible. Almost all do not name the bases in Grant’s planning, only mentioning them as incidental to the maneuvers of the Army of the Potomac. The reason the accounts make this characterization is important. Virtually all popular and academic accounts overemphasize Grant’s hope for a decisive battle that would end the campaign to the detriment of studying his planned sustained campaign. For these historians, who are usually caught up in negative perceptions about so-called attritional warfare, the new type of sustained campaign was suboptimal and only the outcome of Lee’s tactical acumen in staving off decisive battles and Grant’s determination to keep fighting. The military professionals, as noted earlier, knew better.27

Conclusions

Military professionals who focus on teaching and writing about war fighting at the appropriate level of command provide an invaluable resource to future commanders and staff members and military historiography. Popular and academic histories of Grant’s military command have rarely been very usable in preparing military professionals. No matter how well done, popular and academic histories struggle to maintain focus on that which was of vital importance to Grant as a field army, army group, theater, and overall military commander. As a result, popular and academic Civil War histories were not used much in military schools before World War II. After that war, military professional writing from the earlier time largely disappeared. If military professionals taught Grant’s 1864 strategy and campaigns, which was less and less often the case, they generally did not do their own research or writing. This gap made finding military history works that were directly usable for professionals in the military classroom difficult.

Today, when military schools study Grant’s (or other historical military) campaigns, most end up using excerpts from histories, biographies, and primary documents. These excerpts require serious intervention from the instructor, and even then, only if the instructor deeply understands the campaign. The few exceptions prove the point. James Schneider, an instructor at the US Army School of Advanced Military Studies, writing explicitly for students learning how to plan military campaigns, wrote works that directly engaged with Grant’s activities as a commander. The historically minded Army educator and Chief of Staff of the Army Gordon R. Sullivan also researched and wrote about Grant’s strategy and campaigns to prepare the Army for future war fighting. The similarities in perspective between the military professionals from before World War II and Schneider and Sullivan are notable, and it is likely that neither of the latter read those former accounts (they did not cite any). If the earlier types of military professional accounts had been published more broadly, never forgotten, and continued after World War II, later students like Schneider and Sullivan would not have had to rediscover what professionals from before World War II already knew.28

The Harding Project is off to a tremendous start in renewing and disseminating military writing. This article is not meant to limit the broad agenda. Indeed, hopefully, the citations in this article to earlier published works represent “a repository of earlier thinking that can be repurposed for contemporary challenges.” And whereas, the example of Grant’s command and the use of the example by military professionals are about the military history of strategy and operational art, the point could easily be extended to writing on subjects such as tactics, technology, leadership, recruiting, and industrial mobilization.29

So, please, military professionals at all levels, research, teach, and publish—and use your unique perspective as military professionals to focus on the war fighting.

 
 

Thomas Bruscino
Dr. Thomas Bruscino is a historian and professor in the Department of Military Strategy, Planning, and Operations at the US Army War College.

 
 

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Endnotes

  1. Zachary Griffiths and Theo Lipsky, “Introducing the Harding Project: Renewing Professional Military Writing,” Modern War Institute at West Point, September 5, 2023, https://mwi.westpoint.edu/introducing-the-harding-project-renewing-professional-military-writing/; and Todd Schmidt, “Strengthening the Army Profession through the Harding Project,” Military Review 104, no. 2 (March-April 2024): 1–2. Return to text.
  2. Frederic Louis Huidekoper, The Military Unpreparedness of the United States: A History of American Land Forces from Colonial Times until June 1, 1915 (Macmillan, 1915). Return to text.
  3. Editorial Staff, “Comment: Official Records of the War of the Rebellion,” The Military Historian and Economist 1, no. 2 (April 1916): 200, https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Military_Historian_and_Economist/3Mo9AQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=Howell. Return to text.
  4. Willey Howell, “Lieutenant-General Grant’s Campaign of 1864–65,” The Military Historian and Economist, 1 (April 1916 and July 1916), 113–40, 274–96; and Arthur L. Conger, The Rise of U. S. Grant (Century Company, 1931), 306–62. Return to text.
  5. Arthur L. Wagner, Strategy: A Lecture Delivered to the Officers of the Regular Army and National Guard at the Maneuvers at West Point, KY, and at Fort Riley, Kansas, 1903 (Hudson-Kimberly Publishing, 1904), 25–26; Matthew Forney Steele, American Campaigns (Byron S. Adams, 1909), 1:535–87; Conger, Rise, 345; and William K. Naylor, Principles of Strategy, with Historical Illustrations (General Service Schools Press, 1921), 184–85. Return to text.
  6. Naylor, Principles of Strategy, 185. Return to text.
  7. Eben Swift, Field Orders, Messages and Reports (Government Printing Office, 1906), 11–12; and Conger, Rise, 306–62. Return to text.
  8. This campaign is variably called the “Wilderness campaign,” “Virginia campaign,” “Petersburg campaign,” or “Appomattox campaign.” The naming confusion is evidence of the novelty of the campaign. Clarence Deems Jr., “Grant as a Leader,” in Psychology and Leadership: Eight Lectures, on Selected Phases of These Subjects, Delivered at the General Service Schools (General Service Schools Press, 1924), 132–48. Return to text.
  9. L. B. Kromer, “Federal and Confederate Strategy in the Civil War” (lecture, US Army War College [USAWC], Carlisle, PA, January 12, 1932), Folder 1, Box 3A, Leon B. Kromer Papers, US Army Heritage and Education Center, 24; Arthur L. Wagner, Organization and Tactics, 8th ed. (Franklin Hudson, 1918), 190; and Naylor, Principles of Strategy, 247–48. Return to text.
  10. Steele, American Campaigns, 483; John Bigelow, The Principles of Strategy: Illustrated Mainly from American Campaigns, 2nd ed. (Lippincott, 1894), 123–31; and Naylor, Principles of Strategy, 178, 180. Return to text.
  11. Jens Bugge, “A Study on the Movements of Grant’s Army from the North Anna to Cold Harbor” (student paper, USAWC, March 29, 1911); Robert S. Abernethy, “The Advance of Grant’s Army towards Spotsylvania, May 7, and the Recontre Battle of May 8, 1864: Notes for a Discussion of the Movement on the Ground” (student paper, USAWC, 1911–12); and George B. Duncan, “The Operations, Federal (Grant) and Confederate (Lee) from May 26, 1864, Up to June 1, 1864, Totopotomy” (student paper, US Army Heritage and Education Center, 1911–12). Return to text.
  12. John J. Pershing, My Experiences in the World War (Frederick A. Stokes, 1931), 2:243–81; Hunter Liggett, A.E.F.: Ten Years Ago in France (Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1928), 169–70; and Ulysses S. Grant, Memoirs and Selected Letters, 1839–1865 (Library of America, 1990), 781. Return to text.
  13. Charles Roscoe Howland, A Military History of the World War (General Service Schools Press, 1923), 1:407–408, fig. 2:150; and Howland, Military History, 2:150. Return to text.
  14. Frank H. Simonds, History of the World War (Doubleday, 1920), 5:217–18; Herbert Sidebotham, “The Progress of the Allies,” New Republic, November 2, 1918, 18; George Harvey, “The Week,” The North American Review’s War Weekly, October 24, 1918, 10; and David F. Trask, “Allied Counteroffensive (18 July to 11 November 1918),” in The European Powers in the First World War: An Encyclopedia, ed. Spencer Tucker (Garland Publishing, 1996), 47. Return to text.
  15. Brian Allen Drake, “Blood and Soil: Americans and Environment in the Trenches of Petersburg and the Western Front,” in Wars Civil and Great: The American Experience in the Civil War and World War I, ed. David J. Silbey and Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai (University Press of Kansas, 2023), 195–218; Jay Luvass, The Military Legacy of the Civil War: The European Inheritance (University of Chicago Press, 1959); Steven E. Sodergren, The Army of the Potomac in the Overland and Petersburg Campaigns: Union Soldiers and Trench Warfare, 1864–1865 (Louisiana State University Press, 2017), 90–94; and Henry J. Reilly, “It’s Time You Knew the Truth,” Hearst’s International Combined with Cosmopolitan 84 (February 1928): 29–30. Return to text.
  16. Liggett, A.E.F., 47, 167–68; Hunter Liggett, Commanding an American Army: Recollections of the World War (Houghton Mifflin, 1925), 73; Pershing, World War, 2:304; Charles G. Dawes, A Journal of the Great War (Houghton Mifflin, 1921), 1:215; George C. Marshall, Memoirs of My Services in the World War, 1917–1918 (Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 176; Thomas M. Johnson, Without Censor: New Light on Our Greatest World War Battles (Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1928), 167–68, 300; Arthur W. Page, Our 100 Days’ Fighting (Doubleday, Page & Company, 1920), 93; Leonard P. Ayers, The War with Germany: A Statistical Summary, 2nd ed. (Government Printing Office, 1919), 112–13; Newton D. Baker, “America in the World War,” Army Ordnance 8 (March-April 1928): 274–75; Elizabeth Frazier, “The Last Fight,” The Saturday Evening Post, February 8, 1919, 98; Frank H. Simonds, “America’s Greatest Battle: The Meuse-Argonne,” The American Monthly Review of Reviews 60 (November 1919): 491–501; and Richard J. Beamish et al., America’s Part in the Great War: A History of the Full Greatness of Our Country’s Achievements (John C. Winston Company, 1919), 206. Return to text.
  17. Eben Swift, “Review of The Decisive Battles of Modern Times by F. E. Whitton,” The North Carolina Historical Review 1, no. 4 (October 1924): 456–58. Return to text.
  18. Eben Swift, “The Wilderness Campaign from Our Present Point of View,” in Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1908 (Government Printing Office, 1909), 1:244–48; Thomas Bruscino, The American and Joint Origins of Operational Depth in the Meuse-Argonne Campaign (Marine Corps University Press, July 2021); and Frederick Palmer, Our Greatest Battle (Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1919), 17. A version of this view would be picked up by some European observers after World War I. Luvass, Military Legacy, 209. Return to text.
  19. George Pappas, Prudens Futuri: The US Army War College (Alumni Association of USAWC, 1967), xvi. Return to text.
  20. Thomas Bruscino, Developing Strategists: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Interwar Army War College, ed. Jessica J. Sheets (US Army Heritage and Education Center, 2019), https://ahec.armywarcollege.edu/documents/Eisenhower_and_the_Interwar_AWC.PDF. Return to text.
  21. Ethan S. Rafuse, “Still a Mystery? General Grant and the Historians, 1981–2006,” The Journal of Military History 71, no. 3 (July 2007): 849–74; and Joan Waugh, U. S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth (University of North Carolina Press, 2009). Return to text.
  22. Ron Chernow, Grant (Penguin Press, 2017), 1048. For a comparison of the ruthlessness of the American Civil War to the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, see Earl Schenck Miers, The Last Campaign: Grant Saves the Union (Lippincott, 1972), 26; Ronald C. White, American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant (Random House, 2016); William S. McFeely, Grant: A Biography (Norton, 1981); Allen C. Guelzo, “Ulysses S. Grant’s Forgotten War,” Washington Monthly (January-March 2024): 65–67; and Wayne Wei-Siang Hsieh, “Total War and the American Civil War Reconsidered: The End of an Outdated ‘Master Narrative,’ ” The Journal of the Civil War Era 1, no. 3 (September 2011): 394–408. Return to text.
  23. Harry S. Laver, A General Who Will Fight: The Leadership of Ulysses S. Grant (University Press of Kentucky, 2013), 105–14, 111; Edward H. Bonekemper III, A Victor, Not a Butcher: Ulysses S. Grant’s Overlooked Military Genius (Regnery, 2004) 148–58; Donald Stoker, The Grand Design: Strategy and the U.S. Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2010), 350–73; Chernow, Grant, 356; and Brooks D. Simpson, Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Adversity, 1822–1865 (Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 245–454, 273. Return to text.
  24. Burke Davis, Sherman’s March (Random House, 1980); Joseph T. Glatthaar, The March to the Sea and Beyond: Sherman’s Troops in the Savannah and Carolinas Campaigns (Louisiana State University Press, 1985); Victor Davis Hanson, The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny (Free Press, 1999), 123–260; Anne J. Bailey, War and Ruin: William T. Sherman and the Savannah Campaign (Scholarly Resources, 2003); Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy toward Southern Civilians, 1861–1865 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 171–204; T. Harry Williams, McClellan, Sherman and Grant (Rutgers University Press, 1962), 70–77; and Joseph T. Glatthaar, Partners in Command (Free Press, 1994), 201–36. Return to text.
  25. Davis, Sherman’s March; Glatthaar, March to the Sea; Hanson, Soul of Battle, 123–260; Bailey, War and Ruin; Grimsley, Hard Hand of War, 171–204; Williams, McClellan, Sherman and Grant, 70–77; Glatthaar, Partners in Command, 201–36; Laver, General Who Will Fight, 129–42; and Bonekemper, Victor, 199–217. Return to text.
  26. For an excellent account of the logistics of the campaign and an argument that Grant stumbled into an attritional approach, see Edward Hagerman, The American Civil War and the Origins of Modern Warfare: Ideas, Organization and Field Command (Indiana University Press, 1988), 243–53; Laver, General Who Will Fight, 114–28, 143–53; Bonekemper, Victor, 156–97; Chernow, Grant, 374–416; Mark Grimsley, And Keep Moving On: The Virginia Campaign, May-June 1864 (University of Nebraska Press, 2002); Gordon C. Rhea, The Battle of the Wilderness, May 5–6, 1864 (Louisiana State University Press, 1994); Gordon C. Rhea, The Battles for Spotsylvania Court House and the Road to Yellow Tavern, May 7–12, 1864 (Louisiana State University Press, 1997); Gordon C. Rhea, To the North Anna River: Grant and Lee, May 13–25, 1864 (Louisiana State University Press, 2000); Gordon C. Rhea, Cold Harbor: Grant and Lee, May 26–June 3, 1864 (Louisiana State University Press, 2002); and Gordon C. Rhea, On to Petersburg: Grant and Lee, June 4–15, 1864 (Louisiana State University Press, 2017). Return to text.
  27. Ulysses S. Grant to George Meade, 9 April 1864, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, National Archives; Ulysses S. Grant to George Meade, 17 April 1864, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, National Archives; Ulysses S. Grant to Henry W. Halleck, 29 April 1864, National Archives; Bruce Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox (Doubleday & Company, 1953), 142– 46; Bruce Catton, Grant Takes Command (Little, Brown and Company, 1968), 253; T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His Generals (Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), 294–327; and Edward G. Longacre, General Ulysses S. Grant: The Soldier and the Man (De Capo Press, 2006), 217–44. For information about problems with attrition as a mode of analysis, see Thomas Bruscino, “Reflections on Military Strategy: Killing Annihilation vs. Attrition,” War Room, August 14, 2020, https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/annihilation-attrition/. Return to text.
  28. James J. Schneider, “The Loose Marble—and the Origins of Operational Art,” Parameters 19, no. 1 (1989): 85–99, https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol19/iss1/26/; James J. Schneider, The Structure of Strategic Revolution: Total War and the Roots of the Soviet Warfare State (Presidio Press, 1994), 11–53; and Gordon R. Sullivan, “Ulysses S. Grant and America’s Power-Projection Army,” Military Review 74, no. 1 (January 1994): 4–14. Sullivan was likely influenced by Schneider, in part through future General James M. Dubik, who wrote a School of Advanced Military Studies monograph under Schneider’s direction. See James M. Dubik, Grant’s Final Campaign: A Study in Operational Art (School of Advanced Military Studies, 1992); and Gordon R. Sullivan and James M. Dubik, Envisioning Future Warfare (US Army Command and General Staff College Press, 1995). Likewise, a good recent account of the logistics and basing for the Overland Campaign came from the military schoolhouse. See Curtis S. King, A Talent for Logistics: McClellan and Grant Sustaining the Army of the Potomac in 1862 and 1864, Leavenworth Paper no. 25 (Combat Studies Institute Press, 2022). Return to text.
  29. Griffiths and Lipsky, “Introducing the Harding Project.” Return to text.