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"I personally rank Lee #3 among Civil War generals, behind Grant and Sherman, although Jackson might have been at the top if he had an independent command opportunity."

Then we agree.

But note that when Grant & Lee fought at the Wilderness / Spotsylvania and again at Petersburg, Grant outnumbered Lee nearly 2 to 1, and each suffered the same percentage of casualties -- meaning that Grant suffered MORE casualties from his larger force.

My only point here is: before you start blaming one commander for the number of his casualties, take a closer look at both forces, and who actually WON the battle.

I think Lee deserves credit, for example at Antietam, for fighting a much larger force to a draw, even if Lee had slightly more casualties.

Yes, I fully understand that the South could NOT AFFORD it's casualties, while the North COULD. But Lee's job was to defeat the northern army, and he did it better than anyone else.

All three commanders were extremely aggressive and mobile, even (or especially) while "playing defense."

But you got something basically wrong: a percent doesn't matter which side had the larger army. A percent is the same. I think you meant to say that when the North deployed a larger army, even losing a smaller percent they often lost more men, which is true.

However, your second point actually supports my view that Lee in fact had big problems, because in "winning" the battles that he won by taking such huge casualties, he was losing the war. And we aren't even counting Ft. Donelson's surrender (11,000) or Vicksburg's surrender (20,000) which weren't Lee's, but they were all part of the strategic plan that Lee at least helped to craft. My criticism of Lee is that the "aggressive defense"---which I certainly admit was dreamed up mostly in Davis's office because the Confed. simply couldn't afford to pull a Soviet-style "territory-for-position" retreat---was a loser.