[procambarus]

Thank you for the long cut and paste from Ken Burn's Great Big Golden Book of the Official History of the Civil War (yes, you can continue to believe it was a "civil war" if you want to, though you've admitted that it wasn't). After wading through the whole thing, the question I have is: Do the causes someone fights for matter or not? In your original post the south "brought it on themselves" (ie, they caused the war) and used it to excuse what Sherman did; in the second post the cause doesn't matter, only the outcome, so it's tied. Oh wait. The second post also says again that the south caused the war. Is that supposed to be a tie breaker or did you just lose track? You obfuscated a little to well, apparently.

Just to address a few points:
You say the North had "no option" but to do whatever it took to defeat the south militarily. That is, to borrow a phrase, incredible ignorance. Any number of options were available, not the least of which would've been to settle it peacefully and allow the South to leave the Union. You also contend that the North was justified in whatever it did because the South was willing to cause great numbers of casualties in the Northern Armies. This is again ignoring the option of peaceful solution. If the Northern Armies didn't want casualties they should have stayed in the North. Thats that.

We quite obviously have differing ideas of what constitutes greatness. You, by your own admission, would consider Osama Bin Laden and Hitler to be great if they had managed to win. My concept doesn't allow for depravity, whether it's making war on civilians with an army, or making war on civilians by crashing airliners into buildings. Both are terrorism. The Monkey See, Monkey Do excuse applies to both or neither.

[Defiant]

I saw Ken Burns' saga on PBS long ago, but that small slice of the civil war does not color my views on who are great commanders in history.

To answer your question, in determining whether someone is a great military commander, their cause matters not. The question was not, in the hypothetical posed by the starter of this thread, who is the greatest human being that ever lived, or the most influential or the kindest. Who was the greatest military commander.

When asking that question, you are looking at some pretty bad actors--Genghis, Caesar, Napolean, Nazis, Muhammad and Saladdin, the Turks, Cyrus, and your favorite villain, Sherman. To determine "greatness" in military matters, you look at what their objective was, and their cleverness, efficiency, leadership and other ways they accomplished their objective.

What an incredible dodge to claim that the North could have achieved its objective by ways other than Sherman's March, including by surrendering and allowing the south to secede. That betrays another failure to understand the question asked. The North could have continued to fight the war McClellan's way, and perhaps would have won eventually, although I doubt it. That would not have made the North's general's great, however, because they would have been squandering their resources and accomplishing their goals in a stupid way, much the way Russian tsars and commissars won by sending waves of peasants at an enemy until the enemy ran out of bullets.

They could have chosen not to fight at all, but that would not have been a very good way to achieve the objective, now would it?

The question assumes that there is a general, he has an army, the army is given an objective, and the general achieves it. Now who did it the best?

Would you say that the best football coach is the one whose team had the fewest penalties? The one who forfeited the game? Or the one who won by the highest score, or defeated the strongest team? Hmmmmm. Think on that, and when you can tell me which football coach is the greatest, then maybe you can ponder which military commander is the greatest, and take your sesquicentennially old grievances out of the equation.