Grant and Lee: Victorious American and Vanquished Virginian. Edward H. Bonekemper III. Praeger Publishers. 437 pages; maps; charts; index; $49.95.

By Col. Cole C. Kingseed
U.S. Army retired

Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and Gen. Robert E. Lee emerged from the American Civil War as the North’s and South’s premier military commanders. While each general-in-chief has attracted his share of admirers and detractors, few biographers have made a comprehensive comparison of the two leaders over the span of their seemingly separate 1861–63 campaigns, as well as their more familiar head-to-head contests in Virginia during 1864–65.

Subtitled Victorious American and Vanquished Virginian, Grant and Lee reinforces Edward H. Bonekemper III’s previous works: How Robert E. Lee Lost the Civil War and A Victor, Not a Butcher: Ulysses S. Grant’s Overlooked Military Genius. In each book, Bone-kemper makes a compelling case for Grant’s tactical and strategic superiority to Lee. The Grant who emerges from these pages is an astute military commander who, through “dexterity and cunning,” achieves complete success less than a year after launching his Overland Campaign against Lee in the spring of 1864.

Bonekemper does not disguise his obvious admiration for Grant. As the subtitle indicates, Grant pursued a national strategy that was consistent with the North’s superior resources and the country’s offensive-minded President. From 1861–65, Grant’s “aggressiveness in three theaters was consistent with the Union need for [total] victory,” while Lee’s “aggressiveness in a single theater was inconsistent with strategic and tactical defensiveness the Confederates needed to preserve their limited manpower and force the stalemate that was sufficient for Southern victory.”

Grant and Lee contains a provocative, albeit highly biased, analysis of the casualty rates that each commander suffered throughout his battles and campaigns. Again Bonekemper is anything but impartial, as Grant’s excessive casualties on the battlefield, which Bonekemper claims were always “militarily tolerable,” are offset by contrasting them with the numbers of Confederate prisoners captured at Fort Donelson, Tenn.; Vicksburg, Miss.; and Appomattox Court House, Va. In his direct confrontations with Lee in the war’s final year, for example, Grant actually incurred a far higher casualty rate than Lee, but when the South’s prisoners are included following Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, the casualty ratio appears relatively even.

Bonekemper actually bases his controversial assessment of Lee’s tactical and strategic inferiority on the highly debatable premise that the Union, not the Confederacy, had the burden of winning the war. Bonekemper contends that all the South had to do to win independence was to pursue a defensive strategy until the Confederacy achieved international recognition or the North tired of the war. Such an assertion fails to take into account President Abraham Lincoln’s implacable desire to conduct offensive operations to force the Southern states to renounce their self-proclaimed independence.

The only way for the South to have won the war, posits Bonekemper, was for Lee to pursue a strategic and a tactical defensive. To Lee, such a course was both militarily and politically unacceptable, since the North’s superiority in resources would eventually prevail. Bonekemper contends that Lee’s penchant for the offensive and his “Virginia myopia” played into the Union’s hands and resulted in the loss of Vicksburg, “the fall of Atlanta, the reelection of Lincoln and the loss of the war.” Somehow, Bonekemper also attributes the destruction of the Confederate Army of Tennessee at Frank-lin and Nashville to Lee since Gen. John Bell Hood, “a protégé of Lee’s,” needlessly sacrificed his army in a series of frontal attacks. Strange logic indeed!

Grant and Lee does make a significant contribution to our understanding of these complex commanders in Bonekemper’s analysis of the careers of both generals over the entire course of the Civil War. He traces how each sought to achieve victory by offensive operations, but Bonekemper concludes that Lee’s reliance on the tactical offensive was misplaced because of inferior resources and that he should have dispatched portions of his army to the Mississippi Valley to counter Union gains in the Western Theater of the war rather than invading Maryland and Pennsylvania in 1862 and 1863, respectively.

In Grant and Lee’s final chapter, Bonekemper compares his subjects in myriad general military and military managerial skills. Contemporary military officers and noncommissioned officers will find this analysis particularly illuminating. Not surprisingly, Grant holds the upper hand in virtually every field, including tactics, strategic vision, use of staffs and other resources, maneuverability, and clarity of orders.

Again, Lee falls short in virtually every category. Only in moral courage does Bonekemper assign Lee equal marks. Given Lee’s consistent substandard ratings, one wonders how Lee achieved any military success or how he held the Union Army of the Potomac at bay for three years.

To his credit, Bonekemper cites a number of prominent historians to lend credence to the various schools surrounding the merits of Grant’s and Lee’s generalship. Readers will find the detailed appendices and notes well worth the cost of the book. Two appendices specifically address conflicting casualty rates in every major battle and campaign fought by Grant and Lee. In addition, superior maps throughout the text add to the reader’s comprehension of the various campaigns.

In the final analysis, Bonekemper has produced a highly readable, though flawed, assessment of the war’s most notable military commanders. Joining an increasing number of recent historians who believe that Lee has been consistently “overrated by romantic proponents of the Myth of the Lost Cause,” Bonekemper posits that “to Grant, along with Lincoln, must go the credit for Union victory, and to Lee, along with Jefferson Davis, must go the blame for Confederate defeat.”