John DeTore
282 posts
Everyone loves asking: “If Grant was such a great general, how come he lost nearly every battle to Lee and suffered way more casualties?”
Robert E. Lee himself had a very different answer.
“I have carefully searched the military records of both ancient and modern history, and have never found Grant’s superior as a general. I doubt his superior can be found in all history.” — Robert E. Lee
The entire question is built on two flat-out falsehoods.
First: Grant didn’t “lose nearly every battle.” There was essentially ONE continuous campaign — from the Wilderness in May 1864 straight through to Appomattox in April 1865.
Grant seized the initiative in the very first clash and never gave it back. Lee spent the rest of the war reacting to Grant’s moves.
When Lee attacked in the Wilderness hoping the old forests and bogs would save him (like they always had), Grant didn’t retreat north like every previous Union commander. He simply disengaged, slid south, and flanked Lee again.
Lee never dictated the terms of battle after that day.
James Longstreet had tried to warn the Army of Northern Virginia: “We’ve never faced anyone like this man.” They didn’t listen. They learned fast.
Second: The casualty comparison ignores that Lee was almost always the defender. Context matters.
But the deeper truth is bigger than any single clash. Lee still fought war the old way — disconnected battles, win-loss record like a sports season.
Grant fought the next war: coordinated campaigns across multiple theaters, using railroads, telegraph, navy, and engineers to keep relentless pressure until the enemy simply could not continue.
Grant didn’t win by accident. He made contact and maintained it until victory was inevitable.
Lee fought the last war. Grant wrote the blueprint for the next one.
That’s why he was great. That's why he won.
Change your mind yet? Drop your hottest take on Grant vs. Lee below. 🔥
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TheBlackWolf@thewolvenhour
Roman Reconquista When Rome's Flame flickered and the Eagles fell, the West was overrun. But the East refused to fall. Byzantium's armies, led by the last great Roman general, reclaimed the shattered glory of an empire. This is his epic conquest...🧵
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While Latin remained the official language, Greek increasingly dominated (since the population was mainly Greek), particularly in cultural expressions.
Christianity was deeply embedded within their identity, with the emperor being central in religious and political life.
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Historian of the Civil War and I agree 💯 Grant was a better General than Lee, valorized in Lost Cause mythology, as President he supported Reconstruction. On the defensive in his second term but his memoir is a literary masterpiece. #theriseandfallofthesecondamericanrepublic
Echoes of War@EchoesofWarYT
He won the Civil War, broke the Klan, went bankrupt at 62, got terminal throat cancer, and wrote one of the greatest books in American literature in the final year of his life. He finished it 5 days before he died. Ulysses S. Grant was born 204 years ago today. His name wasn't even Ulysses S. Grant. He was born Hiram Ulysses Grant in Point Pleasant, Ohio on April 27, 1822. The congressman who nominated him to West Point wrote down the wrong name. Grant kept it. The "S." stands for nothing. He hated his father's tannery and loved horses. Graduated 21st of 39 at West Point. Fought in the Mexican-American War, then came home convinced it was an unjust war designed to expand slavery. He later said he believed the Civil War was divine punishment for it. He married Julia Dent in 1848, into a slave-owning Missouri family. His abolitionist father refused to attend the wedding. In 1859, broke and desperate, Grant freed the one enslaved man he'd briefly owned instead of selling him. He could have gotten a year's wages. In the Civil War he became what no other Union general was: relentless. Vicksburg (July 4, 1863) split the Confederacy in half. Lincoln then gave him every Union army. His Appomattox surrender terms: officers kept sidearms, men kept horses for spring planting, no one prosecuted. As president (1869 to 1877) he did something no president would do again until LBJ: used federal troops to crush the Ku Klux Klan. He suspended habeas corpus in 9 South Carolina counties, prosecuted Klansmen before predominantly Black juries, and broke the first Klan. His presidency was also rocked by scandal: Black Friday 1869. Crédit Mobilier. The Whiskey Ring. Belknap. Grant himself never took a dime. He was just disastrously loyal to corrupt friends. The pattern damaged his reputation for a century. After the White House, he toured the world for 2 years. Dined with Queen Victoria. Met the emperor of Japan. Then in 1884, a Wall Street partner named Ferdinand Ward ran what we'd now call a Ponzi scheme. Grant was wiped out. 62 years old. Penniless. Weeks later he was diagnosed with terminal throat cancer. Mark Twain offered to publish his memoirs. Grant wrote in agony, sometimes 50 pages a day, racing the disease to leave Julia an inheritance. He finished the manuscript July 18, 1885. He died July 23. The book made Julia $450,000, about $14M today. It's now considered one of the finest memoirs in the English language. For decades historians ranked Grant a failure. Since 2000 he's jumped 13 spots in the C-SPAN survey, the biggest rise of any president. Happy birthday, General 🇺🇸
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Ulysses S. Grant was the greatest general of the Civil War on either side and perhaps the greatest general in U.S. history, owing to his critical importance to history. Without him, a united America may have been only a brief experiment in representative democracy. Happy Birthday, Sam!
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Happy Birthday U.S. Grant! 🇺🇸
Ulysses S. Grant was born on April 27, 1822, in Point Pleasant, Ohio. He was a key Civil War General and the 18th U.S. President.
Some say he is a villain, and some say he is a hero. What are your thoughts on Grant? Do you think he is a hero or a villain?
Echoes of War@EchoesofWarYT
He won the Civil War, broke the Klan, went bankrupt at 62, got terminal throat cancer, and wrote one of the greatest books in American literature in the final year of his life. He finished it 5 days before he died. Ulysses S. Grant was born 204 years ago today. His name wasn't even Ulysses S. Grant. He was born Hiram Ulysses Grant in Point Pleasant, Ohio on April 27, 1822. The congressman who nominated him to West Point wrote down the wrong name. Grant kept it. The "S." stands for nothing. He hated his father's tannery and loved horses. Graduated 21st of 39 at West Point. Fought in the Mexican-American War, then came home convinced it was an unjust war designed to expand slavery. He later said he believed the Civil War was divine punishment for it. He married Julia Dent in 1848, into a slave-owning Missouri family. His abolitionist father refused to attend the wedding. In 1859, broke and desperate, Grant freed the one enslaved man he'd briefly owned instead of selling him. He could have gotten a year's wages. In the Civil War he became what no other Union general was: relentless. Vicksburg (July 4, 1863) split the Confederacy in half. Lincoln then gave him every Union army. His Appomattox surrender terms: officers kept sidearms, men kept horses for spring planting, no one prosecuted. As president (1869 to 1877) he did something no president would do again until LBJ: used federal troops to crush the Ku Klux Klan. He suspended habeas corpus in 9 South Carolina counties, prosecuted Klansmen before predominantly Black juries, and broke the first Klan. His presidency was also rocked by scandal: Black Friday 1869. Crédit Mobilier. The Whiskey Ring. Belknap. Grant himself never took a dime. He was just disastrously loyal to corrupt friends. The pattern damaged his reputation for a century. After the White House, he toured the world for 2 years. Dined with Queen Victoria. Met the emperor of Japan. Then in 1884, a Wall Street partner named Ferdinand Ward ran what we'd now call a Ponzi scheme. Grant was wiped out. 62 years old. Penniless. Weeks later he was diagnosed with terminal throat cancer. Mark Twain offered to publish his memoirs. Grant wrote in agony, sometimes 50 pages a day, racing the disease to leave Julia an inheritance. He finished the manuscript July 18, 1885. He died July 23. The book made Julia $450,000, about $14M today. It's now considered one of the finest memoirs in the English language. For decades historians ranked Grant a failure. Since 2000 he's jumped 13 spots in the C-SPAN survey, the biggest rise of any president. Happy birthday, General 🇺🇸
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Grant was one of the most consequential Americans in history. He was the only one of the Union’s generals who understood the depth of the problem in front of him.
The Confederates were fighting for a cause. They were ideologically possessed. Be it for State’s Rights, Slavery, or the principles of the American system, it did not matter.
He saw this in his first battle with them and knew that they would not relent or submit until soundly broken.
This is why he fought them the way he did. Why he pursued them and pressured them the way he did. And it’s why he won battles that he “lost” the first time.
Grant understood this was an industrial war, a war of attrition. And that that logistics behind you were more important to winning than the men in front of you.
He was nearly erased from history because he was the man who, along with Sherman, saved the American experiment from the depredations of British and French external pressure and support.
This is why he was consigned to the role of “a drunk butcher who got lucky,” rather than the man who won Lincoln the war and gave the US republic another chance to thrive.
He and Lincoln were the first of historic consequence to beat the Color Revolution playbook and his reward was opprobrium and marginalization.
In short, U.S. Grant was a badass who learned from his failures and never wavered. In the end, he beat Lee to a pulp, while his strategy tore the South’s fever dream to pieces.
Yes, total war is deplorable. It brings out the very worst in humanity. But, sometimes that is all your enemy offers you in return.
Look around you today, and you’ll see this vile pattern playing itself out in Ukraine, Tehran, and yes, in the Blue States in the US.
They are banking on weaponizing our humanity against us to stop short of where they are willing to go to win.
Grant was both a model and a warning. If you are going to fight, fight like a demon. He didn’t have the luxury of the broken field Patton had in France in 1944-45. He couldn’t move so fast that he could beat the enemy before they knew they were beaten.
Grant had to force the issue head on, being just as relentless as Patton, and did so knowing the price would be almost too high to bear.
That’s America. That’s what fighting for a cause truly looks like…. Where kings aren’t gods, but men, created equal.
I hope that this is the message Donald Trump conveys without equivocation to Charles and Camila this week. Do this great American’s legacy proud on the anniversary of his birth.
Echoes of War@EchoesofWarYT
He won the Civil War, broke the Klan, went bankrupt at 62, got terminal throat cancer, and wrote one of the greatest books in American literature in the final year of his life. He finished it 5 days before he died. Ulysses S. Grant was born 204 years ago today. His name wasn't even Ulysses S. Grant. He was born Hiram Ulysses Grant in Point Pleasant, Ohio on April 27, 1822. The congressman who nominated him to West Point wrote down the wrong name. Grant kept it. The "S." stands for nothing. He hated his father's tannery and loved horses. Graduated 21st of 39 at West Point. Fought in the Mexican-American War, then came home convinced it was an unjust war designed to expand slavery. He later said he believed the Civil War was divine punishment for it. He married Julia Dent in 1848, into a slave-owning Missouri family. His abolitionist father refused to attend the wedding. In 1859, broke and desperate, Grant freed the one enslaved man he'd briefly owned instead of selling him. He could have gotten a year's wages. In the Civil War he became what no other Union general was: relentless. Vicksburg (July 4, 1863) split the Confederacy in half. Lincoln then gave him every Union army. His Appomattox surrender terms: officers kept sidearms, men kept horses for spring planting, no one prosecuted. As president (1869 to 1877) he did something no president would do again until LBJ: used federal troops to crush the Ku Klux Klan. He suspended habeas corpus in 9 South Carolina counties, prosecuted Klansmen before predominantly Black juries, and broke the first Klan. His presidency was also rocked by scandal: Black Friday 1869. Crédit Mobilier. The Whiskey Ring. Belknap. Grant himself never took a dime. He was just disastrously loyal to corrupt friends. The pattern damaged his reputation for a century. After the White House, he toured the world for 2 years. Dined with Queen Victoria. Met the emperor of Japan. Then in 1884, a Wall Street partner named Ferdinand Ward ran what we'd now call a Ponzi scheme. Grant was wiped out. 62 years old. Penniless. Weeks later he was diagnosed with terminal throat cancer. Mark Twain offered to publish his memoirs. Grant wrote in agony, sometimes 50 pages a day, racing the disease to leave Julia an inheritance. He finished the manuscript July 18, 1885. He died July 23. The book made Julia $450,000, about $14M today. It's now considered one of the finest memoirs in the English language. For decades historians ranked Grant a failure. Since 2000 he's jumped 13 spots in the C-SPAN survey, the biggest rise of any president. Happy birthday, General 🇺🇸
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Grant is one of the most underrated Americans of all time. He's the Christian general from the Civil War we should all celebrate. After all, he won the war and saved the Union! In the early 20th century, the narrative of his life was told in a biased and sometimes downright false way. He overcame alcoholism and refused to drink while in the White House. His treatment and advocacy for African Americans were courageous. He is one of the greatest Americans.
Echoes of War@EchoesofWarYT
He won the Civil War, broke the Klan, went bankrupt at 62, got terminal throat cancer, and wrote one of the greatest books in American literature in the final year of his life. He finished it 5 days before he died. Ulysses S. Grant was born 204 years ago today. His name wasn't even Ulysses S. Grant. He was born Hiram Ulysses Grant in Point Pleasant, Ohio on April 27, 1822. The congressman who nominated him to West Point wrote down the wrong name. Grant kept it. The "S." stands for nothing. He hated his father's tannery and loved horses. Graduated 21st of 39 at West Point. Fought in the Mexican-American War, then came home convinced it was an unjust war designed to expand slavery. He later said he believed the Civil War was divine punishment for it. He married Julia Dent in 1848, into a slave-owning Missouri family. His abolitionist father refused to attend the wedding. In 1859, broke and desperate, Grant freed the one enslaved man he'd briefly owned instead of selling him. He could have gotten a year's wages. In the Civil War he became what no other Union general was: relentless. Vicksburg (July 4, 1863) split the Confederacy in half. Lincoln then gave him every Union army. His Appomattox surrender terms: officers kept sidearms, men kept horses for spring planting, no one prosecuted. As president (1869 to 1877) he did something no president would do again until LBJ: used federal troops to crush the Ku Klux Klan. He suspended habeas corpus in 9 South Carolina counties, prosecuted Klansmen before predominantly Black juries, and broke the first Klan. His presidency was also rocked by scandal: Black Friday 1869. Crédit Mobilier. The Whiskey Ring. Belknap. Grant himself never took a dime. He was just disastrously loyal to corrupt friends. The pattern damaged his reputation for a century. After the White House, he toured the world for 2 years. Dined with Queen Victoria. Met the emperor of Japan. Then in 1884, a Wall Street partner named Ferdinand Ward ran what we'd now call a Ponzi scheme. Grant was wiped out. 62 years old. Penniless. Weeks later he was diagnosed with terminal throat cancer. Mark Twain offered to publish his memoirs. Grant wrote in agony, sometimes 50 pages a day, racing the disease to leave Julia an inheritance. He finished the manuscript July 18, 1885. He died July 23. The book made Julia $450,000, about $14M today. It's now considered one of the finest memoirs in the English language. For decades historians ranked Grant a failure. Since 2000 he's jumped 13 spots in the C-SPAN survey, the biggest rise of any president. Happy birthday, General 🇺🇸
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He won the Civil War, broke the Klan, went bankrupt at 62, got terminal throat cancer, and wrote one of the greatest books in American literature in the final year of his life. He finished it 5 days before he died.
Ulysses S. Grant was born 204 years ago today.
His name wasn't even Ulysses S. Grant. He was born Hiram Ulysses Grant in Point Pleasant, Ohio on April 27, 1822. The congressman who nominated him to West Point wrote down the wrong name. Grant kept it. The "S." stands for nothing.
He hated his father's tannery and loved horses. Graduated 21st of 39 at West Point. Fought in the Mexican-American War, then came home convinced it was an unjust war designed to expand slavery. He later said he believed the Civil War was divine punishment for it.
He married Julia Dent in 1848, into a slave-owning Missouri family. His abolitionist father refused to attend the wedding. In 1859, broke and desperate, Grant freed the one enslaved man he'd briefly owned instead of selling him. He could have gotten a year's wages.
In the Civil War he became what no other Union general was: relentless. Vicksburg (July 4, 1863) split the Confederacy in half. Lincoln then gave him every Union army. His Appomattox surrender terms: officers kept sidearms, men kept horses for spring planting, no one prosecuted.
As president (1869 to 1877) he did something no president would do again until LBJ: used federal troops to crush the Ku Klux Klan. He suspended habeas corpus in 9 South Carolina counties, prosecuted Klansmen before predominantly Black juries, and broke the first Klan.
His presidency was also rocked by scandal: Black Friday 1869. Crédit Mobilier. The Whiskey Ring. Belknap. Grant himself never took a dime. He was just disastrously loyal to corrupt friends. The pattern damaged his reputation for a century.
After the White House, he toured the world for 2 years. Dined with Queen Victoria. Met the emperor of Japan. Then in 1884, a Wall Street partner named Ferdinand Ward ran what we'd now call a Ponzi scheme. Grant was wiped out. 62 years old. Penniless.
Weeks later he was diagnosed with terminal throat cancer. Mark Twain offered to publish his memoirs. Grant wrote in agony, sometimes 50 pages a day, racing the disease to leave Julia an inheritance. He finished the manuscript July 18, 1885. He died July 23.
The book made Julia $450,000, about $14M today. It's now considered one of the finest memoirs in the English language. For decades historians ranked Grant a failure. Since 2000 he's jumped 13 spots in the C-SPAN survey, the biggest rise of any president.
Happy birthday, General 🇺🇸
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Roman Emperor Draft.
Draft your Top 3 Roman Emperors.
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In case you’re wondering about my next book project…
Coming October 2026…
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@grey4626 I have a feeling God will make a believer out of you yet! You’re just too mighty a warrior.
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John, you theologically illiterate fuck...
it’s glaringly obvious you’ve never actually read the Bible, or at least not with any intellectual honesty.
Allow me, an atheist forged in the cold furnace of reason, to educate your ass on the religion you so selectively distort and weaponize for your own performative piety.
Your pearl-clutching over Pete Hegseth crediting “divine providence” for those precision strikes on Iran exposes the depth of your scriptural illiteracy.
The God of the Bible isn’t some effete, turn-the-other-cheek pacifist cooked up by 21st-century liberal theologians desperate to sanitize history.
He is Yahweh Sabaoth...the Lord of Hosts, El Gibbor, the Mighty God of War...a deity who forges empires in fire and exacts retribution with genocidal precision.
He never commanded His people to be fucking pussies.
He commanded them to conquer, to slaughter, to leave no survivor when the divine mandate demanded it.
Read the text without your cherry-picking hermeneutic filter.
Exodus 15:3 declares it without apology: “The Lord is a man of war; the Lord is His name.”
Deuteronomy 7 and 20 lay out the rules of holy war in black and white...utterly destroy the nations before you, show them no mercy, annihilate every man, woman, child, and beast lest their gods corrupt the covenant.
Joshua doesn’t negotiate at Jericho; he marches at Yahweh’s command and the walls fall so the swords can finish the job.
Saul is anointed king precisely to erase the Amalekites down to the last infant and lamb (1 Samuel 15), and when he shows a flicker of mercy, God rejects him.
The Psalms are soaked in imprecatory venom..."Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks” (Psalm 137:9)...because this is no gentle shepherd; this is the God of retribution who trains hands for battle (Psalm 144:1) and delights in the broken bodies of His enemies.
Even your beloved New Testament, which you flog like a moral shield, refuses to play nice.
Matthew 10:34:
“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.”
Revelation 19 paints the returning Christ not as a lamb but as the blood-drenched rider on the white horse, treading the winepress of God’s wrath until the blood flows bridle-deep.
Vengeance is Mine, says the Lord...and history shows He delegates it liberally when the hour is ripe.
Your sanitized, pussyfied Christianity is pure psychological cope, a textbook case of cognitive dissonance management.
You excise the conquest narratives, the herem commands, the divine warrior theophanies, because the raw, lethal theology terrifies your modern sensibilities.
It’s easier to project a therapeutic Jesus onto the text than admit the Abrahamic God was forged in the same tribal furnace as every other ancient deity of war...a projection of collective human aggression, sanctified and made absolute.
That selective amnesia lets you posture as morally superior while ignoring that the same scriptures Hegseth implicitly channels have justified holy violence for three millennia.
Hegseth gets it better than you ever will, you half-baked heretic.
The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob has always been the God of war and holy justice...ferocious, unrelenting, and utterly unsentimental.
Read the fucking book cover to cover before you tweet your emasculated heresies again.
The Bible doesn’t need your protection. It needs your honesty.
Sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up.
💀🗡️
John Fugelsang@JohnFugelsang
The funny thing about Christians who claim that God helps them bomb people is that they're not fucking Christian.
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It’s hard to put into words what it means to watch your son live out his dream & even harder to describe what it feels like knowing he gets to do it wearing the green of the Boston Celtics.
For our family, this is more than basketball. It’s a privilege.
What makes this organization special isn’t just banners, history, or championships. It’s the standard. From the outside looking in, you see talent. But up close, you see something deeper, a group of men brought together based on character 1st, talent 2nd. People who represent the game and the city the right way.
The culture is real. The accountability is real. The commitment to excellence shows up in the smallest daily details.
From the coaching staff to the front office to ownership, this is an organization that bleeds excellence. Standards aren’t talked about, they’re lived.
Grateful, proud, & deeply appreciative of what it means to be part of Celtics basketball. 🍀
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The emperor 𝐀𝐮𝐫𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐚𝐧’s military greatness earned him the title Restorer of the World!
> Born just before the crisis of the third century when large parts of the empire in the west and east broke away.
> Such a gifted cavalry commander that he earned a place in the emperor’s retinue.
> Fought so well at the Battle of Naissus that the general Claudius Gothicus gave him command of his army when Claudius became emperor.
> Defeated the invading Goths at the Battle of Lake Benacus before crushing them again years later as emperor.
> Defeated the Alemmanic invasion at Fano and crushed them at Pavia.
> Built the Aurelian walls in Rome which stand today.
> Crushed the break-away Palmyrene state of Zenobia at the battles of Immae and Emesa.
> Reconquered the so-called Gallic Empire that had broken away in the west at the battle of Chalons.
> Was called Restitutor Orbis for reunifying the empire.
> Murdered before he could campaign against the Persians.
> Victor of the battles of Immae, Emesa, Chalons, Fano, Pavia, and Lake Benacus.
> At his death his full titles and honorifics were Imperator Caesar Lucius Domitius Aurelianus pius felix invictus Augustus, pontifex maximus, Germanicus maximus, Gothicus maximus, Parthicus maximus, Carpicus maximus, tribunicia potestate VI, consul III, imperator, pater patriae, proconsul, restitutor orbis.
Memory Medieval@MemoryMedieval
Is Aurelian overhyped or what?
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If you are not following David you are missing out!
One of the world’s foremost authorities on the Roman Empire and a fine fellow to boot!
David Parnell@byzantineprof
I am lucky enough to have some new followers. Welcome! 👋 Allow me to introduce myself. I am a historian of the Roman world in the 6th and 7th centuries AD and I post about all things Roman/Byzantine.
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What's the most underrated science fiction story of all time?
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