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The History of North America podcast is a sweeping historical saga of the United States, Canada and Mexico from their deep origins to our present epoch.

Join me, Mark Vinet, on this exciting, fascinating epic journey through time, focusing on the compelling, wonderful and tragic stories of North America's inhabitants, heroes, villains, leaders, environment and geography.

I invite you to come along for the ride.

Welcome to the History Unplugged Podcast. The unscripted show that celebrates unsung heroes, myth busts historical lies,

and rediscoveres the forgotten stories that changed our world. I'm your host, Scott Rank.

Hey everyone, welcome to today's episode. Today's episode has to do with the Civil War, and the topic comes from listener David Santee who asks this question.

I really enjoyed your Civil War series that you did, and I have a follow-up question with that.

You mentioned that Union Generals got better, and Confederate Generals got worse as the war went on. Can you follow up on that?

Alright, well I love wide open questions like this, because it gives me a lot of leeway to take the question wherever I want to go.

The issue of why Union Generals tended to get better, and Confederate Generals tended to get worse as the war went on, can be attributed to all sorts of issue.

One is simple manpower, the Union Army had a much larger manpower supply, so at every single rank from private up to general, there were simply more Generals available.

And in the first year or two of the war, the Union Generals were not that great. At least those in command, they kept losing victories over and over again to Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and other figures.

What I want to do in this episode is I want to zero in on a couple of character studies that perhaps can give a bigger picture understanding of this question.

So first I'll be looking at Robert E. Lee, and a lot of my information for this episode comes from the Edward Bonnekepper book, Myth of the Lost Cause, because Lee is a good stand-in for a lot of the issues that plague Union Generals.

It wasn't simply their ability to fight the war that made them better or worse. It was also the overall aims of the war, which Jefferson Davis was dictating on high, and it made it difficult for the Confederate Generals to win battles, but still execute the strategy of the Confederacy, which was a little bit flawed.

Then I'm going to jump ahead to an issue of the Union Army waging total war, because this tells us about Northern strategy as well.

And when discussing Robert E. Lee, something I've mentioned many times before in this podcast is that he is difficult to separate myth from history, because he's the patron saint of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy myth.

It's a historical theory that holds the cause of the Confederacy was a just in heroic one that it was a struggle for states rights for the Southern way of life in the face of overwhelming Northern aggression.

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