The Commanders of the American Civil War

The American Civil War of 1861 to 1865 was the deadliest war in United States history, fought over slavery and the survival of the Union. It also produced a generation of famous commanders on both sides. Here are four of the greatest, each linked to the battles that made their name, with the plain fact that the Confederates among them fought to defend slavery.¹

For the war itself, its campaigns, battles and legacy, see our guide to the American Civil War, 1861 to 1865.

How we chose these four generals

The four below are the commanders most often named when people ask who led the war: the two Union generals who designed and carried out the strategy that won it, and the two Confederates whose victories in Virginia made them famous. Each has a full profile on Echoes of Battle. They were not the only men who mattered. George Meade commanded the Union army that defeated Lee at Gettysburg, and Lee's own army counted James Longstreet and the cavalry leader J.E.B. Stuart among its most inspiring figures.²

Ulysses S. Grant. The Union general who took Vicksburg, was made general-in-chief, and ground Lee's army down to surrender at Appomattox; later the 18th US president.

Born Hiram Ulysses Grant in Point Pleasant, Ohio, on 27 April 1822, he graduated 21st of 39 in the West Point class of 1843, served in the Mexican War and resigned from the army in 1854. Back in uniform in 1861, he captured Fort Henry and Fort Donelson in February 1862, the North's first significant battlefield victory, and survived the near-disaster of the first day at Shiloh that April. At Vicksburg he crossed the Mississippi, marched inland and besieged the city until John Pemberton's army of about 30,000 surrendered on 4 July 1863. After breaking the siege of Chattanooga that autumn, he was promoted to lieutenant general in March 1864 and made general-in-chief. He accepted Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House on 9 April 1865, was elected president in 1868, and finished his Personal Memoirs only days before he died of cancer in 1885.³

William Tecumseh Sherman. Grant's friend and hammer, who captured Atlanta and marched to the sea, waging the “hard war” that broke the Confederacy's economy.

Born in Lancaster, Ohio, in 1820, Sherman graduated from West Point in 1840 and had left the army in 1853. He led a brigade at First Bull Run, fought under Grant at Shiloh and Vicksburg, and in March 1864 replaced Grant as the top Union commander in the West. Commanding three armies, he outflanked Joseph E. Johnston's Confederates through north Georgia and took Atlanta at the start of September 1864, a victory that helped Lincoln win reelection. He then cut loose from his supply lines for the March to the Sea, a march of nearly 300 miles that ended with the fall of Savannah on 21 December, before turning north through the Carolinas. On 26 April 1865 he accepted Johnston's surrender, the largest surrender of Confederate troops in the war, and from 1869 to 1883 he commanded the US Army.⁴

Robert E. Lee. The Confederacy's most celebrated general, victor of Chancellorsville and loser of Gettysburg, who surrendered to Grant in 1865.⁵

Born at Stratford Hall, Virginia, on 19 January 1807, the son of the Revolutionary War cavalryman Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, he graduated second in the West Point class of 1829, won three brevets for gallantry in Mexico and was superintendent of West Point from 1852 to 1855. Offered command of the Federal forces in April 1861, he declined and resigned when Virginia seceded. On 1 June 1862 he took over the army defending Richmond, renamed it the Army of Northern Virginia, drove McClellan back in the Seven Days' Battles and went on to win at Second Manassas, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. Both of his invasions of the North failed, at Antietam in September 1862 and at Gettysburg in July 1863, where Pickett's Charge broke against the Union center on 3 July. Pinned in the trenches of Petersburg from the summer of 1864, he was named general-in-chief of all Confederate armies in February 1865, two months before his surrender. He spent his last years as president of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia, and died there on 12 October 1870.⁶

Stonewall Jackson. Lee's right arm, master of the fast march and the flank attack, mortally wounded by his own men's fire at the height of Chancellorsville.

Born in Clarksburg, Virginia (now West Virginia), on 21 January 1824, Jackson graduated from West Point in 1846, was promoted to brevet major in Mexico and taught at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington before the war. At First Manassas in July 1861 his brigade's stand earned him the name “Stonewall.” In the Shenandoah Valley in the spring of 1862 he defeated three separate Union forces and tied down troops that might otherwise have reinforced McClellan's drive on Richmond. He was slow in the Seven Days' Battles, a lapse historians still debate, but recovered to seize John Pope's supply base at Manassas Junction and, on 15 September 1862, to capture the Union garrison at Harpers Ferry, the largest such capture by Confederates in the war. On 2 May 1863 he led the flank march and attack at Chancellorsville; that evening his own men shot him by mistake, and he died of pneumonia on 10 May.⁷

A war that changed the country

The Union generals Grant and Sherman won by wearing the South down and wrecking its capacity to fight; the Confederates Lee and Jackson won brilliant battles but served a losing cause. The war killed hundreds of thousands, preserved the United States and ended slavery. See where they fought among the greatest battles in American history.⁸

Why did Grant beat Lee?

Grant had more men and supplies, but he also used them differently. As general-in-chief from 1864 he made Lee's army, not Richmond, his target, and he launched simultaneous offensives across the map so that the Confederacy could not shift troops to meet each threat. He accepted terrible losses to keep up the pressure until Lee's army broke.⁹

The cost was enormous. In the Overland Campaign of May and June 1864, through the Wilderness, Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor, Grant suffered more casualties than Lee had soldiers in his entire army, according to Encyclopedia Virginia, and the American Battlefield Trust notes that Grant's forces were depleted by more than half during the war's last year. Lee made Grant pay in blood but had to yield the initiative, and once he was pinned at Petersburg the end was a matter of time. Encyclopedia Virginia also observes that Grant has never quite enjoyed the reputation his battlefield record seems to warrant, partly because of charges of heavy drinking and of callousness toward his men. For a side-by-side comparison, see Grant vs Lee.¹⁰

How many soldiers died in the Civil War?

About 620,000 soldiers died, according to the traditional count compiled by the Union veterans William F. Fox and Thomas Livermore, which the American Battlefield Trust still uses. A census-based study by the historian J. David Hacker, published in 2011, puts the toll at about 750,000. Either way, the war killed more Americans than any other.¹¹

Roughly two-thirds of the dead were killed by disease rather than in battle. The historian James McPherson has said he was always convinced that the 620,000 figure was too low, and suspects that most of the gap between the two estimates comes from underreported Confederate deaths.¹²

How are the Civil War generals remembered today?

Unevenly, and often with argument. Grant lies in New York in the General Grant National Memorial, the largest mausoleum of its kind in the United States. Lee's prewar home above what became Arlington National Cemetery is preserved by the National Park Service as Arlington House, The Robert E. Lee Memorial, and Jackson is buried in Lexington, Virginia.¹³

Much of Lee's fame comes from the Lost Cause, the postwar view of the war whose champions, in Encyclopedia Virginia's words, used “both myth and fact” to present him as a titan of personal virtue and military genius; Jackson's death in 1863 fed the same mythology with the question of whether the South might have won had he lived. The record also includes slavery at Arlington: after 1857 Lee hired out many of the people enslaved there, breaking up families, and went to court to keep them in bondage until the courts ruled against him. The National Park Service now tells the story of those enslaved people at Arlington House.¹⁴