What was the biggest blunder of the war?
Historians and Civil War Roundtables love to debate this question, using 20/20 hindsight to second-guess decisions made in the heat of battle. Entire books have been written dissecting Lee’s decisions at Gettysburg (where Lee sacrificed 6,500 men in Pickett’s charge); even the wisdom of the Gettysburg campaign from the start can be questioned. Grant faulted himself for the suicidal last attack at Cold Harbor (3,500 casualties). Hood’s assault on Union forces at Franklin was a bigger debacle than Cold Harbor (6,000 casualties). Then there is Malvern Hill (5,300 Confederate casualties), Burnside’s assault on Fredericksburg, Pope’s incompetence at Manassas, and McClellan’s timidity in the Peninsula campaign (when he could have taken Richmond) and again at Antietam (when he could have destroyed Lee’s army). We could go on and on, but it is worth remembering, as Bruce Catton once wrote, that “being a general is easy if you exercise your generalship after all the facts are in, sitting in a g
