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Throughout all of my recent research into Ulysses S Grant and William T Sherman, I realized that we were never really taught in school about the Western Theatre of the Civil War; i.e., Grant’s mostly-successful campaigning around the States of Kentucky, and Tennessee, and Missouri. It’s his and others’ victories there that later helped win the Mississippi River and cut the Confederacy in two.
But what do we learn about in Social Studies/History? Gettysburg. Fort Sumter. Bull Run/Manassas. Antietam. In other words, the Eastern Theatre of the War. And those battles were dominated by incompetent Union commanders for a large majority of them: McClellan, Burnside, Hooker, McClellan again-- men who were more likely to retreat at the very cusp of victory than jump forward and seize the day. It’s bad enough learning about the Eastern Theatre that I remember saying to my parents that with such incompetent commanders the Union deserved to lose the Civil War.
I understand that History class has only so much time to teach students, and I understand that the Civil War is too big to teach in-depth, but why do we focus so much on McClellan and Lee, Hooker and Lee, Burnside and Lee, Meade and Lee, and brush over such an important part of the War as the Western Theatre? We effectively forget about Grant and Sherman until they’ve entered the Eastern campaign, let alone all of their fellow commanders and soldiers, and their years of fighting to take back and then keep the Mississippi in Union hands.