Ulysses S. Grant - In Every Battle

By 1864 the Army of the Potomac had developed a habit its own officers recognised and could not break: before every move, a long discussion of what Lee might do to them. Grant arrived from the west, listened to one of these, and told his staff he was tired of hearing about what Lee was going to do — they would do well to think about what they were going to do to him.

His campaign that spring was built on that inversion. Where earlier commanders had fought a battle and withdrawn to refit, Grant fought and moved south, again and again — the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, the North Anna, Cold Harbor — accepting terrible losses because he understood something about the arithmetic that his predecessors had refused to look at. The Union could replace its casualties. The Confederacy could not replace a single one.

It earned him the label of butcher, which is still argued over. It also ended the war in eleven months. His memoirs, written in agony from throat cancer and finished days before he died, are considered by many the finest ever written by an American soldier.