re: #70 silverdolphin

I mean, realistically, nobody really knew what they had in Grant up until Vicksburg. George Gordon Meade just happened to be the first sonofabitch who successfully fought back against the Rebel menace, and they stuck with him until someone better came along. Up until that point, they had worked their way through almost the entirety of the command structure of the US Army after the Mexican War, and all had fatal flaws that Robert E. Lee found too easy to exploit.