Unlike Lee, Grant Gave Clear and Direct Orders

Grant was a much more important General and President than he's been given credit for. 
He was also a great horseman. m/r

The Second-Happiest Fourth in American History

By Michael Walsh July 4, 2017

One hundred and fifty-four years ago, the nation was electrified by the news out of Mississippi: after a long siege, the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg, commanding the heights of the mighty river, had fallen to Ulysses S. Grant. Coming the day after the federal victory at Gettsyburg, it turned the tide of the Civil War and preserved the union for Mr. Lincoln. It was a national birthday present like none other.

Gettysburg gets most of the attention, as well it should: the three-day struggle between North and South in a small Pennsylvania town was the greatest battle ever fought on the American continent: bloody, heroic, futile, savage, and ultimately decisive, although Lee went home to Virginia to lick his wounds and fight again. But we should not overlook Grant's feat of engineering and generalship in the west, which supplied the victory from which the Confederacy could not recover. The quartermaster in the Mexican War had become the chief general in the west, soon enough to be summoned to Washington to finish Lee and save Abraham Lincoln's presidency.

Nearly alone among the Union generals, Grant understood the stakes and, more important, the meaning and necessity of victory. Facing the steep cliffs and formidable batteries of Vicksburg from his position across the Mississippi, Grant had to find a way to get his troops safely across the river, attack and seize the state capital at Jackson to Vicksburg's east, then move back west to encircle the city from the land and starve and pound it into submission.

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