The Battle of Gettysburg was the greatest clash of arms on American soil, in American History. On the first day alone, July 1, 1863, Union forces lost 9,000 casualties; the Confederates lost 6,000 casualties, in one day, in the first day of battle. The Union forces were led by Maj. General George Meade, a steady, unimaginative,    and uninspiring general. He commanded one of the most resilient armies in history, the Army of the Potomac. The Confederate Army of Northern Virginia was commanded by one of the great generals in American arms, the hero of the Mexican-American War, General Robert E. Lee. It was an army fresh from the greatest feat of arms on American soil, the American Cannae, Chancellorsville, in which Lee had subdivided his inferior force into three parts and defeated the vast army of the North. General Lee, flushed with victory, had invaded the North, into Pennsylvania, on his way to Philadelphia or New York City; where there was a large pro-Southern community of Irish

  On April 9, 1865, General  Ulysses S Grant closed out the Confederacy. General Ulysses Grant is the best writer among the Civil War Generals; his book, PERSONAL MEMOIRS OF ULYSSES S. GRANT is a masterpiece. He won a brutal campaign of attrition to end the American Civil War with a Union victory. The first battle of the campaign of attrition was the Battle of the Wilderness, in  the dense thickets known as the Wilderness of Spotsylvania .  Grant hurled the Union Army of the Potomac into tangled woods, against Lee's Confederate Army of Northern Virginia,  to bloody results. The Army of the Potomac lost 17% of its troop strength in one battle. So many Union soldiers were casualties that, for the first time in American history, rumors had it that the Federal Government fudged the casualty lists downward, to assuage the public dismay. Grant was a drunk; he qualified his drunkenness by stating that he never drank when his wife was near or when he was on active duty. Hence, General Gran