Ulysses S. Grant Quotes
The enemy usually makes your plans for you.
Grant’s overall strategy of attrition of the Southern troops and interdicting supplies and targeting Southern manufacturing and transportation was taking its toll and the Confederates tried a desperate gamble. Robert E. Lee’s tried to attack the Union in the North—Pennsylvania and Maryland threatening Washington and hoping to force the Union to sue for peace. But that left the Eastern part of the Southern heartland relatively undefended. Grant and Sherman, noting the opportunity, then sent Sherman to take Atlanta and destroy all the factories, railroads, and warehouses of food, arms and munitions, then march to the sea and back up the Atlantic Seaboard, freeing slaves and destroying anything and everything that could support an Army and putting enormous pressure on the Southern men fighting with Lee to return home and prevent starvation as there were now few slaves to work the farms. It was the stroke that, as intended, crippled the Confederacy’s ability to wage war. But Grant and Sherman both credited the Southern strategy with opening the opportunity—hence it was the Confederacy that “planned” Sherman’s March. The details of the plan were worked out by Sherman and his staff.
Ulysses S. Grant, 1822-1885, 18th President of the United States (Republican, OH), Response to a journalists question of who planned General Sherman’s March on Atlanta and through the South, Quoted in Mark Twain, “The Turning Point of My Life”, What is Man? And other Essays
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There was little thought of emancipating slaves or their value to the South by the senior officers of the Union Army at the beginning of the war. The Secretary of War changed that. See {629183}for a typical Union General’s view at the beginning of the war.
So far as the Iraq government was concerned the important enemy were the minority Sunni Muslims who had dominated the Shiites before the American Invasion. For America the enemy was Al Qaeda and the terrorists as well as the Sunnis. We ended up fighting Sunnis and even Shiites as the definition of the enemy changed with time.
Ironically, Lieberman was using this quotation to campaign against Bush’s son, George W. Bush.
Moltke’s plan for the Marne Campaign did not work out as planned and he and the Kaiser had a difference of opinion so Moltke was replaced as military commander. This quotation is of critical importance as it shows that the Germans were actually planning the First World War and simply used the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand as an excuse. Thus, the reparations Germany was required to pay when they lost the war. See {642096} for more quotational evidence.
Ulysses S. Grant was an American military leader who served as the 18th president of the United States from 1869 to 1877. As president, Grant was an effective civil rights executive who created the Justice Department and worked with the Radical Republicans during Reconstruction to protect African Americans. As Commanding General, he led the Union Army to victory in the American Civil War in 1865 and thereafter briefly served as Secretary of War.
