Remembering the thin veneer of "civilization"....

     The Civil War had been a contest of incomparable ferocity, dwarfing anything in American history.  It claimed 750,000 lives, more than the combined total losses of all other wars between the Revolutionary War and the Vietnam War.  The historian James M. McPherson has calculated that, as a portion of the total population, the Civil War killed seven times as many American soldiers as World War II.  While the North lost more men in absolute terms, death took a far greater toll in the South, where the population was smaller, with young and old alike indiscriminately conscripted;  by the end, more than one-fifth of the southern white male population had perished.  Grant was sobered by the horrifying roster of casualties, saying future generations would look back at the Civil War "with almost incredulity that such events could have happened in a Christian country and in a civilized age."
     For the rest of his life, Grant had to deal with the charge that he had merely been the lucky beneficiary of superiority in men and resources.  He grew touchy on the subject because it addressed the larger question of whether he had crudely consigned young men to their death, winning by overwhelming force.  The plain fact is that six Union commanders before him had failed, with the same men and materiel, whereas Grant had succeeded.  It vexed him that the North denigrated its generals, while southern generals were idealized.  As he remarked bitterly, "The Southern generals were [seen as] models of chivalry and valor—our generals were venal, incompetent, coarse . . . Everything that our opponents did was perfect.  Lee was a demigod,  Jackson was a demigod, while our generals were brutal butchers.

-Ron Chernow,  Grant