Ulysses S. Grant could be seen as a poor tactician but good at strategy. The individual battles that he presided over are rarely studied - and if they are, it's more common for what the opposing general did. Grant just wasn't terribly imaginative on the battlefield and rarely did something audacious and groundbreaking like Jackson/Lee at Chancellorsville, Hannibal at Cannae, or Macarthur at Inchon. A good reason for this is his background - while Lee graduated second in his class at West Point and was a "teacher's pet" wonderkid aide for Winfield Scott in the Mexican War, Grant was a quartermaster in that same conflict and mainly concerned himself with making sure his unit didn't run out of gunpowder, flour, and meat.

However, his campaigns are held in high regard. The troop dispositions at Fort Henry, Fort Donaldson, and Vicksburg aren't going to knock your socks off, but the end result was helping to make the Mississippi Union-controlled, functionally cutting the Confederacy off from Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, and most of Louisiana. If he won a battle he kept pursuing the opposing army and got angry at subordinates who didn't likewise follow through. This did make him look good as an "aggressive" general when it seemed like those were in short supply for the Union, but it was also more practical. One of the big advantages for the Union in the Civil War was their industrial capacity - Union supply lines tended to be more stable and Confederate's tended to be more ad-hoc and unstable, and keeping the Confederates on the move would upset those supply lines more and more, frequently to the point of disintegration. Keeping the enemy moving could also lead to the enemy pausing to regroup in an area that could be besieged, and there the logistical advantage for the Union was total, and the Confederate advantages of maneuver and individual brilliance were completely negated. Grant tended to lose more men in battles than Lee did, which is in part because Lee was defending ground and part because Lee was better at the tactical dispositions. But Grant's men were better fed and clothed while a growing number of Lee's were freezing, starving, and without shoes, so he lost fewer due to the everyday "wastage." You could say that Lee brought his army with him, and Grant brought the Union with him. Generals like Lee are also held in high regard because they're quotable. He said at Fredericksburg, "It is good that war is so terrible lest we grow too fond of it." Grant didn't have a lot of good quotes - he was precise and clear in giving instructions that were impossible to misconstrue to subordinates he trusted to follow them, and didn't generally rely on oratory, so he rarely shows up in lists of quotes. He's closer in spirit to Eisenhower, whose line upon approving the launching of ships for D-Day was a simple "OK, let's go."

Omar Bradley said "amateurs talk about strategy, professionals talk about logistics." In that manner, Grant was a professional that deserves more praise.