Grant's nickname and reputation as a thoughtless butcher of men is largely the result of one action of one battle: Cold Harbor. And it while the charge he ordered in that battle did result in high casualties, we need to understand the context in which his reputation grew.

The Civil War started with a very timid Union leadership and tepid response. McLellan"s army of the Potomac was underutilized much like a novice chess player may be afraid to engage his pieces in a way that could cause loss. The aforementioned McLellan was the most famous example, but plenty of the Union generals were reluctant because of low confidence and the unprecedented nature of a war against their fellow countrymen.

Meanwhile, Grant was engaged in the Western Theater and seemed to understand the conditions for victory: Aggression and consistent pressure.

Caution and prudence won't result in decisive success. At some point the chess player has to break the ice and and start engaging pieces to control the narrative of the board, or else the opponent is calling the shots. There were numerous times where the Confederacy could have been incapacitated militarily if the Union just took the initiative and engaged with the retreating army or bothered to engage at all. At the battle of Seven Days, Robert E. Lee was able to skip between various defensive lines of the semi-surrounded Richmond and execute effective counter-offensives against the Union line. All it would have taken is for the Union to continue pressing forward and Lee's army would have been pinched in. While he may have retreated, the Confederate capital would have been occupied.

So amidst this ad nauseum narrative of nervous and indecisive general staff, we have Grant who is willing to maintain an offensive despite taking a hit, and constantly pursues retreating Confederates with divisions of fresh troops coming into rotations, never letting the enemy rest, and it's working. He came off as aggressive, and that paired with a few instances of high casualties led to the reputation of being a thoughtless butcher sending boys into a meat grinder. Lincoln was even challenged to dismiss him, to which he replied, "I cannot spare this man. He fights."

It bears noting however, that the butcher claim is somewhat erroneous to begin with as well. If you look at Grant's rate of casualties in the campaigns he oversees, he is actually close to the mean among his peers. He even scores better than Lee in overall rates of loss.

So why the reputation? Well, as previously mentioned, he escalated the Aggression and did have a few bad days, but southern revisionists also embraced the the narrative as they began to chronicle the conflict: After all, it sounds better to portray a lost war as the culmination of being out-manned over being outsmarted.

None of this is to say that Grant wasn't more well provisioned. He was! But what general in their right mind wouldn't press their advantages to win? At the end of the day I would argue as would many others -including the team of historians at the American Battlefield Trust- that Grant in fact was one of the most efficient and successful in dedicating the necessary resources in the necessary manner to achieve the necessary results.