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Originally Posted by The Reaper
I could have counted them all, but did not see the relevance of a peripheral discussion when the primary point of my response about Insurrection vs. Civil War remained unanswered by RL, who asked the question.
I have no reason to doubt your numbers, but find it significantly different from my sample.
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I started anecdotally, looking at various sources such as Congressional bios which noted Confederate service. Then I went for a sample, but looking at various samples showed wide discrepancies, so I looked at all generals.
BTW, you invited the peripheral discussion since you reacted to RL's slight of Confederate military prowess by attacking lawyers. RL is a lawyer, but he is not a soldier. As far as I know, I am the only lawyer on the forum who is also a soldier, so I take somewhat more offense than he does. But not that much...
In any event, even if it were true that there were more lawyers in Union ranks than Confederate, you would not have proven anything. You can cite a Sickles and I can cite an Early, but what does that prove? To make the argument, you would not need to show that lawyers were overrepresented among generals, but rather that they were overrepresented among incompetent generals. Further, you would need some rational basis for arguing that it was their lawyerliness that was the reason for their incompetence. After all, anecdotally, we can easily point to a number of less-than-competent Union generals who were professional military officers.
By the way, Sickles was probably not even the worst Union lawyer/general. How about John Alexander McClernand or Nathaniel Prentiss Banks? And on the Confederate side, you have John Buchanan Floyd and Gideon Pillow, generals who deserted their men.