Hi Russ, Welcome!
Hi Richard - perhaps you can explain the references to Gen. Grant? Was he one of the renegades who decided to have a war with the Home Country? - Or was he a rebel who fought against his own country? - Perhaps he was on the side that wanted to tax the Southern lot to bankruptcy?
I'm sure you can explain the link to a milling machine? (We English don't know much about the internal wars in the colonies (I assume one lot didn't want to pay taxes to support the other lot?) especially those who claimed independence and stopped paying taxes to us! (That's what the tea debacle was all about, wasn't it?). Maybe operating the Miller "taxes" the brains?
K2
Not a prob. General Grant was the greatest general in the the American civil war. He took three armies prisoner and in the doing of it, at leaST in the Western theater of the war, made it look like child's play. By the end of the war, he commanded more than 1,000,000 men. He was the first Leiutenant General since Washington and eventually he became the first five star general ever. Duiring the nazi regime, the German army studied Grant's work, NOT general Lee's! The German attitude was that ANY competent general could do what Lee did IN DEFENCE. Notice that Lee's OFFENSIVE attempts all failed because of his inability to understand what he was doing. What Grant did was very Napoleonic. Put Napoleon up against Grant, and it would be a tie or Grant would win. President Grant is on our $50 bill.
The stories about how Grant came to find Sheridan are almost funny. His right hand man Sherman, some people claim was a better general than Grant, however, Sherman even said he would not have done what Grant did at Vicksburg because he thot it would not work. Vicksburg technique is exactly what the Germans did in WWII--divide and conquer, destroy in detail, keep small armies apart and cut them up individually.
So . . . our new friend with the Cincinnati mill named General Grant, which I like very much, I thot maybe he had a couple other 'generals' to keep General Grant company. BTW, there are MANY counties in the USA named 'Grant'.
The war did not start out as a taxation problem, it started out as the North, having more people in congress, managed to force the South to sell their cotton to the north at a lower price than the south could get from selling to Britain. Really, it was only an excuse for a hothead from South Carolina to get SC to secede from the Union. BAAAAD choice--no-one, at that time, had any real clear idea what Lincoln was like.
