Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson had such limited social skills that today some would think he was autistic or somewhere on the autism spectrum, like Alan Turing at Bletchly Park. John S. Mosby shot the the town bully in Charlottesville, Virginia when he was a student there at the University of Virginia in the 1850s. At the time Mosby weighed 110 pounds and the bully was 200. They said Sherman was insane and Grant was a drunk.

The modern-day selection standards for serving as an officer would have filtered out many of the finest combat leaders of the Civil War. When one lists the essential qualities of being a combat leader being a nice guy is nowhere on anyone's list of the top ten attributes.