Yeah, that list rather sucks. At a minimum you need to add in Robert Lee and Ulysses Grant. Also Genghis Khan was no slouch on the battlefield, and most people feel like Sun Tzu knew a thing or two about fighting battles...
huh. If we're talking about the "general consensus" You are perhaps the only person I've heard of who would put both lee and grant on the list.
Some would add Lee (though personally, I think that is for political/tribal reasons more than anything else... but I do acknowledge than many have a high opinion of the man, especially when it came to cavalry.) - but even those of us who sympathize with the north generally don't rate Grant much above 'competent enough' - he got the job done, but nobody is going to compare him to Caesar or Napoleon.
It was short because the north had massive manpower and industrial production advantages. AFAIK the northern leadership made it much harder then it should have been, if anything (or Lee made it harder, or both).
Grant won that campaign. A campaign that had been attempted and lost by three of his predecessors. Tactically the guy was no genius, but strategically he was brilliant.
