Consensus seems to be emerging: Custer was not a scumbag, unless one is an unintelligent person who simply flames with thoughtless namecalling, and of course there is none of that on the Mudcat.
Meanwhile-- alternate history novels are fun! Ward Moore wrote Bring the Jubilee back in 1953 IIRC and the South took Little Round Top and kept Meade from uniting his army, and was defeated in detail. Mackinlay Kantor took much the same approach. When Oldest Daughter took MacPherson's Civil War History course at Princeton, she found that he had once used as a final exam question "What single small change in history would you make so that the South wins the war?" Answers were judged on the size of change needed (no fair giving Lee an atomic bomb!) -- Turtledove has as his point of departure Special Order 191; it never got lost, Lee defeated mcClellan in September 1862 and Independence came a month later. My own change is George Thomas, who went South instead of staying with the North. . .
As for the Sherman quote, he was head of a Louisiana military academy as secession fever swept the South, and he told one of his Southern friends that they had no chance of winning as Kim remembers. But that's incomplete. I keep quoting Fletcher Pratt who said yes, the industrial power of the North was what decided the war, but only AFTER a series of battles were fought that set the stage for industrial power to be decisive. i like that answer.