Retreat to Victory?: Confederate Strategy ReconsideredDid Confederate armies attack too often for their own good? Was the relentless, sometimes costly effort to preserve territory a blunder? Why great battles in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and Tennessee rather than well-laid ambushes in Alabama's sandhills or the pine forests of the Carolinas? These questions about Confederate strategy have dogged historians since Appomattox. Many have come to believe that the South might have won the Civil War if it had only avoided head-on battles, conducted an aggressive guerrilla campaign, and maneuvered across wide swaths of territory to exhaust the Union's willingness to continue the war. Retreat to Victory? Confederate Strategy Reconsidered challenges this widely held theory. Robert G. Tanner argues that deep retreats and battle avoidance (the strategy of maneuver rather than combat) were not available to Southern leaders in planning their wartime strategy. The South fought as it did for valid reasons, according to Tanner, and this book examines these reasons in detail, including the South's need to protect its slave-based economy, to establish a state's rights-oriented government, and to win independence from the Union. Tanner uses Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz's classic On War as a means for evaluating Confederate actions. On War provides a single measure for testing claims that the South could have prevailed by avoiding battles and forcing the Union to hold large tracts of land. Provocative and carefully researched, Retreat to Victory offers a fresh perspective on Confederate strategy and makes an important contribution to the field that no serious student of American history will want to miss. |
From inside the book
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... Valley ( 1976 ; reprinted in an ex- panded edition , 1996 ) , which was named the Book of the Month for both the Military History Book Club and the History Book Club . CONTENTS Introduction xi CHAPTER ONE CONFEDERATE STRATEGY : AN OVERVIEW.
... CHAPTER TWO CONFEDERATE GEOGRAPHY - 23- CHAPTER THREE REBEL ARMIES ON THE MARCH - 47 - CHAPTER FOUR ON CLAUSEWITZ -73- CHAPTER FIVE SLAVERY AND CONFEDERATE STRATEGY - 87- CHAPTER SIX INDEPENDENCE AND CONFEDERATE STRATEGY - 115 - CHAPTER ...
... Chapter 7 , but not all readers will be convinced , and if this study does no more than delineate assumptions upon which the Fabian concept stands so that readers may knowledgeably debate and research them , the effort will have its ...
... Chapter 1 this strategy emerges in three parts , and we find that only in the last was there any- thing that could be termed as a brash willingness to endure Fed- eral battlefire ; Chapter 1 then initiates a rigorous look at themes that ...
... chapter looks again at whether retreat to vic- tory was a realistic option for the South . NOTES 1. Bevin Alexander , Lost Victories : The Military Genius of Stonewall Jackson ( New York : Henry Holt and Company , 1992 ) , 80 . 2 ...
Contents
CONFEDERATE STRATEGY AN OVERVIEW | xxiii |
CONFEDERATE GEOGRAPHY | 21 |
REBEL ARMIES ON THE MARCH | 45 |
ON CLAUSEWITZ | 71 |
SLAVERY AND CONFEDERATE STRATEGY | 85 |
INDEPENDENCE AND CONFEDERATE STRATEGY | 113 |
NO PLACE TO HIDE | 139 |
Bibliographical Essay | 147 |
Index | 153 |