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. |
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Confederate Strategy Reconsidered Robert G. Tanner. Retreat to Victory ? Confederate Strategy Reconsidered The American Crisis Series BOOKS ON THE CIVIL WAR ERA NO . 2 Robert G. Tanner SR BOOKS A Scholarly Resources Inc. Imprint ...
Confederate Strategy Reconsidered Robert G. Tanner. Again , for my parents ABOUT THE AUTHOR Robert G. Tanner is a graduate of.
Confederate Strategy Reconsidered Robert G. Tanner. troops were tied down in garrison duty by the end of 1863.2 Latter - day planners for a hypothetical gray victory suggest that more Confederates should have been arrayed to achieve ...
... Confederate victory as Federal forces , repeatedly caught wrong - footed , were crippled by attri- tion and the ... Confederacy . The North brought to the colors only about one- half of its corresponding population , yet that was ...
Confederate Strategy Reconsidered Robert G. Tanner. he could . He never lost Hannibal from sight . He never got so near him as to give him an advantage . " Unable to crack this op- position , the brilliant Carthaginian finally left Italy ...
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 |