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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... posture . Expanding the idea of maneuver to encompass everything from far - flung guerrilla war to deep strikes such as that of General E. Kirby Smith into Kentucky during the fall of 1862 , supporters of maneuver INTRODUCTION xiii.
Confederate Strategy Reconsidered Robert G. Tanner. Kentucky during the fall of 1862 , supporters of maneuver war- fare spin out a tempting vision of Confederate victory as Federal forces , repeatedly caught wrong - footed , were ...
... Kentucky to Vicksburg , Mississippi , Major General Ulysses S. Grant faced a march greater in distance than that from Berlin to Warsaw . One of the military ironies of the war is that with all of the geographical space available , the ...
... Kentucky summarizes this view : " As the weaker contestant , goes this line of thought , the Confederacy might have adopted the classic strategy of the weak : that of avoiding battles of decision , freely yielding territory for a time ...
... Kentucky foray . Though they reveal weaknesses that underlie arguments urg- ing a Confederate Fabian strategy , these early chapters are incom- plete because they treat the conflict in a limited sense , describing the arena of maneuver ...
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 |