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
Results 1-5 of 63
... North to hold ever expanding tracts of ul- timately untenable real estate while rebels ghosted about , just out of reach of bedeviled blue armies that they would not di- rectly confront — save when ill - timed Federal movements offered ...
... North on the strategic de- fensive . It might win the war . " 1 That Jackson could have gained so much without loss is a questionable assertion given the bat- tering his men took hustling around the Shenandoah — a campaign that probably ...
... North and South . It is estimated that the South mus- tered one million men when all forms of military service are tal- lied ; this is greater than 85 percent of service - eligible males across the Confederacy . The North brought to the ...
... North's resolve to continue the war and led to a political settlement fa- vorable to the South , " John McKenzie , a combat veteran , writes in reappraising Lee's generalship . This theme frequently surfaces in revisionist works on Lee ...
... North could not other- wise have done — that is , destroy the Army of Northern Virginia . Lee's most recent academic biographer labels him as " obsessed " by aggressive instincts.11 Others also find Lee blameworthy , though it is not ...
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 |