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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... South waged war as it did . Historians have described Confederate strategy as a com- promise from a never - resolved dispute on whether to achieve maximum concentration of force in Virginia or at some point west of the Appalachians ...
... South lost the Civil War . " 3 Alexander insists that " the South was an ideal region for guerrilla warfare . The Confeder- ates possessed an army whose numbers were filled with a sense of rightness in their cause and a friendly ...
... 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 colors ...
... South held to a misguided offensive strategy while an- other strategy was available to it that might have allowed it to win the war . There is very persuasive evidence that a more de- fensive Confederate posture would have worn down the ...
... South's true grand strategy of the defensive , " declares Nolan , " could have kept its armies in the field long enough to wear down the North's will- ingness to carry on the war . " 12 Integral to the preceding ideas is the belief that ...
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 |