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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... west of the Appalachians ; others have found in rebel warcraft the in- evitable outcome of a Celtic heritage that lusted for the frontal charge . Debates over Confederate strategy have persisted since Appomattox . In recent years a ...
... western Tennessee that the Union deployed 51,000 men to patrol the region . During his final operations against Vicksburg , Ulysses S. Grant wielded a field force of 36,000 men , while his rear elements covering western Tennessee ...
... western theater sought earnestly to achieve a concentration of force for offensives into Tennessee and Ken- tucky . At Shiloh , Stones River , Chickamauga , the shattering battles around Atlanta , and even as late as the fall of 1864 at ...
... Western Confed- eracy , " in Gary W. Gallagher , ed . , Lee the Soldier ( Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press , 1996 ) , 203 . 11. Russell F. Weigley , The American Way of War ( Bloomington : Indi- ana University Press , 1973 ) , 129 ...
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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 |