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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... ARMIES ON THE MARCH - 47 - CHAPTER FOUR ON CLAUSEWITZ -73- CHAPTER FIVE SLAVERY AND CONFEDERATE STRATEGY - 87- CHAPTER SIX INDEPENDENCE AND CONFEDERATE STRATEGY - 115 - CHAPTER SEVEN NO PLACE TO HIDE - 141 - Bibliographical Essay 149 ...
... armies that they would not di- rectly confront — save when ill - timed Federal movements offered up isolated columns to be destroyed by quickly amassed supe- rior numbers . Advocates of this strategy believe that after sev- eral years ...
... armies and win indirectly and with little bloodshed by deception , surprise , and distraction . Lee sought to destroy [ George ] McClellan's army in place by frontal attack , main force , and direct blows into the heart of Union ...
... armies invade Spain , Sicily , and later Carthage itself . Stalling Hannibal on the Italian Peninsula allowed Rome to concentrate its superior navy and vast manpower in an overwhelmingly offensive grand strategy by which Carthage's ...
... 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 the Confed- eracy possessed ample land both for guerrilla combat and for maneuvering armies ...
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 |