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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... avoided set - piece battles and instead compelled the 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 ...
... avoid manpower losses from grand battles , particularly offensive battles . Civil War actions could be murderous ... avoiding battle ; repeatedly , he sur- rendered rich provinces rather than be lured into a direct clash . He utilized ...
... avoid their adversary . And the Confederacy's immense size precluded complete occupation . " 13 The authors of a treatise ana- lyzing Southern defeat turn to the writings of Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz and determine ...
... avoided by sacrificing some , even much , real estate . That sacrifice is thought preferable to the expected casualties when 100,000 or more men collided in stand - up battle . A Con- federate strategy of holding territory , stresses ...
... avoiding battles of decision , freely yielding territory for a time , employing hit and run tactics , and resorting to ... avoid the destruc- tion or crippling of the main Southern armies . Such a defen- sive strategy of attrition might ...
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 |