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. |
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... Campaigns . I. Title . II . Series . E487.T15 2001 973.7'301 - dc21 00-066106 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum require- ments of the American National Standard for permanence of paper for printed library materials ...
... Campaign of 1862 and is the author of the classic study , Stonewall in the Valley ( 1976 ; reprinted in an ex- panded edition , 1996 ) , which was named the Book of the Month for both the Military History Book Club and the History Book ...
... was to be won by Confederate armies through maneuver . March rather than battle was the high road to Southern independence . For example , the 1862 Seven Days Campaign on Virginia's Peninsula was among the war's first pro- xi.
... campaign that probably was less arduous than a slash into the Keystone State — and the notion becomes very difficult to defend upon re- calling that Jackson would have had to cleave his way through more than 30,000 Union infantry in the ...
... campaign from Paducah , Kentucky to Vicksburg , Mississippi , Major General Ulysses S. Grant faced a march greater in distance than that from Berlin to Warsaw . One of the military ironies of the war is that with all of the geographical ...
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 |