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
Results 1-5 of 23
... defeats inflicted on other generals by the great- est tactician in the annals of war , Hannibal . Though Hannibal's Carthaginian army was loose in the Roman homeland , Fabius instituted a policy of strictly avoiding battle ; repeatedly ...
... defeat the North militar- ily . 9 The University of South Carolina's Thomas Connelly ques- tioned whether the South , with scarce human and material resources , was " able to afford Lee " and answered in the nega- tive , stating that ...
... defeat turn to the writings of Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz and determine that he would have felt the Union lacked sufficient force for victory , " especially in such a vast country as the South . " 14 Some of the ...
... defeat in Vietnam , nuclear strategy , and even counternarcotrafficking , and figures as dissimilar as Ernest Hemingway , Lawrence of Arabia , Mao Tse- tung , and Dwight Eisenhower were serious readers of Clausewitz . His work is ...
Sorry, this page's content is restricted.
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 |