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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... fought exclusively in that style . A third type of guerrilla band was comprised of civilians living as noncombatants save when they gathered for raids under local leaders who derived at least some official status from national or state ...
... fought . To belabor the South's scale is to lay groundwork for urging a Fabian strategy . Those who postulate that the South rashly ig- nored maneuver in combination with shunning costly engage- ments necessarily base their case on a ...
... fought a wiser war . This study is of the strategy actually followed by Jefferson Davis as commander in chief , his top military advisers ( Robert E. Lee and later Braxton Bragg ) , theater commanders ( such as Gen- erals Lee , Albert S ...
... fought . The most fruitful stage of investigation must await an introduction to Clausewitz's life and masterwork , On War , found in Chapter 4. Thereafter , rebel strategy is examined in light of the South's core political INTRODUCTION xxi.
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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 |