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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... Military policy . 2. Confederate States of America - Politics and government . 3. Confederate States of America - Defenses . 4. Confederate States of America . Army - History . 5. Strategy - History - 19th century . 6. United States ...
... Military Institute . A native of Southern California , he now lives and practices law in Atlanta , Georgia . Tanner has studied and lectured on the Civil War for more than twenty - five years . He has a particular interest in the ...
... military advances a blunder ? Why were there great battles in Pennsylvania , Maryland , Virginia , and Tennessee rather than well - laid ambushes in Alabama's sandhills or skillful retreats through the pine forests of the Carolinas ...
... military equation , and proponents of maneuver believe it should never have happened . Insisting that anything would have been better than this carnage , these writers assail General Robert E. Lee and President Jefferson Davis for ...
... military service are tal- lied ; this is greater than 85 percent of service - eligible males across the Confederacy . The North brought to the colors only about one- half of its corresponding population , yet that was sufficient to ...
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 |