Retreat to Victory? Confederate Strategy Reconsidered

Journal of Southern History, Nov, 2002 by Ethan S. Rafuse

By Robert G. Tanner. The American Crisis Series: Books on the Civil War Era, No. 2. (Wilmington, Del.: SR Books, 2001. Pp. [xxiv], 162. Paper, $17.95, ISBN 0-8420-2882-X; cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-8420-2881-1.)

Why did the South lose the Civil War? The answer seemed pretty clear to Robert E. Lee in April 1865 when he told his army it had been "compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources." However, not a few have challenged Marse Robert's explanation and its implication that the Confederacy may have been doomed to a certain extent from the start. Instead, some have concluded the problem was a faulty strategy that overemphasized offensive operations. While acknowledging that Lee's aggressive generalship did produce some spectacular tactical victories, a number of scholars have claimed it was strategically counterproductive, for it produced massive casualties the South could not afford. Surely, it has been argued, there must have been a better way.

In Retreat to Victory? Robert G. Tanner takes on the Confederate high command's critics by systematically pointing out what he believes are fatal flaws in the various alternative strategies that some have argued would have been better suited to the task of securing southern independence. Following the writings of the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz on the need for an appropriate link between military strategy and national policy, Tanner makes a very powerful case.

Among the book's many strong points is Tanner's shrewd and persuasive analysis of how geography circumscribed Confederate strategic options. Future champions of a Fabian strategy will be hard-pressed to counter his well-reasoned argument that the South simply did not have the space available to conduct a successful retreating strategy. Tanner also offers a serious challenge to the notion that the South should have adopted a strategy of maneuver that avoided pitched battles in order to conserve manpower. He points out that two 1862 campaigns distinguished by hard marching rather than heavy fighting--Stonewall Jackson's Shenandoah Valley campaign and Kirby Smith's march into Kentucky--took almost as heavy a toll on Confederate ranks as did campaigns distinguished by major battles.

Finally, Tanner analyzes Confederate strategy in relation to the South's main war aims of "allowing its slave-based social order and economy to flourish and achieving total independence" (p. 84). In the end, he concludes, the fragility of the former, along with the fact that keeping the upper South in the Confederacy was essential if it were to be a viable nation, mandated that Jefferson Davis and his generals adopt a conventional and aggressive forward defense.

To be sure, many of Tanner's points have been addressed either implicitly or explicitly in a number of other works. Nonetheless, he deserves considerable praise for producing a balanced, well-researched, and provocative consideration of the problems the Confederate high command encountered as it attempted to formulate a strategy that would secure southern independence.

ETHAN S. RAFUSE
Merriam, Kansas