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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not counterfactual enough, March 20, 2008
Alexander, Bevin. How the South Could Have Won the Civil War: The Fatal Errors That Led to Confederate Defeat. New York: Crown Publishers, 2007.
This books supposed subject in contained in its title, but it does not really achieve that. The subtitles is slightly more accurate. It is 337-pages including notes, bibliography and index with eighteen maps and very readable type.
The introduction is entitled "No Victory is Inevitable" which is true but analysis of why and how victory could have shifted to the historically defeated is a difficult task. Such analysis moves into the realm of counterfactual (or alternate) history, a field more usually the playground of fiction writers rather than historians.
In Chapter 2 "A New Kind of War" (p 33-43) Alexander lays out the three strategies that the Confederates had to choose from:
* Passive defense, championed by President Jefferson Davis and, as such, the de facto strategy of the CSA.
* Engaging and destroying the enemy, championed by Robert E. Lee and later pursued by him.
* Invasion of the North to destroy its ability to make war, by destroying economic and transportation assets, according to Alexander, this was the strategy that `Stonewall' Jackson wanted to see followed by the CSA.
Alexander believes that the war against the infrastructure of the North would have been a winning strategy. By Jackson was not able to find support for such a course of action, nor does it seem that he tried very hard to do so, and it did not happen. There Alexander leaves the matter, Jackson was right and if the Confederates had just listened they could have won. No discussion is made of how the Confederacy could have effectively pursued this.
Would cavalry raiders, such as Nathan Bedford Forrest commanded, have been sufficient? Or would it have required the actual Confederate armies to have pushed into the North, laying waste to all around them. Could J.E.B. Stuart's cavalry done it alone? Perhaps partisan rangers, such as John Singleton Mosby commanded, could have been employed to assist in these tasks. None of these questions are properly addressed nor is any likely Union response. How would the Federal army have deal with such raids? Would Lincoln's government have fallen? Would the depredations light the fires of resolve and revenge among the people of the Northern states? None of this is even considered by Alexander, he just agrees with a single letter of Jackson's, the only place he seem to have presented these views, and moves on.
The rest of the book is looking at the battles of the army of Northern Virginia. Alexander is a strong supporter of `Stonewall' Jackson and his strategic and tactical insights, especially his ability to act on the strategic offensive and the tactical defensive using the weapons of the era to their best advantage. The rundowns of battles are familiar with occasional comments on how they could have gone better for the Confederacy if different actions had been taken but nothing new or even very interesting here.
The book neglects the western theater of operations, relegating it to another loss for the Confederacy. Alexander fully overlooks the potential of Shiloh to have been a turning point in the war, in the Western theater at the very least, and is content to criticize the incompetence and overly defensive mind set of the western Confederate commanders. Alexander recognized that the defense had primary on the battlefields of the Civil War and deals harshly with those commanders, on both sides, that threw their man away on fruitless frontal assaults. However, he complains about General Joe Johnson trying to force Sherman to attack him behind field fortifications (p. 252-3) which ultimately came to naught as Sherman flanked him repeatedly but at least Johnson was not throwing his men away.
Alexander uses Sherman's success in his March to the Sea as proof that Jackson strategy of attacking the North economically would have caused its collapse. While there are similarities in strategic design, by the time Sherman moves through Georgia, the South was hollowed out by four years of war and blockade. However the North never suffered the same level of hardship and, one suspects, would have been more resilient to such damages and more able to resist such attacks into its heartland.
While an interesting read, the writing is solid if unexceptional, this book adds little new to the debate on the American Civil War.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Surrender...Or Else!, February 11, 2008
In about 1978 I began reading seriously about the Civil War. The library in St Paul MN had a vast literature on the subject, including numbered/signed 1st editions and obscure local works. The MN Historical Society had a lot of material including letters home from the front. I have gamed the ACW many many times, tactically at the battle-scale and strategically the war as a whole. At Ft Snelling I was inducted into the 1st MINN Vols, a re-enactment group, although as a non-uniformed member. On the wall of my gaming room hang framed reproductions of the paintings of the seven Minnesota regiments found in the capitol building and governor's office.
In all my studies I have found exactly one large unit that surrendered -- Pemberton at Vicksburg. This occurred after a campaign lasting about a year. I mention this because Mr Alexander has units surrendering left and right, had the Confederacy only done the right thing. Page 28 -- 1st Manassas -- "...a brisk move with only a few troops up to Centerville would have...forced them to surrender." Page 41 -- Stonewall Jackson -- "Jackson's aim...was to...force the opposing army against some terrain feature such as a mountain or river, where it would be compelled to surrender." Page 79 -- Seven Days -- "Lee felt he had a good chance of defeating McClellan and forcing his army to retreat in panic or surrender." Page 81 -- Seven Days -- "If this had been done, McClellan would have been forced to surrender his entire army."
We're only in 1862 and AoP has already surrendered three or four times! This sounds good if you know little or nothing of the war.
Alexander's thesis is a good one. He advocates Fuller's indirect approach. That is, make war not on the enemy's main force but on its ability to supply itself and against the state of mind of the High Command. This was Jackson's method. He criticizes Lee on this point, as have others. "The enemy is there and I intend to attack him there." That is Lee in a nutshell, alright. (No one else could have maintained the ANV in the field as long as he did, so you have to say Lee was a positive overall.) Yet, note Hood's references to the "Lee-Jackson School" in his memoirs, "Advance and Retreat." Hood sought to apply in the western theater the lessons he absorbed while serving under Lee in the east, and we know the result. There was nothing indirect in his methods.
The idea of assuming the tactical defensive in a civil war battle, is a good one. Longstreet had it and applied it whenever he could. It was not Jackson's alone. Yet it was never enough to win the war.
To find out if the south could have won the war, play SPI's "War Between the States." This vast game uses weekly turns and offers the players the complete range of options. Combat is attritional, but that is unimportant if your idea is to test the indirect approach which of course seeks to avoid combat. You will find there was no way for the south to win. Large-scale maneuvers against the enemy's sensitive rear areas are mostly impossible because of the supply problem, and small-scale maneuvers are easily dealt with. The last time I played it, I tried out the specific idea of preventing the capture of New Orleans and maintaining control of the river and Gulf coast ports. I couldn't do it.
So my beef with the book is that is assumes so much! We have to remember, this is the 19th century. Applying 20th-century methods, learned the hard way and shown to be effective, is not possible with 19th-century armies. Mechanization was answer to the problem of mobility. We have to wait for the IC-engine before we can break out in deep penetrations into the enemy's rear and attack them where they aren't. ("Hit 'em where they ain't." Wee Willie Keeler)
Nonetheless I enjoyed Alexander's narrative. It was a good summary of the eastern theater. It was always true that the north could lose the war in the east but could only win it in the west, so concentrating on the east was a good idea for the author.
On the frontispiece are photos of Lee, Jackson and Davis. Davis makes only a few short appearances in the book. For my money, Davis is the one man most responsible for the defeat of the south. Alexander ought to write a book about Davis' screwups. It would be a big seller!
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Mixed Feelings, January 24, 2008
This is a quite good operational and grand tactical history of the Eastern Theatre of the American Civil War from 1st Bull Run to Gettysburg, complete with a plethora of very useful maps, told from viewpoint of the Confederate high command.
For the author, Jackson is a transcendent military genius, Lee is myopic at best, and Davis becomes pretty quickly becomes immaterial. Ordinary soldiers enter the narrative mainly as numbers engaged, and casualties.
The author posits that the Army of Northern Virginia could have wandered around eastern Pennsylvania for months in the summer living off the land. On the other hand, he suggests that any Union army would have surrendered almost immediately if cut off from supply. Similarly, he suggests the Union itself would have surrendered upon the capture or cutting off of either Washington, Baltimore, or Philadelphia. The possiblilty that any of these events would have merely riled up the Union against an invader is not even mentioned, much less discussed.
So, while I found the book an enjoyable read, I also find it possible to doubt many of the author's opinions and spectulative theses. For me, these things balance out to a four star rating.
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