Lost Victories

Résumé du livre

There is nothing inevitable about military victory, even for forces of apparently overwhelming strength. But what of the American Civil War and the question of inspired Confederate leadership? The prevailing view holds that Robert E. Lee was the Confederacy's preeminent military strategist - the South's mythic hero who achieved all that was possible against vastly superior forces. This fresh and authoritative account of the Civil War's first two years challenges that assumption. Drawing on neglected primary sources it demonstrates that Lee's decision to block Stonewall Jackson's plans for an invasion of the North made defeat certain.
On four separate occasions, Jackson called for a strike across the Potomac behind Washington to force Federal forces to protect the capital, leaving Baltimore and Philadelphia unprotected and Northern railroads and industry vulnerable to direct attack. Jackson, not Lee, as this authoritative reconstruction of the War's legendary battles in Virginia and Maryland - First and Second Manassas (Bull Run), the Valley Campaign battles, the Seven Days, Antietam (Sharpsburg), Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville - makes plain, possessed the gifts common to only a handful of history's great commanders. The astute and daring Jackson understood after First Manassas that victory for the weaker army was possible only if its leaders could "mystify, mislead, and surprise" the enemy. Further, the resourceful and opportunistic general recognized that the South's only hope was to make war so painful that the North would accept Southern independence.
Lee, on the other hand, did not appreciate the element of surprise and the strategic advantage of strikes behind Washington; nor did he understand how to isolate and destroy an enemy within his grasp. Further, his inability at the Seven Days - and, more destructively, at Gettysburg - to secure strong defensive positions resulted in the needless slaughter of tens of thousands of irreplaceable Confederates. Yet Jackson, who understood the dangers of the rifle's minie ball to the attacker and how to avoid ill-advised frontal attacks, knew when to go for the jugular. Jackson's ruthlessly efficient plan against Hooker at Chancellorsville, as it unfolds herein, called for nothing less than the destruction of the Army of the Potomac. After Jackson surprised and defeated Hooker's larger forces, he called for an attack on the Federal rear to cut off its line of retreat.
At the eleventh hour of his most spectacular victory at Chancellorsville, Jackson was cut down by friendly fire; his daring plan to destroy Hooker's army, like his plan to seal off Washington by a northern invasion, denied. With Jackson's death the South lost his victories and the clear-eyed vision of the one man who could have changed the course of America's bloodiest war.