Confederate Tide Rising: Robert E. Lee and the Making of Southern Strategy, 1861-1862 (review)

Abstract

222CIVIL WAR HISTORY citizens increasingly relied on their armies rather than on their central government to boost morale, and Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia became the most important national institution" (8). Until the very last months of the war, popular morale was still high and a large majority of southern soldiers remained in the field, despite the sobering fact that "no other whiteAmericans have lost such a huge percentage of their young men killed or maimed, or have had to withstand such intense pressures for so long" (53). Just as victory had sustained, military defeat alone doomed the Confederacy, for its people, "persevering despite great adversity, . . . surrendered only when their pool of manpower had been ravaged, Union armies stood poised to smash opposing Confederate forces, and much of their country literally lay in ruins" (172). This is an extremely satisfying book. Scholars who might dismiss Gallagher's contentions as ipso facto—that success in war by nature depends upon military victory—will have ignored the lessons drawn from other such civil conflicts, whether earlier or moré recent than the Civil War. Regardless, readers will find their knowledge of the Confederate experience augmented more by this book than nearly any other since Emory Thomas's Confederate Nation. Gallagher deserves praise for that alone, but he will earn it for much more. Christopher Phillips Emporia State University Confederate Tide Rising: Robert E. Lee and the Making ofSouthern Strategy, 1861-1862. By Joseph L. Harsh. (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1998. Pp. xviii, 278. $35.00). This is the first of two studies analyzing confederate military policy and grand strategy in the first two years of the war projected by historian Joseph L. Harsh, whose work has appeared in Civil War History and Military Affairs. Harsh defends Jefferson Davis against charges that he squandered resources through a futile perimeter defense of all Confederate territory and that he encouraged his generals to undertake costly, draining offensives.. Harsh believes Davis correctly saw that a defensive war of attrition could not achieve the independence of all the slave states and maintain their territorial integrity as a nation. The war must be taken to the enemy through an offensive-defensive strategy, breaking their will to fight. The optimum time for this strategy was early in the conflict, when the South outperformed the North in putting manpower in the field. Only in the fall of 186 1 and in early 1862 when the South chose static defense was ground lost. Davis found in Robert E. Lee a field commander able to translate grand strategy into action. Lee also realized that on the defense, which would become a siege situation, Northern superiority in numbers, engineering, and heavy equipment would inevitably prevail. The North must be dealt consecutive hard blows to exhaust the will to fight. These blows must cause minimum cost to the South— book reviews223 "soft fighting and heavy victories," as Lee put it. This was to be achieved through the grand turning movement, threatening the enemy's communications and forcing him out of his chosen positions to fight unprepared and at a disadvantage. Harsh says that strategically Lee did this in the Peninsula and Second Manassas campaigns but that faulty tactical execution led to unaffordable Rebel losses. Harsh's provocative argument challenges recent criticism of Lee's aggressiveness . The book will inevitably raise questions. If a defense of Lee's actions rests on showing that his was the way to break Northern morale, why does the book spend almost no time on the psychological balance of the opponents? Indeed, Harsh suggests that the union answer to defeat on the Peninsula was to increase their armies by 50 percent, surely not the response Lee wanted. Works assessing the psychological aspect of the war, however, are not in the bibliography . Again, in supporting Lee and Davis in their belief that the war must be fought on the Northern border to shield Richmond, rather than making a defensive stand in the heart of the South, Harsh says that a large percentage of Rebel manufacturing was concentrated in the Rebel capital and had to be saved. But couldn't the machinery have been transported South, as...