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4 - Strategy, Operations, and Tactics

from Part II - Managing the War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2019

By
Donald Stoker  and
Mark Elam
Edited by
Aaron Sheehan-Dean
Aaron Sheehan-Dean
Affiliation:
Louisiana State University
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Summary

The current method of differentiating levels of war did not exist during the Civil War. Most Civil War leaders only looked at the prospective battle (tactical issues), not at how each individual engagement fitted into a campaign (the operational level of war), and how this related to the nation’s military strategy (the methods for prosecuting it). Some tout a supposed awareness of the teachings of Baron Antoine-Henri Jomini’s Art of War among Civil War leaders, but all that can be proven is this work’s influence upon certain generals such as the Union’s Henry Wager Halleck and the Confederacy’s Pierre G. T. Beauregard.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of the American Civil War , pp. 65 - 89
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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References

Key Works

Crist, Lynda Lasswell, Dix, Mary Seaton, and Williams, Kenneth H. (eds.). The Papers of Jefferson Davis, 14 vols. (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1979–2015).Google Scholar
Dowdey, Clifford and Manarin, Louis H. (eds.). The Wartime Papers of R. E. Lee (New York: Bramhall House, 1961).Google Scholar
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Marszalek, John F. Commander of All Lincoln’s Armies: A Life of General Henry Wager Halleck (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004).Google Scholar
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Stoker, Donald The Grand Design: Strategy and the U.S. Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).Google Scholar
Stoker, Donald “The Myth of the Confederate ‘Offensive–Defensive’ Strategy,” North & South, vol. 13, no. 3 (September 2011): 48–54.Google Scholar
Stoker, Donald “There Was No Offensive–Defensive Confederate Strategy,” Journal of Military History, vol. 73, no. 2 (April 2009): 571–90, 608–10.Google Scholar
Symonds, Craig L. Joseph E. Johnston: A Civil War Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992).Google Scholar
United States Navy Department. The Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, 30 vols. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1894–1922).Google Scholar
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