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  • The Grand Design: Strategy and the U.S. Civil War
  • Earl J. Hess (bio)
The Grand Design: Strategy and the U.S. Civil War. By Donald Stoker. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. 512. Cloth, $27.95.)

Donald Stoker, a professor of strategy and policy at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, wanted to write a new book about Civil War strategy that would "tell the story of the 'how' of strategy in the war—its evolution and the attempts at implementation—as well as show why certain strategic decisions were made and their impact" (10). He did so while apparently avoiding archival repositories. His endnotes have many references to published primary sources, and he often relies on secondary sources to craft his narrative.

Stoker wisely assumes that nothing was written in stone. Strategic planners in the Civil War had several options, and several different outcomes could have resulted from their decisions. He believes the Confederacy could have won its independence, but more important he argues that "the North could and should have won sooner" (11). Why it did not end the war faster intrigues Stoker, and much of his discussion is bent toward answering that question.

In the process, Stoker has produced a book that serves as an introduction to the complicated topic of strategy, which he admirably defines early in the book. Stoker lays out the modern conception of strategy's place within the sometimes confusing mix of policy, grand strategy, strategy, operations, and tactics. He poses these concepts as an inverted pyramid with the largest concept, policy, on top.

It would be fascinating to see an explanation of Civil War strategy presented as a complicated set of intertwined concepts such as this one, but Stoker has not done that. His discussion tends to deal only with grand strategy and strategy. Although one could not do much more in a single volume, many other historians have discussed these concepts as well.

Stoker adds comparatively little to previous interpretations and advances views consistent with those of many scholars. He argues that Leonidas Polk's occupation of Columbus, which broke the neutrality of Kentucky, was a strategic mistake because it threw that border state toward the northern camp. More recent scholarship indicates that the sympathies of Kentuckians already were sliding toward the North and that Polk wanted to reverse the trend before it was too late.

Stoker gives Abraham Lincoln much credit for learning on the job as a strategist; he made some mistakes, but in the long run he kept his focus on the essential strategic goals and persistently goaded his generals toward them. In contrast to Lincoln, Stoker paints Jefferson Davis as a failure, a [End Page 275] president who did not see the larger issues of Confederate strategy and who "failed to control the political realm" (405).

Stoker also criticizes Henry W. Halleck, joining a long list of scholars who have enjoyed using the general as a whipping boy. Halleck erred greatly by concentrating strength on western Tennessee in 1862 rather than striking for Chattanooga first, and Stoker further blames him for not crushing Beauregard when he captured Corinth. Stoker accepts the argument, advanced after the war by Grant and others, that Halleck could have marched all the way to the Gulf after taking Corinth but instead frittered away his opportunities in occupation duties. He further blames Halleck for acting indecisively as general-in-chief, hampering the Union war effort by his unwillingness to order subordinates to do his bidding. Such arguments aim to contrast Halleck's record with Grant's masterful coordination of the war effort in 1864–65, which Stoker sees as the right way to have done things.

In all of these areas, it is highly possible to argue against Stoker's interpretations. Halleck was not the overwhelming failure as general-in-chief, and Grant was not the overwhelming success, that historians have tended to paint them. Stoker believes that the Federal reopening of the Mississippi River was a sideshow, not the main theater of operations, and that the Union drive from Nashville to Chattanooga to Atlanta was the central theater and decisive arena of military operations. Yet one could...

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