Anaconda Plan
The Anaconda Plan was a Union strategy during the American Civil War to defeat the Confederacy by blockading southern ports and controlling the Mississippi River. The plan aimed to suffocate the South economically and prevent it from receiving supplies or exporting goods. It was named after the constricting snake, symbolizing the Union's intent to squeeze the Confederacy into submission.
4 Key excerpts on "Anaconda Plan"
eBook - ePub- Paul Christopher Anderson(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
...Mutterers who preferred something dressed in the pageant of Napoleonic confrontation scorned this as meat-handed strangulation and belittled it as “the Anaconda Plan,” but they were to be never-minded. Scott was especially keen on major western waterways, which, unlike their eastern cousins, generally flow vertically. They were potentially avenues of movement and transport into and through the Southern heartland, and so to control them was to fasten the Confederacy in a logistical chokehold. Mastery of none was more vital than the mighty Mississippi River. To govern the Father of Waters (in Lincoln’s arch-christening) was to split the Confederacy in two. If New Orleans were captured as an added advantage, western Unionists might also breathe easier. As before the War, their commerce could move freely downriver. Sooner and not later it stands noting that the Anaconda Plan offered elements of eventual Union victory, especially its foresight on water. By late 1861 the Union had begun a blockade, despite two initial diplomatic blushes caused in first case by Lincoln’s misunderstanding of how to impose a blockade under international law, and in the second by a swaggering Union sea captain who stopped a British packet and manhandled two Confederate diplomats on-board to Europe. Scott’s plan even prefigured the way in which the Confederacy was eventually suffocated by attrition. But it was not the plan of Union victory, as is often breezily professed. Occupation meant containment, and containment meant not conquest but pacification that would promote reconciliation and reunification. Scott’s vision was sustained by all the assumptions and fortified with all the objectives of a conservative war. Its object was to restrain destruction, its intent to forestall Lincoln’s much-feared “violent, remorseless revolutionary struggle.” The hand of war was only as firm as necessary to quell, to secure, to quiet, to control, to govern – and even to protect and to make peace...
- LCDR David K. Zatt(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Golden Springs Publishing(Publisher)
...Unfortunately, each man exacerbated these feelings by seizing every opportunity to rebut the other in the eyes of Lincoln. Major General Winfield Scott, Commanding General of the United States Army at the beginning of the Civil War, proposed a strategic plan to force the Southern states to acquiesce and rejoin the Union. Craig Symond’s, in his book A Battlefield Atlas of the Civil War, gives the following summary of Scott’s plan: “The plan he offered to the President consisted of three elements, all designed to achieve not so much a military victory as reconciliation:” (1) A major army should be created to operate in northern Virginia, both to protect the Federal capital and to tie down the principal rebel army. Scott did not advocate an early offensive, however, largely because he knew that a spilling of blood was the surest guarantee of rendering a reconciliation impossible.” (2) A naval blockade should be established to cut the Confederacy off from European military aid and diplomatic support. The subsequent isolation would demonstrate to the rebels their dependence on the Northern states and perhaps force them to reconsider their rashness. (3) A combined Army-Navy operation to control the Mississippi River should be mounted to split the Confederacy in half both physically and economically.” {7} Figure 2. Southeastern United States Scott was severely criticized by the press, who dubbed his plan “The Anaconda Plan,” {8} because of his desire to enact such a passive stance toward the rebellious Southerners. Many of his subordinates, who also criticized him, believed that the proper approach should be a decisive assault on Richmond. Scott also believed that the Union Army was not prepared and it needed time to build-up a strong enough force to achieve such a victory...
eBook - ePub- Reid Mitchell(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...In the Civil War, the political strategy controlled military strategy. The Union would win only if the Confederacy was destroyed as a political entity. As Unionists viewed the question as one of national integrity and viability, they could not accept a compromise peace. The Confederacy, conversely, only won if it established its independence; compromise was impossible for the Confederates as well. And after January 1, 1863, the preservation or destruction of slavery joined national sovereignty as the second principal issue to be decided by the war. A few Confederates and many Unionists might have been willing to compromise on the slavery issue, but neither the Lincoln nor the Davis administration would. Initially, however, each side underestimated the commitment of the other. The Confederacy faced a difficult but nonetheless simple strategic problem. It did not have to invade the Union; it did not have to defeat the Union; it only had to outlast the Union. For the Confederates to win, all they had to do was not lose. What the best way of accomplishing this was, however, was unclear. Union military strategy was initially predicated on a political assumption: the belief that secession was a ploy that lacked the support of the citizens of the new Confederacy. All that was necessary was to close the Confederacy’s borders, stop up its ports, clear out the Mississippi River, and wait for the southern people, the white citizens, to repudiate their ambitious leaders. This strategy, developed by the aging general-in-chief of the army, Winfield Scott, was derisively known as the Anaconda Plan. Elements of the Anaconda Plan would be followed to their conclusion-the blockade, which required seizing Confederate ports to be effective, and the conquest of the Mississippi. But the central assumption of the plan, which was wrong in any case, never received its fair test. The Confederates had positioned an army at Manassas, Virginia, only a few miles from Washington, DC...
eBook - ePubCIVIL WAR – Complete History of the War, Documents, Memoirs & Biographies of the Lead Commanders
Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant & William T. Sherman, Biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis & Robert E. Lee, The Emancipation Proclamation, Gettysburg Address, Presidential Orders & Actions
- Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, James Ford Rhodes, John Esten Cooke, Frank H. Alfriend(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Madison & Adams Press(Publisher)
...CHAPTER XIII Table of Contents The Federal Government frankly accepted the true teachings of the war in its earlier stages, and no feature of the lesson was more palpable than the inferiority of the North in the art of war and military administration. No longer trusting, to any extent whatever, to a contest of prowess with an enemy whose incomparable superiority was already established, Mr. Lincoln, his cabinet, and his military advisers, were concurrent in their convictions of the necessity of a policy which should make available the numerical superiority of the North. The “anaconda system” of General Scott, adhered to by General McClellan, and sanctioned by the Government and the people, though by no means new in the theory and practice of war, was based upon a just and sagacious view of the situation. To overwhelm the South by mere material weight, to crush the smaller body by the momentum of a larger force, comprehends the Federal design of the war, undertaken at the inception of operations in 1862. The success attending the execution of this design we have described in preceding pages. We have accredited to the enemy the full extent of his successes, and endeavored to demonstrate that they resulted not from Confederate maladministration, but from a vigorous and timely use of his advantages and opportunity by the enemy. But while according to the North unexampled energy in preparation, and an unstinted donation of its means to the purpose, which it pursued with indomitable resolution, no concession of an improved military capacity is demanded, from the fact that use was made of obvious advantages not to be overlooked even by the stupidity of an Aulic council. We have shown that the preponderating influence in the achievement of the enemy’s victories in the winter and spring of 1862, was his naval supremacy. Even at that period it was palpable that, without his navy, his scheme of invasion would be the veriest abortion ever exposed to the ridicule of mankind...
