Anaconda Plan

• 1. Named in Mockery

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  The Anaconda Plan got its name from a jeer. Union generals who opposed Winfield Scott's strategy compared it to the coils of a serpent slowly suffocating its prey. The mockery backfired; the image spread, and so did the name.

  Scott, the General-in-Chief of the Union Army, was thinking in terms of geography and patience. He wanted to seal the Confederacy off from the world. That meant blockading its ports, cutting off its trade, and splitting the rebellion by controlling the Mississippi River. Critics saw passive suffocation where they wanted aggressive strikes.

  Many Union generals demanded an immediate march on Richmond. Scott countered with a vision of encirclement that would, he promised, bring the rebellion to heel with less bloodshed than any frontal assault. The war that followed tested that promise severely. The questions the anaconda's name raises outlasted the war by a century and a half.

• 2. The Architect's Vision

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  On the 27th of April, 1861, George B. McClellan wrote to Winfield Scott with a different strategy for winning the war. McClellan commanded Ohio's state militia with the rank of Major General of Volunteers. He proposed an immediate march on Richmond, directed up the Kanawha River, with an alternate option of marching through Kentucky if that state left the Union.

  Scott found the plan wanting. The Kanawha was not suited for water transport, making any march on Richmond a purely overland affair. Overland campaigns wore down men, horses, and equipment quickly. Western Virginia also leaned strongly toward the Union. Scott estimated that five out of seven residents there opposed secession. An invasion would turn potential supporters into enemies and expose civilians to the ravages of war.

  Scott preferred encirclement to piecemeal conquest. In his endorsement of McClellan's letter to the President, Scott put his alternative plainly. He favored "enveloping them all (nearly) at once" through a river cordon and a coastal blockade, rather than attacking any single objective. After further thought, he submitted a formal plan to McClellan on the 3rd of May, 1861. A second letter, dated the 21st of May, completed the outline. The plan called for a column of perhaps 80,000 men to use the Mississippi River as a highway. A compact amphibious spearhead would lead, followed by a conventional army to consolidate territory behind it.

  Scott could not impose this vision. Aged and infirm, he retired before the end of 1861. McClellan replaced him as General-in-Chief. The question of how to execute the river campaign passed to commanders who had their own ideas about which river mattered most.

• 3. Father of Waters

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  Under Henry Halleck, who succeeded McClellan in the West, the Tennessee River became the preferred strategic line, not the Mississippi. Halleck believed in turning Confederate strongholds rather than attacking them directly. The Navy Department had its own plans.

  Gustavus Vasa Fox, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, was determined to take New Orleans from the Gulf of Mexico. His reasoning was direct: once New Orleans fell, he expected other river towns to surrender rather than face bombardment. The task went to Captain David Glasgow Farragut.

  On the night of the 24th of April, 1862, Farragut ran his fleet past the forts that defended New Orleans from the south. New Orleans surrendered. His ships then pressed upriver and secured the capitulation of Baton Rouge and Natchez in sequence. The advance stopped at Vicksburg, Mississippi. Confederate defenses there sat atop bluffs too high for the naval gunnery of the day to overcome.

  In early June, the Western Gunboat Flotilla swept aside a Confederate rear guard at the First Battle of Memphis. The Mississippi was open from its upper reaches down to Vicksburg. That city remained the only Confederate-held point on the river.

  Halleck still did not send troops to support the fleet. Falling water levels forced Farragut's deep-draft vessels to withdraw toward New Orleans. The Army did not move against Vicksburg until November, by which time Ulysses S. Grant had taken command in the West. Halleck had been called to Washington to replace McClellan as General-in-Chief.

  Grant inherited a harder problem. The Confederates had fortified both Vicksburg and Port Hudson to the south. The 130-mile stretch of river between them, measured along roads, included the junction of the Red River with the Mississippi. This was the last land contact between the eastern Confederacy and the Trans-Mississippi. Confederate President Jefferson Davis strengthened both positions from Richmond. Command at Vicksburg passed successively to Brig. Gen. Martin L. Smith, then Maj. Gen. Earl Van Dorn, then Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton.

  The siege of Vicksburg ended on the 4th of July, 1863. Pemberton surrendered approximately 29,500 men. Five days later, on the 9th of July, Maj. Gen. Franklin Gardner surrendered Port Hudson. The post and its garrison passed to the Federal Army of the Gulf under Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks. Abraham Lincoln marked the moment with a phrase that has endured: "The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea."

• 4. The Atlantic Cordon

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  President Lincoln had proclaimed the blockade on the 19th of April, 1861, a week after the bombardment of Fort Sumter. It covered the ports from South Carolina to Texas, and was later extended to Virginia and North Carolina when those states seceded. The executive order was never rescinded, meaning the blockade ran independently of Scott's broader plan.

  The Blockade Strategy Board convened during the summer of 1861. Assembled by the Navy Department, it included representatives from both the Army and the Treasury Department's Coast Survey. Scott's original proposal had not estimated how many ships were needed to guard the more than 3,000 miles of coastline in the seceded states. It named no harbors as priorities and set no timeline. The board's reports filled those gaps.

  Steam power raised the first practical challenge. Steamships were the only vessels capable of maintaining a reliable blockade, but they ran on coal and needed harbor access for resupply. Every suitable harbor south of the Chesapeake Bay was in Confederate hands. To establish the blockade, the Union had to take at least one.

  Although the board recommended Fernandina, Florida, as the southern anchor of the Atlantic blockade, two other positions were seized first. On the 28th of August, 1861, Union forces moved against the Outer Banks of North Carolina. By the 29th, two minor forts near Cape Hatteras were in Federal hands. On the 7th of November, a major naval operation at Port Royal, South Carolina, captured a deep-water harbor midway between Savannah and Charleston.

  The Hatteras operation had been planned as a raid, with orders to block the inlet and withdraw. It became something more permanent. By early in the following year, the Burnside Expedition captured Roanoke Island. The Union Army established itself permanently in eastern North Carolina. Fernandina fell in early March 1862, nearly a year after Fort Sumter.

  Confederate defeats at Forts Henry and Donelson in Tennessee and at Roanoke Island prompted the Confederate War Department to pull most coastal forces inland. Only three Atlantic ports remained actively defended: Wilmington, Charleston, and Savannah. The traffic at Savannah was negligible; a mere eight steam-powered blockade runners reached Georgia or northern Florida ports throughout the entire war.

  Charleston was the hardest to close. An early attempt to block its harbor by sinking ballast-laden hulks in the channels failed. Ships serving the blockade participated in an assault on Fort Sumter on the 7th of April, 1863; that assault also failed. Those same ships provided artillery support for infantry attacks on Battery Wagner on the 11th and the 18th of July, 1863. After Battery Wagner fell to siege, Union guns could command the harbor entrance. Blockade runners stopped using Charleston, though the city itself held out.

  After the middle of July 1863, when Charleston was largely sealed, most commerce between the Confederacy and northern Europe moved through Wilmington. Fort Fisher, guarding the mouth of the Cape Fear River, fell to Union forces in January 1865. Only that loss ended Wilmington's usefulness, and with it the Confederacy's last viable Atlantic supply route.

• 5. Mobile and the Gulf

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  Confederate defenders abandoned Ship Island, in the Gulf of Mexico between Mobile and New Orleans, on the 16th of September, 1861. Fearing they might be cut off from the mainland, they left without resistance. Federal troops arrived the following day to take possession.

  The Blockade Strategy Board had designated Ship Island as the base for the Gulf Blockading Squadron. That purpose was quickly overtaken. The island became the staging ground for the naval attack on the Mississippi River forts protecting New Orleans. Early in 1862, the Gulf Blockading Squadron was reorganized into two separate commands. Flag-Officer James L. Lardner led the East Gulf Blockading Squadron; Flag-Officer David G. Farragut commanded the West.

  Bermuda and Nassau, the primary centers of blockade-running activity, were far closer to Atlantic ports than to Gulf ones. Any ship trying to cross from the Atlantic to the Gulf had to pass the Florida Keys. The Keys remained in Federal hands throughout the war, serving as the base for the East Gulf Blockading Squadron.

  Of the three Gulf ports the Confederate War Department chose to defend, Galveston changed hands twice. Federal forces captured it on the 4th of October, 1862. Confederate forces retook it on New Year's Day of 1863. It remained accessible to blockade runners for the rest of the war. The fall of Vicksburg, however, rendered it worthless alongside everything else in the Trans-Mississippi.

  Mobile was the one sustained problem on the Gulf. After New Orleans fell in the spring of 1862, Mobile was the last meaningful port on that coast. It held that status until August 1864. Farragut then obtained permission from both the Navy Department and the War Department to attack the forts at Mobile Bay's entrance. His order during the battle has become one of the war's most quoted lines: "Damn the torpedoes." The forts fell and were occupied by Federal soldiers. Mobile itself remained in Confederate hands but ceased to function as a working port.

  In July 1862, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles wrote to both Gulf squadron commanders. He directed them to recruit freed Black men; the labor demands of the blockade had grown beyond what existing crews could meet.

• 6. A Strategy Debated

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  Rowena Reed, a historian who has examined the war's command structure, argues that no coherent Union strategy ever existed. Washington, in her view, was never able to impose its will on field commanders. The Anaconda, she contends, is a label imposed after the fact on campaigns that had no real order at the time.

  Virtually all present-day historians agree that the Western campaign was at least as significant as the fighting in the East. The fall of Vicksburg, in their reading, validated the river component of the plan. The blockade's worth, however, remains the more contested half.

  Historians estimate between 2,500 and 2,800 total attempts to run the blockade, with a success rate of at least 80 percent. Blockade runners were built for speed rather than cargo capacity. Conventional cargo vessels, with their spacious holds, rerouted away from Southern ports entirely.

  Southern exports of cotton fell by 95 percent from pre-war levels. Confederate currency lost value. The Confederate government was financially strained as early as 1862. Citizens unable to sell goods on the world market lost confidence in the rebellion's prospects.

  Supply problems in the Confederate armies, one school of argument contends, traced more often to the deteriorating rail network than to the blockade. Supporters of the blockade counter that the railroads deteriorated partly because the blockade diverted coastal sea traffic to the rail system. That added load accelerated the network's breakdown.

  The most striking numbers in the debate concern British-built blockade runners, operating mostly from Liverpool and Glasgow. Historians estimate the Confederates received thousands of tons of gunpowder, half a million rifles, and several hundred cannons through these ships. Some historians have argued those runners prolonged the war by two years, adding 400,000 deaths on both sides. What the Anaconda could not squeeze out, British shipyards kept flowing in.