Anaconda Plan

5 Key excerpts on "Anaconda Plan"

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  The Battle of West Point: Confederate Triumph at Ellis Bridge

  • John McBryde(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • The History Press

    (Publisher)

  Part I

  PREPARATIONS FOR A RAID

  The best strategy is always to be very strong first in general, and then at the decisive point…There is no higher and simple law of strategy than that of keeping one’s forces concentrated.

  –Sun Tzu

  Early in the war, General Winfield Scott, commander of all Union forces, devised a plan to choke the South into submission. His plan became known as the Anaconda Plan because it resembled a South American snake, stretching from the southern ports in the Atlantic and wrapping around Florida and into the Gulf of Mexico. The anaconda then wrapped itself around Mississippi up the Mississippi River. By January 1864, this plan had been accomplished. No supplies were entering the South from overseas ports except by blockade runners. Both the Confederate army and the citizens of the South suffered from the Union blockade.

  FEDERAL DIVISION OF THE SOUTH

  By January 1864, General Grant desired to further subdivide the South in the Western Theater by sending William T. Sherman on a mission to scorch a swath of land across the southern half of Mississippi and maybe even Alabama. The plans included Sherman occupying Selma and Mobile, Alabama. The east bank of the Mississippi needed to be cleared of Confederate snipers shooting at Union gunboats and supply boats moving up and down the Mississippi River. Basically, Grant wanted to clear Mississippi of all Confederate opposition. He wanted to take or destroy all Confederate stores supplying the Confederate army. The task fell to Sherman, who at the time was in Knoxville after the Battle of Chattanooga. Sherman was in command of the Department of the Tennessee, “which embraced substantially the territory on the east bank of the Mississippi River, from Natchez up to the Ohio River, and thence along the Tennessee River as high as Decatur and Bellefonte, Alabama.”14 General McPherson was at Vicksburg, and General Hurlbut was at Memphis. They both provided Sherman regular reports concerning Confederates in each of their areas. In his memoirs, Sherman said that there was “a considerable force of infantry and cavalry in the State of Mississippi, threatening the river, whose navigation had become to us so delicate and important matter.”15

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  Journalism in the Civil War Era (Second Edition)

  • David W. Bulla, Gregory A. Borchard, Kimberly Wilmot Voss(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers

    (Publisher)

  Navy taking Virginians prisoner in Norfolk, and that a French marine in New Orleans had “offered his service to the Confederate Government.” 14 Union General-in-Chief Winfield Scott proposed to strangle the South with a naval blockade of Southern ports and an attempt to cut the Confederacy in two by gaining supremacy along the Mississippi River. The Chicago Daily Tribune criticized Scott’s plan in June 1861, claiming it would not cause the Confederates to starve because the crops were “abundant” in their fields despite the war, and because foreign powers dependent on cotton would recognize the Confederacy and would then break through Scott’s blockade. 15 The Cincinnati Commercial The Naval War Mediated in Newspapers and Magazines | 223 complained, “Scott’s anaconda moves his giant coils but slowly”—a frequent crit- icism of the strategy, especially with so few Union victories early in the war, espe- cially in the East. 16 In July 1861, Tribune editors noted that the strategic nature of the Anaconda Plan had slowed the U.S. Army to a crawl, and that General Irvin McDowell’s seventy thousand men along the Potomac River “are burning with impatience for the order to advance on the rebels.” 17 After McDowell’s Union Army was defeated at Bull Run, the New York Herald wrote that the Anaconda Plan had led Lincoln and the Union “on the broad highway to destruction” and that “General Scott’s grand and infallible plan for a short war has thus already been destroyed.” 18 The Cedar Falls Gazette in Iowa praised Scott’s strategy, calling it “slow but sure.” 19 On the other hand, the Buchanan County Guardian, also in Iowa, praised Congressman John Addison Gurley of Ohio for his attack on the Anaconda Plan, which the newspaper pronounced a “miserable failure.” 20 The Cleveland Morning Leader indirectly criticized Scott’s plan by eulogizing Frederick W.

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  Women in the American Civil War

  [2 volumes]

  • Lisa . Tendrich Frank(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  Blockade runners—fast ships that sneaked past the Union Navy—transported cotton to Europe and the Caribbean while importing needed manufactured goods, weaponry, food, and luxury items to the South. On April 19, 1861, President Abraham Lincoln issued an order to begin a naval blockade of Confed- erate seaports. In what would eventually become part of the Anaconda Plan, the Federal navy attempted to choke off the supply of goods entering and leaving the South. Because of the South’s reliance on agriculture—cotton and tobacco pro- vided the majority of revenue for Southerners—few manufacturing centers were located in the South at the outbreak of the Civil War. Most manufactured goods, raw materials, and luxury items came from the North or from Europe. Union military strate- gists hoped that a blockade would force the Confed- eracy to its knees, leaving it unable to fight without supplies. Even as the flow of manufactured goods slowed to a trickle, Southern factories shifted to war production. The Confederate government asked civilians to become self-sufficient to weather the crisis. Women absorbed the brunt of the shortages, especially in regard to cloth. With the decline of Group of people on the deck of the USS Hendrick Hudson. Originally known as the CSS Florida. the ship was a Con- federate blockade runner, later captured by Union forces and renamed. Southern women depended on runners such as the Florida to provide them with supplies like cloth, newspapers, books, foodstuffs, and luxuries during the Civil War. (National Archives and Records Administration) Border States 134 domestic cloth manufacturing after the Revolution, most households purchased their clothing. Jeffer- son Davis and other Confederate officials urged women to make their own clothing as a patriotic gesture. However, elite women initially scoffed at the thought of wearing “Negro cloth” and therefore continued to buy clothing, imported by blockade runners from Bermuda, Nassau, or Havana.

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  Shiloh and the Western Campaign of 1862

  • O. Edward Cunningham, Gary D. Joiner, Timothy B. Smith, Gary D. Joiner, Timothy B. Smith(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Savas Beatie

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 2

  Lincoln Takes a Hand

  NO ONE KNOWS FOR certain who first conceived of the idea of a great Union push down the lines of the Mississippi and Tennessee rivers. Perhaps many men thought of the plan in its broadest outlines at the same time. It was certainly evident to anyone who looked at a map that such an offensive utilizing the rivers as avenues of transportation and invasion would be the easiest way to conquer this region in the South, by splitting the Confederacy in two.

  In April 1861, while yet an officer of the Ohio militia, young George McClellan proposed to General Winfield Scott, the fat and aging General-in-Chief of the United States Army, that one possible plan of action would be to “cross the Ohio at Cincinnati or Louisville with 80,000 men, march straight on Nashville, and act according to circumstances,” with the ultimate aim of advancing on “Pensacola, Mobile and New Orleans.”1 Just days later, Scott presented his own famous Anaconda Plan. This proposed a “complete blockade of the Atlantic and Gulf ports … in connection with such blockades,” proposing a mighty “movement down the Mississippi to the ocean, with a cordon of posts at proper points… the object being to clear out and keep open this great line of communication in connection with the strict blockade of the seaboard, so as to envelop the insurgent states,” and crush them with the minimum amount of blood shed. Scott went on to say in a letter to McClellan that twelve to twenty steam gunboats would be needed, besides transports to carry 60,000 men who would be inducted in the army.2 Scott’s plan did not allow for the difficulties that would be set forward in an invasion, and he underestimated the forces needed, but at least he offered a beginning for Union strategy in the West.

  Nor were the Southerners unaware of the strategic possibilities inherent in the situation. Work continued on developing fortifications to protect the Mississippi, Cumberland, and Tennessee, while the Confederates were making all efforts possible to mass troops and equipment in the West. A young Southern ordnance officer, Captain W. R. Hunt, in a letter containing recommendations to Major General Polk, written on August 12, pointed out succinctly that “if the war should unfortunately be prolonged, the Valley of the Mississippi must ultimately become its great theater, for the enemy now working to subjugate the South knows the value of our great artery of commerce and of the prominent cities upon it too well for us to doubt that he will bend all his energies to control them.”3 Captain Hunt’s fears were well founded, for just a few hundred miles north, various Union officers were already beginning to mull over ideas for a drive down the river line. One of the first high ranking officers to bring up the matter was Colonel Charles Whittlesey, a graduate of West Point in 1831 and the chief of Brigadier General Ormsby M. Mitchel’s engineers. In a dispatch dated November 20, Whittlesey wrote General Halleck suggesting the propriety “of a great movement by land and water up the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers.”4 His idea was that this would al low the army to operate along the water lines half way to Nashville without endangering the supply line, which would be vulnerable to attack by cavalry if operating overland along the crude road system. This would also make possible, even probable, the Confederate evacuation of Columbus, since it would have the effect of threatening their railway communications. Further, it was in Colonel Whittlesey’s opinion the most passable route into Tennessee.5

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  The Germans of Charleston, Richmond and New Orleans during the Civil War Period, 1850-1870

  A Study and Research Compendium

  • Andrea Mehrländer(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  The longer the war lasted – and the blockade as well – the more the divisions among the groups disappeared. Aside from the trade losses suffered by all, this giant sea blockade hit the foreign population of the South much harder than it did the native population. For the latter it was at first only an economic problem, but for the foreigners, among them the Germans, there were personal negative consequences right from the beginning: a) postal connections to family in the old country were interrupted; b) the long-awaited immigrant ships with friends and acquaintances were cut off; c) food from the homeland, which had been ordered regularly and without difficulty by traders in the South before the war, no longer arrived. 1 Günter Schomaekers, Der Bürgerkrieg in Nordamerika (Wels/München: Verlag Welsermühl, 1977), 20. The coastal blockade was part of the Anaconda Plan, by which the South was to be slowly strangled economically by the Union; the name refers to the giant snake of the same name from South America that strangles its enemies slowly with its eight-to-ten meter body. 2 Lonn, Foreigners in the Confederacy , 309; Richmonder Anzeiger , Sept. 19,1864. 214 VII. Anaconda & Martial Law 1. Blockade-Running: “What most people don’t seem to realize is that there is just as much money to be made out of the wreckage of a civilization as from the upbuilding of one.” 3 1. Blockade-Running: “What A total of eighty-eight ships registered in New Orleans and Charleston for foreign and domestic trade by the summer of 1861 belonged to German owners or partners. 4 However, only a small fraction of these were probably involved in the business of blockade-running because fifty-three of these ships were registered in the port of New Orleans, which fell into Union hands in April, 1862.

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