The Anaconda Plan was a strategy outlined by the Union army for suppressing the Confederacy at the beginning of the American Civil War.Wolfe, B. Anaconda Plan. (2011, May 9). Retrieved from Encyclopedia Virginia Web. 17 Oct. 2015 Proposed by Union General-in-Chief Winfield Scott, the plan emphasized a Union blockade of the Southern ports and called for an advance down the Mississippi River to cut the South in two. Because the blockade would be rather passive, it was widely derided by a vociferous faction of Union generals who wanted a more vigorous prosecution of the war, and likened it to the coils of an anaconda suffocating its victim. The snake image caught on, giving the proposal its popular name.
In the early days of the Civil War, Scott's proposed strategy for the war against the South had two prominent features. First, all ports in the seceding states were to be rigorously blockaded. Secondly, a strong column of perhaps 80,000 men should use the Mississippi River as a highway to thrust completely through the Confederacy. A spearhead, a relatively small amphibious force of army troops transported by boats and supported by gunboats, should advance rapidly, capturing the Confederate positions down the river in sequence. It would be followed by a more traditional army, marching behind to secure victories. The culminating battle would be for the forts below New Orleans. When they fell, the river would be in US hands from its source to its mouth, and the rebellion would be cut in two.ORA I, v. 51/1, pp. 369–370, 387
Origin of plan The Anaconda had a logical development, both in its origin and the way it played out in the experience of battle. The blockade had already been proclaimed by President Abraham Lincoln. On April 19, 1861, a week after the bombardment of Fort Sumter that marked the outbreak of the war, he announced that the ports of all the seceded states, from South Carolina to Texas, would be blockaded; later, when Virginia and North Carolina also seceded, their coastlines were added.ORN I, v. 4, pp. 156–157, 340. The executive order was not rescinded until the end of the war and so the blockade existed independently of Scott's plan.
In the early days of the secession movement, the status of the border states Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware, all of which allowed slavery, was unclear.Virginia, also a border state, had already seceded by the time the Anaconda was proposed. All except Delaware had strong pro-Southern interests. Missouri was torn by internal conflict that mimicked in miniature the larger war that was convulsing the nation. Maryland was kept in the Union by jailing many of the opposition faction. Kentucky tried to keep the peace by proclaiming its neutrality and by aiding neither the North nor the South if both would agree to leave the state alone.
Because Congress was not in session to authorize presidential initiatives to suppress the rebellion, the burden of raising troops for the war fell on the loyal state governments. Ohio was particularly active in doing so and early acquired the services of George B. McClellan, as the commander of its militia, with the rank of Major General of Volunteers. In a few weeks, as the state militias were incorporated into the national service, the militias of Indiana and Illinois were added to McClellan's command. From this power base, he felt enabled on April 27, 1861, to write a letter to General Winfield Scott outlining his strategy.ORA I, V. 51/1, pp. 338–339. He proposed an immediate march on Richmond, by now the capital of the Confederacy, directed up the Kanawha River. Alternatively, if Kentucky were to leave the Union, a march directly across that state should take Nashville, and then, he would "act on circumstances."
Scott's endorsement of McClellan's letter, which he submitted to the President, shows that he considered it, but not favorably. The Kanawha was not suited for water transport, so the march on Richmond would have to be overland and subject to breakdowns of men, horses, and equipment. More seriously, western Virginia (West Virginia had not yet parted from Virginia) was still very much pro-Union. According to Scott's estimate, its populace stood five out of seven opposed to secession. An invasion as proposed would alienate many of them and subject both enemies and friends to the ravages of war. The same argument could be applied to Kentucky. Perhaps most damagingly, the war as proposed would subjugate the Confederacy piecemeal, with by necessity the border states bearing most of the burden, "instead of enveloping them all (nearly) at once by a cordon of ports on the Mississippi to its mouth from its junction with the Ohio, and by blockading ships on the seaboard."ORA I, v. 51/1, p. 339.
The germ of Scott's Anaconda Plan for suppressing the insurrection is seen in the endorsement. After giving the plan more thought he submitted his proposal in a letter to McClellan on May 3, 1861. A second letter, dated May 21, was his final plan outline!
Scott was not able to impose his strategic vision on the government. Aged and infirm, he had to retire before the end of the year. He was replaced as General-in-Chief by McClellan.
Development of Mississippi River
Under McClellan and his eventual successor in the West, Maj. Gen. Henry Halleck, the Mississippi became a somewhat neglected theater for operations in the West. Halleck, with McClellan's approval, believed in turning the enemy's Mississippi River strongholds rather than attacking them directly, so he moved away from the river.ORN I, v. 22, pp. 700–701. As he saw it, the Tennessee rather than the Mississippi was the "great strategic line of the Western campaign."ORA I, v. 10, p. 24.
The Navy Department, however, remained committed to the idea of opening the Mississippi. In the person of Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus Vasa Fox, it decided early on the capture of New Orleans by a naval expedition from the Gulf of Mexico, after which all other towns bordering the river would fall rather than face bombardment.Gideon Welles, "Admiral Farragut and New Orleans: with an account of the origin and command of the first three naval expeditions of the war," The Galaxy, v. 12, pp. 669–683, 817–832 (November and December 1871). The task of taking New Orleans was entrusted to Captain (later Admiral) David Glasgow Farragut, who followed his own plans for the battle; running his fleet past the forts that defended the city from the south on the night of April 24, 1862, he forced the city to surrender.Dufour, Charles L., The night the war was lost, pp. 265–286.
After repairing his ships from the damage they had suffered while forcing their way past the forts, he sent them up the river, where they successively sought and obtained the surrender of Baton Rouge and Natchez. The string of easy conquests came to an end at Vicksburg, Mississippi, as the Confederate position there occupied bluffs high enough to render them impregnable to the naval gunnery of the day.
Following the loss of Island No. 10 shortly before Farragut took New Orleans, the Confederates had abandoned Memphis, Tennessee, leaving only a small rear guard to conduct a delaying operation. In early June, this was swept aside at the First Battle of Memphis by the gunboats of the Western Gunboat Flotilla (soon thereafter to be transformed into the Mississippi River Squadron) and the United States Ram Fleet, and the Mississippi was open down to Vicksburg. That city became the only point on the river not in Federal hands.ORN I, v. 23, pp. 118–140.
Again, the Army under Halleck did not grasp the opportunity that was provided. He failed to send even a small body of troops to aid the ships, and soon Farragut was forced by falling water levels to withdraw his deep-draft vessels to the vicinity of New Orleans.Shea and Winschel, Vicksburg is the key, pp. 17–18. The Army did not attempt to take Vicksburg until November, by which time the Army was under the leadership of Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, after Halleck had been called to Washington to replace McClellan as General-in-Chief.
By the time Grant became commander in the West, the Confederate Army had been able to fortify Vicksburg and Port Hudson to the south. This stretch – measured along roads, somewhat longer on the river – including the confluence of the Red River with the Mississippi, became the last contact between the eastern Confederacy and the Trans-Mississippi. No doubt of its importance, the government of Confederate President Jefferson Davis in Richmond strengthened both positions. Command at Vicksburg passed from Brig. Gen. Martin L. Smith to Maj. Gen. Earl Van Dorn to Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton. The size of the defending army increased in step with the advancing rank of its commander.Shea and Winschel, Vicksburg is the key, pp. 20, 36.
The campaign for Vicksburg eventually settled into a siege, which terminated on July 4, 1863, with Pemberton's surrender of all the forces under his command. At that time, his army numbered approximately 29,500 men.Shea and Winschel, Vicksburg is the key, p. 178.
When word of the loss of Vicksburg reached the garrison at Port Hudson, Maj. Gen. Franklin Gardner, the commander there, knew that further resistance was pointless. On July 9, 1863, he surrendered the post and its garrison to the Federal Army of the Gulf and its commander, Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks.Shea and Winschel, Vicksburg is the key, p. 200. Henceforth, in the phrase of Abraham Lincoln, "The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea."
Development of blockade
The Anaconda Plan as proposed by Scott relied on the blockade, as he stated it, "to envelop the insurgent States and bring them to terms with less bloodshed than by any other plan."ORA I, 51/1, 369, 387. Insofar as he foresaw direct combat, it was to be more or less confined to the central thrust down the Mississippi River. Almost surely he did not anticipate the level of violence that it provoked. For that matter, the blockade itself had to be modified by events, provoking much of the bloodshed that he hoped to avoid.
Scott's proposal for the blockade was not properly a strategy although it is often referred to as such by historians. It did not estimate the forces that would be needed to guard the at least of coastline in the seceded states. It did not consider an allocation of resources. It did not set out a timeline or even name points of particular concern. Much of that was later done by the Blockade Strategy Board, a group meeting at the request of the Navy Department, with representatives from the Army and the Treasury Department Coast Survey.
During the summer of 1861, the board issued a series of reports recommending how best to maintain the blockade, taking into account the topography of the coast, the relative merits of the various southern ports, the opposition likely to be encountered, and the nature of the ships that would be used by both sides. The board recommendations concerning the Gulf Coast were rather rudimentary and largely ignored, but the blockade on the Atlantic coast followed their plan reasonably closely.ORN I, v. 12, pp, 195–198, 198–201, 201–206; v. 16, pp. 618–630, 651–655, 680–681.
Atlantic blockade