Anaconda Plan: Winfield Scott's Mocked Blockade and the Mississippi Squeeze

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

After Fort Sumter in 1861, George B. McClellan proposed a fast overland march on Richmond by way of the Kanawha River or across Kentucky to Nashville. General-in-chief Winfield Scott rejected it, citing a river unsuited to heavy transport and the risk of driving fragile border states and pro-Union western Virginians, five of every seven by his estimate, toward the Confederacy. In May 1861 he proposed blockading every Southern port on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts and sending about 80,000 men with gunboats down the Mississippi to the forts below New Orleans. Critics in the press mocked the idea as a sluggish snake, giving it the name Anaconda Plan, and Scott retired before the year was out.

Henry Halleck preferred turning strongholds along the Tennessee River, so the Navy pressed the river campaign alone. In April 1862 David Farragut ran past Fort Jackson and Fort St. Philip and a chain boom to take New Orleans, then Baton Rouge and Natchez, but the 200-foot bluffs at Vicksburg were beyond his guns, Halleck sent no troops and the falling river forced him back. Grant's campaign ended with Vicksburg's surrender on July 4, 1863, and Port Hudson soon after. On the coast, coal-hungry steam blockaders forced the Union to seize bases at Hatteras Inlet, Port Royal and Fernandina. The episode weighs Rowena Reed's view that no coherent plan existed against the collapse of the cotton economy.

• Confederate torpedoes used glass vials of sulfuric acid that shattered on contact and set off the powder charge.
• The H.L. Hunley, hand-cranked by eight men, sank the USS Housatonic in 1864 with a spar charge and was lost afterward.
• British-built blockade runners with low silhouettes and smokeless anthracite coal completed an estimated 2,500 to 2,800 runs.
• Runners brought in about half a million rifles, but Southern cotton exports fell 95 percent from prewar levels.
• Wilmington, North Carolina, the last major Confederate port, fell in January 1865, shortly before the Army of Northern Virginia collapsed.