This Day in Civil War History (Scott Unveils “Anaconda Plan” for Crushing South)

May 3, 1861—At 75, he was out of shape, with not enough energy either to command armies in the field or even to stay awake in meetings called by the President. Some even wondered if he was slipping in intellectual candlepower.

But, in his last service to his country, by outlining the strategy eventually employed to bring the Confederacy to heel, Lt. General Winfield Scott demonstrated why he might have been the greatest American professional soldier between the American Revolution and the Civil War.

In its essentials, the strategy—which came to be known, derisively, as the Anaconda Plan for the slow, snake-life manner it proposed to squeeze the secessionist states—did indeed carry the day. But a plan like this required both the proper people to carry it out and a general belief that it was feasible, and both were lacking at this point.

When it comes to military conflict, Americans are much like Tennessee Williams’ heroine Blanche deBois: they don’t want realism--they want magic. When Gen. Eric Shinseki, for instance, made the mistake of telling a Senate committee that occupying Iraq would take “something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers,” his testimony led then-Secretary of Defense Donalf Rumsfeld to force him out.

In private meetings with new President Abraham Lincoln, Scott--the general-in-chief of the army, a man who had led armies in the field during the War of 1812, the Seminole War and the Mexican War--had already been at pains to spell out what would be needed for the North to put away the South in the coming conflict:

* A young, talented general (“a Wolfe, a Desaix or a Hoche”)
* Months of intensive troop training
* 300,000 men
* Hundreds of millions of dollars
* Three years.

Ouch.

The President, it seemed, valued Scott’s counsel, but that wasn’t the case with the man who succeeded the aging Virginian: Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan,, at the time a major general of Ohio volunteers but already being considered for a higher position. During the Mexican War, Scott had thought well of McClellan, but now, seeing some of the rising commander’s thoughts on crushing the South--including marching on Richmond overland from the direction of Ohio--he began to have his doubts, and voice them.

One day after receiving McClellan’s plan, Scott wrote down his own thoughts, and sent them off to the younger man. The commanding general of all Union armies started off by throwing cold water on any idea of relying on volunteers signed up for three months. Such soldiers, the old professional noted, would hardly be trained in time before their first campaign would almost be over.

Then Scott proceeded to the more strategic parts of the plan. One was already about to begin: a “complete blockade” of Southern ports along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. But it could be supplemented with a large thrust of Northern troops, transported by a riverine fleet, down the Mississippi River. That would slice the Confederacy in half. From that point on, Federal outposts along the way would further isolate these portions of the South from each other--and, more important, give Southern Unionists time to work on bringing down the secessionists.

If there was an Achilles heel to the plan, it was this last part. A Southern Unionist himself, the Virginian-born Scott believed that enough of his like existed to bring down the Confederacy. But the favorable conditions for Unionism in Virginia (Scott correctly pointed out that in the Western part of the state--the one that eventually seceded itself and rejoined the Union as West Virginia--matters were ripe for such an eventuality)--didn’t apply elsewhere. He should have gotten a hint of this when fellow Virginia Robert E. Lee passed on Scott’s offer to head up the Army.

McClellan scornfully referred to Scott’s strategy as the old general’s “boa constrictor” plan. The Northern press, once it got wind of it, gave a twist on the nickname, calling it the “Anaconda Plan.”

Beware reporters who fancy themselves as von Clausewitzes. A five-decade Army veteran, Scott knew a thing or two about strategy and logistics--and, in particular, his criticism of McClellan’s suggestion of moving troops by land (“long, tedious, and break-down…marches") was acute.
But the Northern press had become enamored of a new slogan, propagated by Horace Greeley‘s New York Tribune: “Forward to Richmond,” and it wanted it done as fast as possible--never mind the inevitable problems with the time needed to train the enormous force required to crush the rebellion. Lincoln bowed to the inevitable, and a force was pulled together to do so. It met disaster at Bull Run.

Before the year was out, Scott, weary in body and spirit (reading McClellan’s hysterical warnings about the possibility of Washington being vulnerable to attack would do that to anyone), had resigned, and the initiative had seemed to pass momentarily for his plan. What helped revive it were commanders who knew how to bring to pass key elements of the plan: on the Mississippi, David Farragut, who seized New Orleans and, later, Mobile Bay with his squadron; Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman, who took the lessons they learned from moving troops along the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers with them further south when they executed the brilliant Vicksburg campaign (with a strong assist from Admiral David Dixon Porter, whose gunboats ran under the guns of that mighty fortress, helping Grant squeeze the city) that split the Confederacy in two.

And then there was a woman, now largely unknown to history, but at the time an influential behind-the-scenes player: Anna Ella Carroll, daughter of the former governor of Maryland and a descendant of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Charles Carroll.

Carroll, author of a number of political tracts in the 1850s, had helped keep her slaveholding state in the Union. She then began to serve as something of a consultant to the administration of fellow ex-Whig Party member Lincoln, writing papers on topics such as the war powers of the government.

One of her jobs became looking into the Mississippi Valley area. Interviews with experienced riverboat hands convinced her that the massive Federal boats then in existence would have trouble with the stiff currents of the Mississippi. But the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers could handle these boats, she noted, and the Confederates would have more trouble defending against Northern forces coming that way.

Carroll took her idea of a river thrust down the Tennessee directly to the President, and in 1862 Grant’s invasion of Kentucky and Tennessee followed along the lines she suggested.

Scott’s vision of the duration of the war and the strategy required to destroy the Confederacy were borne out by events. By the time of his death in 1866, he had the satisfaction of seeing McClellan (who, in an especially ridiculous moment, wrote his wife that the old war hero was “either a traitor, or an incompetent”) relieved of his command by Lincoln before losing the 1864 Presidential race to the Republican. Above all, the Union for which he had fought and been wounded had been preserved.