General Winfield Scott in the Civil War Anaconda Plan

 

Lieutenant General Winfield Scott was better known to his men as “old fuss n feathers,” and the name fit him perfectly. Scott was as close as the Americans had to a genuine hero. He had fought with distinction in the War of 1812 and the Mexican War. In 1832, he completed the treaty ending the Black Hawk War that purchased six million acres from the Sac and Fox nations. Scott enforced Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal policy during that same decade and removed the rest of the Five Civilized Tribes to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River. No American military commander other than George Washington had accomplished so much.

 

Winfield Scott was a corpulent, seventy-three-year-old worrywart when the Civil War rolled around. Everything had to be just so for the old general. So, he planned everything down to the last detail and prepared for every contingency.

 

When Abraham Lincoln asked Scott to draw up a plan for the war, he created the Anaconda Plan. Like the slithery South American serpent, it would wrap its coils around the Confederacy and slowly strangle them into submission.

 

The Anaconda Plan combined a blockade of Southern ports by the navy and a joint army and navy campaign down the Mississippi, and then to control New Orleans and the Mississippi River. Its object was to split the Confederacy in half and squeeze them like an Anaconda snake.

 

The problem was that Scott’s plan was overly ambitious and did not mesh with the administration’s policies for the war. It required the Union to patrol over 3500 miles of coastal land from Virginia to Mexico, an almost impossible task for a navy with only eighty-two vessels.

 

No one doubted General Scott’s plan was good or would get the job done. Unfortunately, the Anaconda Plan was too much like the old general himself. It was slow, fat, and hungry, and it would take forever to get results.

 

And, if there was one thing Abraham Lincoln did not have, it was time. Lincoln’s entire game plan counted on a short, bloodless conflict that would wind up within ninety days. At the end of that time, Lincoln expected both sides would shake hands and carry on as if nothing had happened.