A Savage War: A Military History of the Civil War

Williamson Murray, Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh

Security, Americas

An excerpt from Williamson Murray and Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh's new book.

Editor’s Note: The following is excerpted from A Savage War: A Military History of the Civil War by Williamson Murray & Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh © 2016 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission.

It would take until the winter of 1863/64 for Grant to formulate a victorious Federal military strategy of overwhelming and coordinated military pressure across the whole breadth of the Confederacy’s land and sea frontiers, and a full year’s worth of campaigning between 1864 and 1865 to execute that strategy. Nevertheless, one should not believe that the Federal cause saw a complete absence of strategic planning at the outset of the war. In what the Northern press later dubbed the Anaconda Plan, Scott had proposed a Union military strategy early in the war combining a naval blockade with a waterborne expedition down the Mississippi “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 bring them to terms with less bloodshed than by any other plan.” Union naval power would also seize New Orleans at the Mississippi’s mouth, while riverine transport would allow the proposed expeditionary force to turn Confederate positions. Scott estimated in May 1861 that the Mississippi expedition would require approximately 60,000 soldiers, supported by forty steam transports and twelve to twenty gunboats.

Later that month, in a missive to his future replacement, McClellan, Scott adjusted his estimate and called for a slightly larger force—roughly 80,000 men, divided into two columns, one spearheaded and supported by gunboats, while the second column marched in parallel via land. Scott asked McClellan for his military opinion on how many troops would be necessary for this campaign, and for advice on the composition of the proposed river fleet, but McClellan never properly replied. Perhaps the senior general, however, had reminded the self- styled “Young Napoleon” of how he had utilized sea power to great advantage during the Vera Cruz campaign, in which McClellan had served as a lieutenant.

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