Dependent on its cotton trade for hard currency, the Confederacy was extremely vulnerable to a blockade. The Confederate states had a small fraction of the Union's manufacturing capabilities as well as available cash. Although the Confederate Congress authorized an army of a hundred thousand men, they could offer little to pay, clothe, feed, or arm them. The Union actually only had three warships suitable for blockade duty.Īs bad as the military situation was that Lincoln and his administration, it was far worse for Jefferson Davis. Almost all of them were sailing vessels, which a new generation of steam powered ships had made obsolete. Navy only had forty-two warships in operation, most of them patrolling distant oceans. While the challenge on land was daunting for both armies, Lincoln's call for a naval blockade seemed ridiculous. The same was true about the navy, out of 1,554 officers, 373 were either dismissed or left to join the Confederacy. At the outbreak of the war, there were 1,108 officers, nearly 400 of them, including many with significant wartime experience in Mexico remained loyal to their home states and joined the Confederacy. Before the war, the U.S.Army was small, only about 16,000 officers and men. The Union was woefully unprepared, even though it comprised twenty-three states and possessed most of the nation's industry and agriculture along with most of the banks and financial wealth, canals, roads, and rapidly growing railroad and telegraph network, the Union didn't have much of an army. The Confederacy was larger than all of western Europe, with thirty-five hundred miles of coastline and one hundred and eighty possible ports of entry to patrol, he blockade would be he largest such effort ever attempted. There was really very little the Union could do either to go to war, or to prevent southern trade. Lincoln announced the blockade on April 19th, 1861, however it was more words than action. Despite the criticism against the Anaconda Plan, the blockade of Southern ports and control of the Mississippi provided the ultimate basis for the economic and military defeat of the Confederacy. Lincoln was concerned that it might be too mild as well, however, he clearly saw the wisdom of this strategy and ordered the blockade. This was a time when war was being romanticized with the recent images of the Crimean War, and the famed Charge of the Light Brigade, made popular with Tennyson's 1854 poem. It was soon carrying the label the Anaconda Plan, after that massive constricting snake. Scott's plan was leaked to the press, and he and it were mocked as being overly cautious. The Confederacy would be split in two, and the embargo would cripple the South's economy. Scott, pointed out that his strategy had two main elements, a blockade of the South Atlantic and Gulf ports, as well as an expedition of eighty-thousand men supported by navy gunboats down the Mississippi to New Orleans. In connection with such a blockade, we propose a powerful movement down the Mississippi to the ocean, with a cordon of posts at proper points, the object being to clear out and keep open this great line of communication in connection with the strict blockade of the seabound, so as to envelop the insurgent States and bring them to terms with less bloodshed than by any other means." "We rely greatly on the sure operation of a complete blockade of the Atlantic and Gulf ports soon to commence. In May he wrote to General George McClellan A Virginian, but a devout Unionist, Scott came up with a strategic plan in response to the "insurrection." He was a hero in the Indian Wars, and the Mexican War, he became the first lieutenant general in the American army since George Washington. Scott had been in every American military action since the War of 1812, in which he had been captured once, but earned a hero's reputation second only to Andrew Jackson's.
Scott, nick-named "Old Fuss and Feathers" because of his reputation as a stickler for strict conformity to regulations. The idea of the naval blockade was created by seventy-five year old head of the army, General Winfield Scott.
One was the naval blockade against the Southern ports, the other was his suspension of Habeas Corpus. Two of the decisions that Lincoln made during the beginning of the Civil War are what many of his detractors past and present site as their case against him.
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