Blockade Begins; Strategy Trumps Tactics

Six days after the fall of Fort Sumter, on today's date in 1861, Lincoln imposed a naval blockade on the seceded states. This was part of the so-called Anaconda Plan of General Winfield Scott, much mocked at the time by those who demanded a swifter route to victory. Scott, who had played a major role in the past half-century of American military history, was old and wise enough to take a longer view -- so old that he would soon be pushed into retirement, and would see a man named after him, Winfield Scott Hancock, become a significant Union general in the Civil War. He would also see the Anaconda Plan, as designed, squeeze the life out of the Southern Confederacy.
Robert E. Lee, a key aide to Scott in the Mexican War, who spurned his offer to take command of US forces in 1861, was to become the war's pre-eminent battlefield tactician, repeatedly frustrating Union hopes. Grant, like Scott and William T. Sherman, was an acute strategist.
Scott never fought a Civil War battle, but the Union's western armed forces, in which Grant and Sherman served, were carrying out his Anaconda Plan plan when they took control of the Mississippi River by the middle of 1863. Sherman was not as good a battlefield general as his subordinate George Thomas (who, like Scott, was a Union-loyal Virginian). It was Grant's combination of leadership qualities, including his mastery of tactics and strategy, that made him the war's greatest general.