Waterloo on the Peninsula

The fiery rhetoric, bombast and predictions of easy victory of 1860 are long gone and as 1861 slowly becomes the spring of 1862 things are turning bad for the South.  Despite high profile victories in the eastern theater the Confederacy is being slowly strangled.  Military successes at Big Bethel, Lexington Missouri, Manassas and Ball’s Bluff are offset by Union victories in the Kentucky/ Tennessee Theater and along the coasts of the Carolinas.  Nearly the entire population of northwestern Virginia has decided to remain with the Union and the meager Confederate forces in the area have been beaten back and forced to abandon efforts to retain that strategic segment of Virginia.

​

Victories in 1861 are more a matter of luck and fewer blunders made by the opposing Generals.  That begins to change in early 1862 as the Anaconda Plan begins to take shape. The Anaconda Plan is a strategic campaign intended to suppress and economically strangle the Confederacy.  It was first proposed in 1861 by Union General-in-Chief Winfield Scott.  The plan emphasizes cutting off the Southern states from their trading partners in Europe and breaking the Confederacy into pieces that cannot support each other.  The plan has two components; first, a blockade of the Southern ports along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.  The second part of the plan is an advance down the Mississippi River to cut the South in two and to deny the Southerners the use of the waterway.