The Anaconda Plan Essay

After the Civil War between 1865 and 1877, the country went into Reconstruction. They had to rebuild the south because of Sherman’s plan of total war. In Sherman’s plan, his army took food and burned property, destroying everything that could be used by the Confederates during the war. President Lincoln helped by giving amnesty for Confederate soldiers and a plan for readmission to the Union of the Southern states. He also proposed the Ten Percent Plan. The plan allowed states to be readmitted to the Union if ten percent of its voters swore a loyalty oath to the Union and agreed to the end of slavery. President Johnson took office once Lincoln got assassinated, this changed the course of Reconstruction because he was a southerner and a democrat. He had more sympathy for southerners and many former Confederates assumed political office as soon as their state was readmitted to the Union.

President Abraham Lincoln wanted to prevent a resurgence of resistance. He realized that time was of the essence, and a plan would need to be devised to clearly allow white southerners the ability to regain their status in the Union. His main objective from the beginning of the Civil War was to bring it to an end as quickly as possible. Thus, Lincoln issued the Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction.

1.Lincoln’s original plan was the Ten Percent Plan which would exclude the Confederates except for important officials. This is significant because this was the original idea that the United States wanted to follow in order to rebuild the country.

Congress, which was made up of a Republican majority, refused to seat the southerners that were elected from Confederate states. These problems that developed in Congress, as well as the unfair Black Codes, both show that President Johnson’s plan wasn’t a success.

In 1861, the United States was no longer united and its people were at war, in what is commonly known as the American Civil War. This left President Abraham Lincoln in a tight spot on how to go about dealing with the Southern states that had seceded, the Confederacy, who were now at war with the Northern states, the Union. Lincoln met with his generals to devise a strategy by which the Confederate states could be brought back into the Union. General Winfield Scott, commanding general of the Union army, proposed one plan of battle that he had earlier proposed to Major-General George B. McClellan. His plan came to be known as the Anaconda plan. This plan, although it was never technically adopted, ended up being extremely successful and

The Union believed that if they defeated the Confederacy no further attacks would be carried out. In addition, President Lincoln aimed to re-establish Federal law in the Southern states that had seceded from the nation. He also wanted the Union Army to stop Confederate legislators from meeting in the new Southern capitol of Richmond, Virginia. President Lincoln believed that this would bring a speedy end to the war. BG Beauregard held a strong position in Manassas Junction. Manassas offered railroad access which would lead to the center of Virginia, by way of Orange and Alexandria Railroads. It was essential that Beauregard was able to maintain this position.

Lincoln's main goal was to reunite the Union after the North had won and demolished most of the South. Lincoln wanted to reunite the North and South but the South didn't want to join a slave free north. Lincoln came up with the 10 percent plan which required 10 percent of the state’s population to vote to be loyal to the North and then that state would have to create a new government. The southern states combated this plan with the Wade-Davis Bill which stated that reconstruction would be handed over to congress and the Southern States

At the beginning of the war the Union thought it would be an easy, quick war. The Union leaders at this time had no actual plan for the war. General Scott saw this and came up with the Anaconda plan. Scott considered the war a strategy game, and would attack and penetrate the enemy 's forces without destroying all of their troops; focusing mainly on victory. At the beginning of the war Scott, unlike others, thought that the war would be over in more than two years. The war ended in four years. The term Anaconda plan came from Northern press trying to explain Scotts plan. Many people thought that Scotts plan was too passive and difficult. The Union’s effort in the civil war increased greatly on April 19, 1861. At this point Abraham Lincoln created a naval blockade, a system of ships that stops all imports and exports, on the Confederate coastline. This blockade stretched from the Rio Grande to the Chesapeake Bay. At this time Lincoln’s argument was that the Confederacy had no right to secede. Creating this blockade allowed the National warships to attack privateers. Privateers are privately owned and run warships. These ships were used to take the Union’s trade ships. Getting rid of the privateers meant that the Union could transport goods easier. Scott 's anaconda plan needed the Union’s army and navy to surround the Confederacy. After encompassing the Confederacy the army and navy would tighten in, and effectively strangle the South. This contained two

President Lincoln was thinking of taking a risky step to seal victory. At this point in time he came to the realization that he needed to move in a different direction. The strategic goal to restore the Union was not a good enough reason to keep the Northern states interested and behind the war.

As the Civil War continued in 1863 Lincoln Had announced his plan called the Ten-Percent Plan of Reconstruction. The main goal of the plan was to abolish slavery by getting ten percent of the voters to take the oath, so that when the ten percent was reached they could elect a new state government, which would abolish slavery. In the textbook it states "Lincoln's plan offered no role to blacks in shaping the post-slavery order." There was only select few states that took this oath and those states were Louisiana, Tennessee, and Arkansas. All of these events has started to take place after the victories at the battles of Gettysburg and Vicksburg in 1863, Lincoln felt as If the south had never truly succeeded into the union. Lincoln agreed that

On the other hand had the Confederates been able to press their advantage after the Union lines broke, they might have made things difficult for Washington. Later in the war, with more experience they certainly would not have passed up that sort of opportunity, but as it was they were quite happy with the victory they had won.

With no hope of bringing the South back into the United States by protecting slavery, Lincoln had a new dilemma. His own political party, the Republicans, had formed around their opposition to slavery. Many of the more radical politicians in the party saw the secession of the South as the best opportunity to abolish slavery once and for all. As the US war dead piled up, more and more Northerners began to push Lincoln to punish the states that had seceded by making abolition a major goal of the war. The problem with abolishing slavery, however, was that there were still four slave states that had not seceded from the United States: Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware. Lincoln feared that if he advocated emancipation he would provoke those states into joining the Confederacy, making the war even more difficult to win. Of the border states, Maryland was particularly worrisome, because the US capital at Washington D.C. sat on its border with Virginia. If Maryland decided to join the Confederacy, Washington D.C.

Economically the Union was very strong and greatly outweighed the South. President Lincoln, as the war had begun, quickly declared a blockade, as described earlier, against the main Confederate ports. This was supposed to be under an international treaty, that hadn’t been signed yet, which had created the controversial political issues for Lincoln. Fortunate enough for the Union, when war broke out the United States Navy was small like it’s army, and its ships were scattered around the oceans. Of the American ships that were in surrounding waters, ten were partially destroyed or destroyed to prevent them from going to the Confederates when Virginia seceded. If they did this would have taken the Norfolk naval base with it.

Both the Union and the Confederacy had good military leaders who used and/or invented promising war tactics. The North used a strategy known as the Anaconda Plan. This is where the Union Forces would surround the Confederacy, cut its trade, divide it into two at the Mississippi River, and squeeze it to death. At first the Anaconda Plan was ridiculed, because both sides were originally stuck on old fashion tactics of using mass troops to attack a certain point. When both sides found the new technology in weaponry, made this old strategy suicide the Anaconda Plan was implemented. New technology caused old war tactics to change. Another strategy, I personally like to call “The Jaw” was demonstrated by the brilliant Robert. E. Lee from the South. One war tactic used by Ulysses S. Grant from the North in The Siege of Vicksburg changed the way war was fought from then on. It was called Total War. Total War involves not only war against the opponent’s soldiers but war against their civilians and economic system, in hopes of breaking their moral and in hopes that they give up the thought of winning because victory is just not worth the losses, so defeat may be welcomed. The combination of the ancient technique of total war, which

The first question at hand was to decide which governments would uphold authority in the South (Tindell). President Abraham Lincoln created a plan for regular governments in the states that were or might have been discharged from Confederate rule (Tindell). This plan was known as the Proclamation of