Gen. James Longstreet feared for the Confederacy after the twin defeats at Vicksburg and Gettysburg.

Vicksburg and Gettysburg stand out among the rest. By Ned Harrison

Date published: 10/14/2006

READERS OF THIS column know that I am addicted to lists. I read somewhere that there were more than 10,000 battles, fights, skirmishes, engagements and general disagreements in the four years of the Civil War, and over the next several columns I am going to list them in the order I consider most crucial to the outcome of the war, and tell why I list them in a particular sequence.

Let's set Fort Sumter aside. It wasn't a real battle, just a bombardment. Its importance is that it was one of the few times shots had been fired on federal property, and is accepted as the start of the Civil War.

I mention this because there had been fighting in the 1850s in "bleeding Kansas," as Kansas, a sparsely populated state with strong Union leanings, fought with neighboring Missouri. More than 50 men were killed in border warfare about slavery. (Similarly in World War II, we had been at war with Nazi Germany in the Atlantic well before the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor. On Oct. 31, 1941, the U.S. Navy destroyer Reuben James was torpedoed and sunk by German submarines while on convoy duty in the North Atlantic. Killed were 115 U.S. Navy sailors.)

In addition, pre-Civil War blood had been shed in John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. In October 1859, he had seized the federal fort there, but had been captured by a company of Marines led by U.S. Army Col. Robert E. Lee. Brown, of course, was duly hanged for his actions.

What I am going to write is my list of the most important battles of the war, in the order of their importance. The basis for judgement will be how well or how poorly the single battle (or combination of battles) affected the strategy of the Anaconda Plan.

The Anaconda Plan for winning the Civil War for the Union was first proposed by General in Chief Winfield Scott. Old, tired, gouty, given to sleeping through meetings, he was not physically able to lead the war effort. But his mind worked as well in 1861 as it did in the War of 1812 and the Mexican War of 1846-48.

Date published: 10/14/2006