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Union Gen. William T. Sherman completed the Anaconda Plan by splitting the Confederacy on an east-west axis. |
THE PAST FEW columns have
So far, my ranking has begun with the twin campaigns of Gettysburg and Vicksburg as the most important. Second was the campaign which ended with the Battle of Antietam. (Note: Some experts consider the Battle of Bull Run II as the more important battle, but I prefer to look at it as part of the bigger Antietam campaign.)
The third most important campaign would be the series of battles that began with Chickamauga (Sept. 19-21, 1863), ran through Chattanooga (Nov. 23-25, 1863), and went on to the Battles for Atlanta (summer of '64); and Sherman's March through Georgia and the capture of Savannah at Christmas 1864.
This entire campaign was exactly what Gen. Scott had in mind when he proposed Anaconda: Divide the Confederacy into segments and isolate each one. It had already been done in July 1863, when Vicksburg surrendered, and in effect the Confederacy was split on the north-south axis.
In late 1863, and extending into Christmas 1864, the Chickamauga to Savannah Campaign split the South again, this time on an east-west axis. What had been in 1861 a huge 750,000-square-mile geographic colossus, stretching from the Atlantic to the far reaches of Texas, was by the end of 1864 three separate and isolated islands: There was the area west of the Mississippi; then, the deep South, including Alabama, the southern part of Georgia and Florida; and finally, the North Carolina-Virginia pocket.
Each was now faced with a choking blockade by the Union Navy but was still responsible for its own defense and the production of its own war-making facilities. In addition, each was responsible for producing its own food and other civilian needs.
What a series of battles! Yes, parts of Gen. William Sherman's later battles were included in Gen. Ulysses Grant's overall strategic plan to win the war, which began in May 1864: Never give the South any rest; use the North's dominance on the fields of battle to force the Confederacy to fight everywhere at the same time; prevent Gen. Lee from shifting forces from one battered front to another, which was equally battered--in other words, force the South to fight when and where the North chose.
When this stage of the war began (remember, the campaign started with Chickamauga in September 1863) there had already been 2 years of killing; it had been a bitter time and had cost both nations its young men and its treasure. President Lincoln was determined to end it as quickly possible--and in Ulysses S. Grant he had the perfect weapon, a blend of ruthlessness and keen military judgment, a man who believed as Lincoln did that the way to win was to use the Northern advantages (military, economic, population, transport, manufacturing capability) to fight an ongoing, never-stopping war.
In my next column: The fourth most important campaign was how the early battles at Forts Henry and Donelson (February 1862) affected the war and brought Gen. Grant to national attention.
Virginia and the Civil WarKevin A. Brooks lives "in Spotsylvania County (we have some trench lines from the Chancellorsville and Wilderness campaigns running into our subdivision). I became interested in the local battles back when I was a cadet at VMI and found out that my great-grandfather had fought in the battle of Fredericksburg."
Brooks agrees with me that the South was an enormous land mass, "all 750,000 square miles of it," but his military background cautions that, "Having an 'enormous' land mass to defend with a finite defensive force can be a two-edged sword. That same vastness that provides all those wonderful natural resources also makes it a bit harder to defend the entire area. A defender can try to defend everything and lose everything or he can try to defend only some portion of the area and still end up losing critical portions thereof."
Brooks continues, "The argument can be made that the defender gains the advantage of operating along interior lines, but that was problematic in the South; the fact that the South had a rather tenuous railroad net invited exactly the kind of 'lopping off of the western portion of the Confederacy' from the more industrialized eastern portion that was accomplished when both Mobile (captured Aug. 23, 1864) and Chattanooga (captured Nov. 25, 1863) fell.
Vast areas to defend is not necessarily a 'good' thing for an outnumbered defender to have to deal with, especially one hamstrung by a limited internal transportation net."
Well put, and I thank Mr. Brooks for writing. As I have explained, one of the reasons the South lost the Civil War was the power the Constitution granted individual states over the needs of the central government.
The "strong states" constitution of the Confederacy gave inordinate powers to the individual governors, and their political needs trumped the requirements of the Richmond government in every case. A governor could not allow his state to be sacrificed for the greater good.
Thus, the Confederacy was forced to adopt a "defense everywhere" battle strategy. This is called a "cordon defense" and military writers note that "defense everywhere is defense nowhere."
It is simply impossible to defend every mile of every nation. (Witness the problems we are currently having with people sneaking over our border with Mexico. No nation has the forces to patrol every mile of its border.) Once an attacker penetrates a single point of a cordon defense, then the defense in that whole area collapses and forces a major retreat.
That is the situation the Confederacy faced early in the war, and I'll give a prime example in my next column when I discuss the river war on the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers.
NED HARRISON is a Greensboro, N.C., writer who specializes in military history. His columns about the Civil War appear regularly in North Carolina, Maryland and Virginia newspapers. He wants to hear your opinions about why the South lost the Civil War. Write Ned Harrison, News & Record/T&C. Box 20848, Greensboro, N.C. 27420. E-mail him at n-b-
Email: h@mindspring.com.
