46 e lusive v ictories
(At the start of the war, the Lincoln administration refused to enlist
black soldiers; for the South, arming the slave population was not
on the table until the last days of the war.) Northern industrial
output was nine times that of the South, though the latter did have
arms manufacturing factories that provided a measure of self-
sufficiency.
What the South had going for it was geography: the Confederacy
encompassed a vast territory (800,000 square miles, roughly the size
of France and Germany combined), only some of it accessible by
rivers, good roads, and/or railroads. To conquer such a foe, Union
armies would need to advance deep into hostile territory, with long
and exposed lines of communication. A further Confederate advan-
tage lay in the shorter distances southern troops would have to travel
to reinforce threatened points, a situation known in military parlance
as “interior lines.” Moreover, the southern coastline was extensive,
with many ports and other points where ships might shelter. Given
world demand for cotton and other raw materials, the South could
readily buy on world markets anything its domestic industry could
not supply. Closing off southern commerce via a blockade would
require an enormous fl eet, and the United States Navy in 1861 was no
more up to its assignment than was the U.S. Army. Finally, the Con-
federacy controlled the vital egress from the Mississippi River,
through which many products from the old Northwest reached the
outside world.
At the beginning of the war, Winfi eld Scott outlined a strategy for
defeating the South that would serve as a rough blueprint for what
followed. Known as the Anaconda Plan, Scott’s approach called for
slowly cutting off the Confederacy from the outside world and
strangling it (much as the giant snake squeezes to death its victims).
In specifi c terms, this meant a thorough blockade of the southern
coastline from Texas to Virginia, a movement down the Mississippi
to isolate the western rebel states, and threats by northern armies on
the Confederate perimeter that would force the South to maintain
large and costly fi eld armies. Scott assumed the cumulative pressure
on the South would wear down the will of its people to resist and
lead them to accept federal authority on the generous terms Lincoln
initially off ered.