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Scott, circa 1855







Scott, 1861







The Hercules of the Union, 1861
 

 




 

Winfield Scott (1786–1866)


As the army’s senior commander in 1861, General Winfield Scott organized the defenses around Washington at the outbreak of the Civil War. A Virginian whose services and prestige the South hoped to attach to its cause, Scott remained loyal to the Union, personally commanding President Lincoln’s bodyguard at the inauguration and offering his military counsel for the defeat of the Southern armies. Specifically, Scott suggested a plan to blockade the Confederacy’s eastern seaboard and the Gulf of Mexico and, to seize control of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. This Anaconda Plan was designed to sever the South’s two most western states, Texas and Arkansas, and to squeeze the Confederacy into submission. At seventy-four, Scott was largely ignored because of his age and infirmities, and he requested retirement in the fall of 1861. Scott, however, would live to see the war end four years later by strategies similar to what he had endorsed at the start.


Mathew Brady Studio (active 1844–1883)
Salted-paper print, circa 1861
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

 

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