Talk:Anaconda Plan

message: This is a very nice and interesting article, but is it entirely NPOV?  It seems to lay a very heavy emphasis on the Western theater and on the Tennessee Valley in particular. 
Three points might be made (and hopefully can be, by editors who know their Civil War better than me):
*Richmond, I believe, was the location of the "Tredegar Iron Works", an important weapons factory, so it wasn't entirely a symbolic target.
*Northern morale was a major factor in the war--would they manage to keep going long enough for the Anaconda Plan to work?  And the long string of failures in the East did indeed take Northern morale very low.
*Lastly, I believe the size of the contending armies was generally somewhat larger in the East.
Might these points serve as the basis for making the article a bit more balanced?  Opus33 03:12, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: NPOV?

message: The most successful blockade to date?  That's a pretty bold statement.  While I'm not a Civil War expert, I believe that the blockade was initially unsuccessful.  The Union navy only had about thirty ships to block about 190 southern ports.  In 1862 nearly all Confederate ships made it through the blockade.  It took about two years for the Union navy to build up enough ships to be effective.  By 1865 when the blockade was most successful, the Union navy was still only blocking about half of the Confederate blockade runners.  While this still severely hindered the south, I wouldn't call it the most successful blockade to date.
I'm also fairly certain that the price of cotton overseas went down instead of up during the war.  Britain and France refused to recognize the Confederacy of the southern states and as a result the south refused to sell cotton to them.  But this tactic was unsuccessful and Britain and France instead turned to Egypt and India as their source of cotton.  By the time the south realized that their tactic was not effective and lifted the embargo, Britain and France would no longer buy their cotton.  When the Civil War was over the South found that their cotton wasn't worth as much as it used to be.
Skiguy330 18:17, 7 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, of course the blockade was initially porous.  However, note that you refer to "blockade runners" rather than "cargo ships," which implies that the blockade had an effect even early in the war.  One of the problems the Confederacy had was that the blockade runners concentrated on high-dollar-value luxury items rather than arms for import or cotton for export.  Early in the war, Jefferson Davis and the Confederate government deliberately withheld cotton exports, in the hope of compelling Great Britain to break the blockade.  This turned out to be a grave strategic error because by the time they realized their strategy was not working, the Union blockade had tightened and such exports were impossible.  There's a good discussion of cotton exports and the blockade in James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom. Hal Jespersen 18:43, 7 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Blockade Successful? 

message: User:Rjensen is making major changes to this article without discussion?  Could you discuss first, especially since you are deleting large portions of the original article?  --JW1805 (Talk) 04:40, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: If I asked for discussion before I made major changes to articles, my work would probably grind to a halt. Wikipedia doesn't do well at prepublication reviews of submissions. Jensen's mod was actually pretty good, focusing on the actual content of Scott's plan, rather than a larger discussion of overall Union strategy. Hal Jespersen 18:08, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Recent changes 

message: The statement that "Lincoln did implement the two parts" oversimplifies the development. The Mississippi was opened only because the Navy, against explicit opposition of General-in-Chief McClellan, captured New Orleans and thereby inverted Scott's strategy. A thorough evaluation of the original Anaconda strategy would show that the Army fought only one major battle (Vicksburg) on the river. Columbus and Memphis were outflanked and ceded without fighting, and Island No. 10 would have been likewise (the victory was as much due to the gunboats there as the conventional army units, anyway). The real author of the naval strategy was Gustavus V. Fox, and it is a shame that historians neglect his contribution.PKKloeppel (talk) 14:25, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Implementation 

message: Forgive me if this is a dumb question, but I am new to Wikipedia and do not know many of its policies. Is there a reason for this talk page not to include the WP:MILHIST template?PKKloeppel (talk) 19:01, 27 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  MILHIST template? 

message: A history of Civil War strategies, both Northern and Southern, has recently been published: Donald Stoker, The Grand Design: Strategy and the U.S. Civil War (Oxford, 2010). . It is worth pursuing because Stoker asserts that it is the first history devoted to its topic. (So far as I know, the claim is correct.) I do not believe that it contravenes anything written in the article, but it provides fresh insights. Certainly anyone who wishes to rewrite or otherwise extensively  modify the article should first read Stoker. PKKloeppel (talk) 01:29, 6 March 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: New study of strategy

message: "Virtually all present-day historians agree that the Union's Western campaign was at least as significant as that in the East"
Is this true?  All present day historians?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 159.142.0.105 (talk) 16:06, 24 April 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  western campaign equal in significance to eastern 

message: Should this be merged with Union Blockade? Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 04:35, 24 March 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: I am in favor of merging and will start drafting out how that might look. Amscheip (talk) 01:28, 24 August 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merge?