What was the ANACONDA plan?

What if the Anaconda Plan was implemented (as designed) during the US Civil War?

• Lincoln rejected it because it seemed like inaction, but many of his generals(including the head of the army at the time, Winfield Scott)'s plan was to blockade the southern coasts, seize the Mississippi River, and keep the confederates from obtaining its resources, and then to passively sit and wait(i.e. Not invade the south). What do you think the result of his plan would have been if implemented? Do you think a policy of containment would have worked in the civil war?

• Answer:

  I'm not as familiar with the Plan as I should be, but containment is silly and would not have worked. The actual plan itself was implemented. The coasts were blockaded. (Remember Gone with the Wind? Captain Butler was a blockade runner.) The Mississippi River was occupied, splitting the Confederacy in two. That's what New Orleans, Port Hudson and Vicksburg were about. The containment principle is that you just starve out the enemy. Occupation of the Mississippi River is in direct opposition to containment. The South would have been perfectly happy to be "contained." They would not have been perfectly happy to have the Yankees occupy the main waterway of the South. They would have attacked somewhere and that would have been the end of containment.