Winfield Scott (13 June 1786 – 29 May 1866) was a US Army Lieutenant-General who served as Commanding General of the US Army from 5 July 1841 to 1 November 1861, succeeding Alexander Macomb and preceding George B. McClellan. He distinguished himself during the War of 1812, the Black Hawk War, the Second Seminole War, and the Mexican-American War, and he was briefly in command of the Union Army at the start of the American Civil War, devising the Anaconda Plan.
Biography[]
Winfield Scott was born near Petersburg, Dinwiddie County, Virginia in 1786, coming from a privileged family. He joined the US Army in 1808 as a captain and entered the War of 1812 as a Lieutenant-Colonel. Captured by the British early in his first campaign, he was released in a prisoner exchange and resumed his meteoric rise, making Brigadier-General by spring 1814. Scott was an impressive character in terms of stature, organizational ability, and combat performance. He stormed Fort St. George on Lake Ontario in May 1813 and beat off an attack by British troops at Chippewa in July 1814, a victory that reflected his relentless work drilling his soldiers in disciplined fire and charge with the bayonet. At Lundy's Lane two months later, an attack on a British-held knoll ended in confused carnage, with Scott among the 800 American casualties.
Scott participated in campaigns against Native Americans, supervising the infamous eviction of the Cherokee to Oklahoma in 1838, known as the "Trail of Tears". Within the army, he strove for improvements in staff work, medicla care, sanitation, and tactical training. Ambitious and arrogant, he also spent much time on disputes over seniority, promotion, and presumed insults.
In 1841, Scott was appointed the army's commanding general, a post he held for 20 years. The war against Mexico provided an opportunity to demonstrate his skills on a larger battlefield. He conceived and led an amphibious operation that captured the Mexican port of Veracruz in March 1847 and then marched on Mexico City, gambling on defeating numerically superior Mexican forces wherever he encountered them. From Cerro Gordo in mid-April to the storming of Fort Chapultepec in mid-September, Scott scored an unbroken series of victories praised by the aged Duke of Wellington.
After a failed presidential bid in 1852, Scott was still in command of the army when the American Civil War broke out in 1861. His sensible advocacy of the Anaconda Plan - a patient, long-term strategy for encircling and strangling the Confederacy - was rejected and he resigned soon afterward. He wrote his memoirs in New York City and West Point, and Scott later sent his "Anaconda Plan" strategy to Ulysses S. Grant, who partially employed it in his victorious 1864-1865 campaign against the Confederates. He died at West Point in 1866.
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