At the outset of the Civil War, vaunted general Winfield Scott drafted the Anaconda Plan; an ambitious strategy to blockade southern ports and use naval gunboats to patrol the Mississippi River, effectively splitting the Confederacy in two. Over the course of the war, General Grant's ground forces combined with river forces under the command of General Henry Halleck and Admiral Farragut and Flag Officers Andrew Foote and David Dixon Porter to successfully take strongholds along the Mississippi River and its tributaries such as the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers. The Mississippi River gunboats and ironclads quickly became known as the Brown Water Navy, and this long, successful Federal campaign culminated in Confederate defeat at Vicksburg and the capture of New Orleans, perhaps the Confederacy's most strategic port.