When the Civil War began, both sides were counting on it being a quick war, and their strategies reflected this. At the outset, the Confederacy hoped that they could successfully march their army into Washington and sue for independence at gunpoint. For their part, the Union Army planned to force their way into Richmond and capture the Confederate capital and its leaders. After the First Battle of Bull Run (First Manassas) on July 21, 1861, it became clear that the war would not be won so quickly by either side.
At this point, both sides developed more long-term strategies to win the war. The Union developed a strategy with several goals. First, they would attempt to cut the Confederacy off from the possibility of help from abroad and strangle its economy through a blockade of its coasts. Simultaneously they would take control of the Mississippi River, which would cut the Confederacy off from its westernmost states and disrupt internal movement. Meanwhile, they would continue with their original plan of taking Richmond. These strategies involved fighting exclusively on Southern soil, which Union leaders hoped would demoralize the Southern population. These strategies eventually paid off, but it took much more time and blood than Union strategists had initially predicted.
The Southern strategy relied on wearing down the enemy. They counted on their home-field advantage to provide them with enough local support and victories to keep the war going longer than the North would be willing to fight it. The main hope was that they could hold on long enough to secure help from Great Britain. This plan fell apart after the Confederate defeat at Antietam, when Great Britain made it clear that they would not be providing military support to the South. They then double-downed on their strategy of simply exhausting the Union forces. However, this strategy ultimately failed, as the North had more soldiers and resources than the Confederacy could hope to exhaust.
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https://www.ushistory.org/us/33h.asp
The strategy for both sides at the beginning of the war was a surge to claim the enemy capitals. This plan fell apart on the Confederate side, as the troops lacked the organization to follow up on their victory at First Bull Run. Both sides thought the war would be over quickly.
Winfield Scott was the military strategist for Washington, and he advocated for a slow strangulation of the Confederacy in what would be called the Anaconda Plan. Scott planned for a long war that would ultimately be won by controlling the coastline of the Confederacy, thus bringing about a blockade. While the blockade was ineffective at first, it gradually began to wear on the South, especially after the Union army regained full control of the Mississippi River after the Battle of Vicksburg. While at first both the eastern and western Union armies moved independently of one another, Grant was put in charge of both armies and made them work in concert in order to bleed the Confederate army of manpower.
The Confederacy hoped to fight a war of attrition that would break Northern morale and force peace. This was to be a defensive war in which the Confederacy only fought on its home soil. Lee took the war north twice. He did so once at Antietam in 1862 and once in Gettysburg in 1863 in order to prove that the Confederacy was strong and worthy of the backing of European powers. He also did this to take pressure of the Shenandoah Valley, which saw a great deal of fighting during the war and also served as a major supplier of food for the Army of Northern Virginia. Both of these efforts failed. The Confederacy then went back to the war of attrition in the hopes of getting a peace candidate elected in Washington in 1864, but this did not work. The Confederacy did not have the money, men, or supplies to win a protracted war against a determined enemy.
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