The conflict was not the brief affair that Scott's critics had imagined. In the four years of the war, the US Navy enforced a blockade that certainly weakened the South by reducing its exports of cotton by 95% from pre-war levels, devaluing its currency and wrecking its economy. Furthermore, the Confederacy was split in two by a campaign based on the Mississippi River, and a consensus has now been established that the Southern defeat in the West contributed at least as much to the final collapse of the rebellion as the land battles in the East that had so long dominated the attention of both historians and the general public. The form of the Northern victory thus turned out to look very much like what Scott had proposed in the early days. Consequently, the Anaconda has been somewhat rehabilitated, and general histories of the Civil War often credit it with guiding President Abraham Lincoln's strategy throughout the period.