Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/502

 470 Northern progress in 1861. |_i86i envoys Mason and Slidell on their way from Havana to Europe, only however to be again embittered by England's peremptory de- mand for their release, and the necessity of surrendering them, because the seizure had not been made in strict accordance with international usages. In reality great preliminary progress had already been made toward the maintenance of the government and the eventual suppression of the rebellion. A considerable navy had been improvised ; Port Royal, the finest Southern harbour, captured and occupied; and an effectual blockade established along the whole vast line of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. The Confederate leaders had confidently expected to secure the adhesion of the entire South; but this hope had been effectually baffled. Maryland, Western Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri, forming the whole northern tier of the Slave States, were under the official control of the Unionist government, and for the greater part within Union military lines. Half a million Federal soldiers were under arms, ready for future campaigns ; and there was as yet no perceptible abatement in the streams of volunteers flowing to camps of instruction near the capitals of the Free States. The cool wisdom of the President had averted a rupture with England; and Napoleon III, though filled with unfriendly sentiment, hesitated in his ambitious designs. With the character and extent of the civil war thus much more clearly defined, it becomes easier to trace out and comprehend the scope and succession of the principal military campaigns destined to follow. Geographically the area of insurrection fell into three great divisions, (1) from the Atlantic coast to the Alleghany Mountains, (2) from the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, (3) from the Mississippi to the western frontier. But the political and strategical fields did not immediately coincide with the geographical. If not of the greatest, at least of the first importance was the blockade by which a barrier of ocean patrol was stretched from Chesapeake Bay to the mouth of the Rio Grande. It marked and guarded the sovereignty of the United States over that part of the Atlantic seaboard which the President's proclamation closed to the commerce of the world. Except at the risk of capture and confiscation, no foreign ship might enter its ports to bring arms or munitions to the insurrection; no Confederate vessel might sail out of them to wage war or carry cotton to exchange for gold in Europe. No commercial privileges could be offered by the Confederate States to tempt a foreign nation to intervene. So strictly was the blockade enforced that foreign luxuries disappeared from Southern homes, and Confederate credit shrank to worthlessness. Of the three geographical divisions, that between the Atlantic coast and the Alleghanies assumed from the beginning and maintained till the end the leading importance. Washington City, the Federal