Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/582

 550 The two navies. The blockade. was determined to build a number of ironclads; and among the types selected was the famous turret-ship Monitor, designed by Ericsson, but not accepted by the navy department without great resistance on the part of conservative naval officers, who distrusted this revolutionary departure from preconceived ideas. So rapid was the expansion of the navy that, in the last year of the war, the United States possessed 671 ships, most of them steamers, and many of them armour-plated, manned by 51,500 men. Had half this force existed at the outset, every Southern port must have fallen into Northern hands in the first few weeks of war, and the Secession movement would have been crushed at its birth. But weak as was the position of the United States navy at the outset, the naval position of the Confederacy was weaker still. The Confederate States had no organised navy ; they had no ships intended for war, and but small facilities for building. Their poverty and their dearth of engineering resources placed them at the gravest disadvantage. The iron essential for armour-plating could only be obtained with difficulty; if we can believe the Southern journalist, Pollard, an appeal was actually issued for broken pots and pans to melt down for this purpose. Everything had to be improvised hulls, machinery, ordnance, armour, ammunition, and projectiles ; and the energy with which, notwithstanding all these obstacles, effective fighting ships were constructed, reflects the highest credit upon the officers of the Confederate navy. The want of sulphur and saltpetre in the Confederacy compelled the commanders of ships, when in action, to be extremely sparing of their ammunition, and reacted in a marked degree upon the conduct of the operations. The more vigilant and effective the blockade of the coast became, the greater grew the difficulty of meeting the demands for war material ; and there came a time when, despite the military importance of the railroads, rails had to be torn up to make armour for the ships. For officers, the Confederacy could rely upon the services of the many able and devoted men who had resigned commissions in the United States' navy ; but seamen were harder to obtain, and the crews of the Confederate vessels were generally made up of landsmen. Since the South had no seagoing war -ships of any value, the maritime struggle was necessarily fought out on the coasts, the Northern fleets assailing in succession the fortified positions of the South on the seaboard and the Mississippi, often but not always in co-operation with the Northern army. The twofold dependence of the South upon the external world, as the source of supply from which it drew military and engineering material, iron, clothing, and a hundred other necessaries of war, and as the market for its cotton, the sale of which could alone provide the sinews of war, naturally suggested to the Northern strategists a close blockade of the Southern coast-line a gigantic task, inasmuch as that coast stretched at the beginning of the war from Chesapeake Bay to the Mexican frontier, a distance of 3500 miles. The occupation