hore for money to ransom them at $200 each." There was room for the
wail of a federalist paper: "Our coasts unnavigable to ourselves,
though free to the enemy and the money-making neutral; our harbors
blockaded; our shipping destroyed or rotting at the docks; silence and
stillness in our cities; the grass growing upon the public
wharves."[195] In the district of Maine, "the long stagnation of
foreign, and embarrassment of domestic trade, have extended the sad
effects from the seaboard through the interior, where the scarcity of
money is severely felt. There is not enough to pay the taxes."[196]

South of Chesapeake Bay the coast is not bold and rocky, like that
north of Cape Cod, but in its low elevation and gradual soundings
resembles rather those of New Jersey and Delaware. It has certain more
pronounced features in the extensive navigable sounds and channels,
which lie behind the islands and sandbars skirting the shores. The
North Carolina system of internal water communications, Pamlico Sound
and its extensions, stood by itself. To reach that to the southward,
it was necessary to make a considerable sea run, round the far
projecting Cape Fear, exposed to capture outside; but from Charleston
to the St. Mary's River, which then formed the Florida boundary for a
hundred miles of its length, the inside passages of South Carolina and
Georgia were continuous, though in many places difficult, and in
others open to attack from the sea. Between St. Mary's and Savannah,
for example, there were seven inlets, and Captain Campbell, the naval
officer in charge of that district, reported that three of these were
practicable for frigates;[197] but this statement, while literally
accurate, conveys an exaggerated impression, for no sailing frigate
would be likely to cross a difficult bar for a single offensive
operation, merely to find herself confronted with conditions
forbidding further movement.

The great menace to the inside traffic consisted in the facility with
which cruisers outside could pass from entrance to entrance,
contrasted with the intricacies within impeding similar action by the
defence. If a bevy of unprotected coasters were discerned by an
enemy's lookouts, the ship could run down abreast, send in her boats,
capture or destroy, before the gunboats, if equidistant at the
beginning, could overcome the obstacles due to rise and fall of tide,
or narrowness of passage, and arrive to the rescue.[198] A suggested
remed