land water coast of North Carolina on her Sounds
was opened to the enemy with communications from Norfolk, Virginia, to
Beaufort. A garrison of a thousand men could hold those forts for all
time with the navy in command of the sea.

Burnside followed with his expedition into the Sounds, captured Roanoke
Island and the fall of Newbern was inevitable. Every river-mouth and
inlet of the entire coast of North Carolina was now in the hands of the
Federal Government save the single port of Wilmington.

The moral effect of this blow by the navy was tremendous in the North.
It was the first token of renewed power since the defeat at Bull Run.
The navy had not only turned the tide of defeat in the imagination of
the people, the achievement was one of vast importance to the North and
the most sinister import to the South.

The Federal Government had gained the first important base on the
Southern coast for her blockading squadron and given a foothold for the
military invasion of North Carolina.

The President at Richmond was compelled to watch this tragedy in
helpless sorrow. The South had no navy with which to dispute the command
of the sea and yet she had three thousand miles of coast line!

With swift, remorseless sweep the navy struck Port Royal, South
Carolina, and established the second secure base for the blockading
squadrons.

The Beaufort district of South Carolina captured by this expedition was
one of the richest and most thickly settled of the State, containing
fifteen hundred square miles. It produced annually fifty million pounds
of rice and fourteen thousand bales of cotton. And in its population
were thirty thousand slaves suddenly brought under the power of the
Federal Government.

The coast of Florida was next pierced. The blockade of the enormous
coast line of the South was declared at first an impossibility. Within
less than a year the United States Navy had established bases within
striking distance of every port. New ships were being launched,
purchased or chartered daily and the giant Anaconda was slowly winding
its terrible coil about the commerce of the Confederacy.

Jefferson Davis was not the man to accept this ominous situation without
a desperate struggle. The man who had substituted iron gun carriages for
wood in the army consulted his Secretary of the Navy on the possibility
of revolutionizing the naval-warfare of the world by the construction of
an iron-clad ship of first-class power. In h