s with the cry of "Remember the
Alamo." Almost immediately, the Mexicans were overthrown with terrible
slaughter; Santa Anna himself was captured, and the freedom of Texas was
won at a blow.

HAMPTON ROADS

Then far away to the south uprose
A little feather of snow-white smoke,
And we knew that the iron ship of our foes
Was steadily steering its course
To try the force
Of our ribs of oak.

Down upon us heavily runs,
Silent and sullen, the floating fort;
Then comes a puff of smoke from her guns,
And leaps the terrible death, With fiery breath,
From her open port.

* * *

Ho! brave hearts, that went down in the seas!
Ye are at peace in the troubled stream;
Ho! brave land! with hearts like these,
Thy flag, that is rent in twain,
Shall be one again,
And without a seam!
--Longfellow

The naval battles of the Civil War possess an immense importance,
because they mark the line of cleavage between naval warfare under the
old, and naval warfare under the new, conditions. The ships with
which Hull and Decatur and McDonough won glory in the war of 1812 were
essentially like those with which Drake and Hawkins and Frobisher had
harried the Spanish armadas two centuries and a half earlier. They were
wooden sailing-vessels, carrying many guns mounted in broadside, like
those of De Ruyter and Tromp, of Blake and Nelson. Throughout
this period all the great admirals, all the famous single-ship
fighters,--whose skill reached its highest expression in our own
navy during the war of 1812,--commanded craft built and armed in a
substantially similar manner, and fought with the same weapons and under
much the same conditions. But in the Civil War weapons and methods
were introduced which caused a revolution greater even than that which
divided the sailing-ship from the galley. The use of steam, the casing of
ships in iron armor, and the employment of the torpedo, the ram, and the
gun of high power, produced such radically new types that the old
ships of the line became at one stroke as antiquated as the galleys of
Hamilcar or Alcibiades. Some of these new engines of destruction were
invented, and all were for the first time tried in actual combat, during
our own Civil War. The first occasion on which any of the new methods
were thoroughly tested was attended by incidents which made it one of
the most stri