cruisers became only too
famous in England, from whose ship-building yards they had escaped.
The North failed too in some out of the fairly numerous combined naval
and military expeditions, which were undertaken with a view to making
the blockade more complete and less arduous by the occupation of
Southern ports, and perhaps to more serious incursions into the South.
Among those of them which will require no special notice, most
succeeded. Thus by the spring of 1863 Florida was substantially in
Northern hands, and by 1865 the South had but two ports left,
Charleston and Wilmington; but the venture most attractive to Northern
sentiment, an attack upon Charleston itself, proved a mere waste of
military force. Moreover, till a strong military adviser was at last
found in Grant there was some dissipation of military force in such
expeditions. Nevertheless, the naval success of the North was so
continuous and overwhelming that its history in detail need not be
recounted in these pages. Almost from the first the ever-tightening
grip of the blockade upon the Southern coasts made its power felt, and
early in 1862 the inland waterways of the South were beginning to fall
under the command of the Northern flotillas. Such a success needed, of
course, the adoption of a decided policy from the outset; it needed
great administrative ability to improvise a navy where hardly any
existed, and where the conditions of its employment were in many
respects novel; and it needed resourceful watching to meet the
surprises of fresh naval invention by which the South, poor as were its
possibilities for ship-building, might have rendered impotent, as once
or twice it seemed likely to do, the Northern blockade. Gideon Welles,
the responsible Cabinet Minister, was constant and would appear to have
been capable at his task, but the inspiring mind of the Naval
Department was found in Gustavus V. Fox, a retired naval officer, who
at the beginning of Lincoln's administration was appointed Assistant
Secretary of the Navy. The policy of blockade was begun by Lincoln's
Proclamation on April 19, 1861. It was a hardy measure, certain to be
a cause of friction with foreign Powers. The United States Government
had contended in 1812 that a blockade which is to confer any rights
against neutral commerce must be an effective blockade, and has not
lately been inclined to take lax views upon such questions; but when it
declared its blockade of the South it