possessed only three steamships
of war with which to make it effective. But the policy was stoutly
maintained. The Naval Department at the very first set about buying
merchant ships in Northern ports and adapting them to warlike use, and
building ships of its own, in the design of which it shortly obtained
the help of a Commission of Congress on the subject of ironclads. The
Naval Department had at least the fullest support and encouragement
from Lincoln in the whole of its policy. Everything goes to show that
he followed naval affairs carefully, but that, as he found them
conducted on sound lines by men that he trusted, his intervention in
them was of a modest kind. Welles continued throughout the member of
his Cabinet with whom he had the least friction, and was probably one
of those Ministers, common in England, who earn the confidence of their
own departments without in any way impressing the imagination of the
public; and a letter by Lincoln to Fox immediately after the affair of
Fort Sumter shows the hearty esteem and confidence with which from the
first he regarded Fox. Of the few slight records of his judgment in
these matters one is significant. The unfortunate expedition against
Charleston in the spring of 1863 was undertaken with high hopes by the
Naval Department; but Lincoln, we happen to know, never believed it
could succeed. He has, rightly or wrongly, been blamed for dealings
with his military officers in which he may be said to have spurred them
hard; he cannot reasonably be blamed for giving the rein to his expert
subordinates, because his own judgment, which differed from theirs,
turned out right. This is one of very many instances which suggest
that at the time when his confidence in himself was full grown his
disposition, if any, to interfere was well under control. It is also
one of the indications that his attention was alert in many matters in
which his hand was not seen.

He was no financier, and that important part of the history of the war,
Northern finance, concerns us little. The real economic strength of
the North was immense, for immigration and development were going on so
fast, that, for all the strain of the war, production and exports
increased. But the superficial disturbance caused by borrowing and the
issue of paper money was great, and, though the North never bore the
pinching that was endured in the South, it is an honourable thing that,
for all the rise in the cost of