in Europe came out of the hold of a British man-of-war. The United
States, in 1812, extemporized a navy that gained us the freedom of the
seas. And now the navy has led the way in the war for the freedom of the
continent. The aristocracy felt, intuitively, the danger of this arm of
defence, and discouraged, scattered, and almost annihilated our naval
power before they entered upon the war. When we learn that our active
navy, in April, 1861, consisted of one frigate, too large to sail over
the bar of Charleston harbor, and one two-gun supply ship; and that in
the three successive years it has shot up into a force of five hundred
vessels; that our new ironclads and guns have revolutionized the art of
naval warfare; that we have established the most effective blockade ever
known along two thousand miles of dangerous coast; have captured Port
Royal and New Orleans, aided in the opening of the Mississippi and all
its dependencies which we now patrol, penetrated to the cotton fields of
Alabama, occupied the inland waters of North Carolina and Virginia,
seized every important rebel port and navy yard save four, and destroyed
every war ship of the enemy that has ventured in range of our cannon, we
are pronouncing a eulogy of which any people may be proud. One year more
will swell this maritime power to a force amply sufficient to protect
the coast of the whole republic from all assault of traitors at home or
their friends abroad.

But the army of the Union has not been content to remain permanently
behind the navy. Even in the first year of the conflict, when it was
only a crowd of seventy-five thousand undisciplined militia, contending
against a solid body of well-disciplined and commanded forces, it
wrested two States from the foe, and baffled his intentions for the
capture of all our great border cities. But since the opening of the
campaign of 1802, the real beginning of war by the North, we have
conquered from the aristocracy and now hold fast in Slave States an
area of two hundred thousand square miles, inhabited by four millions of
people--a district larger than France. Three years ago, every Slave
State was virtually in the grasp of the rebels, and the Union was really
put upon the defensive to protect freedom in the Free States and the
national capital. Now, by a masterly series of campaigns in the West and
Southwest, ranging from the Alleghanies to the Gulf, in which we have
never lost a decisive battle, we have saved