e than all,
her mercantile marine was very small. Her foreign trade was in the
hands of Northern merchants. She had ship-yards, for Norfolk and
Pensacola, both national establishments, were within her boundaries;
but her seafaring population was inconsiderable, and shipbuilding was
almost an unknown industry. Strong on land, she was powerless at sea,
and yet it was on the sea that her prosperity depended. Cotton, the
principal staple of her wealth, demanded free access to the European
markets. But without a navy, and without the means of constructing
one, or of manning the vessels that she might easily have purchased,
she was unable to keep open her communications across the Atlantic.

Nor was it on the ocean alone that the South was at a disadvantage.
The Mississippi, the main artery of her commerce, which brought the
harvests of the plantations to New Orleans, and which divided her
territory into two distinct portions, was navigable throughout; while
other great rivers and many estuaries, leading into the heart of her
dominions, formed the easiest of highways for the advance of an
invading army. Very early had her fatal weakness been detected.
Immediately Fort Sumter fell, Lincoln had taken measures to isolate
the seceding States, to close every channel by which they could
receive either succour or supplies, and if need be to starve them
into submission. The maritime resources of the Union were so large
that the navy was rapidly expanded. Numbers of trained seamen,
recruited from the merchant service and the fisheries, were at once
available.

The Northern shipbuilders had long been famous; and both men and
vessels, if the necessity should arise, might be procured in Europe.
Judicious indeed was the policy which, at the very outset of the war,
brought the tremendous pressure of the sea-power to bear against the
South; and, had her statesmen possessed the knowledge of what that
pressure meant, they must have realised that Abraham Lincoln was no
ordinary foe. In forcing the Confederates to become the aggressors,
and to fire on the national ensign, he had created a united North; in
establishing a blockade of their coasts he brought into play a force,
which, like the mills of God, "grinds slowly, but grinds exceeding
small."

But for the present the Federal navy was far too small to watch three
thousand miles of littoral indented by spacious harbours and secluded
bays, protected in many cases by natural breakwaters, a