s surrendered. But Dix's determined
words reverberated through the North, and thrilled all hearts with the
hope that the time for delay was past, and that the growing rebellion
would be put down with a firm hand.

So at the opening of the war we find the North with a navy consisting
of but a few old-fashioned ships, few sailors, officers everywhere
resigning, and a general feeling of distrust of brother officers in
all grades.

The condition of the South as regards the navy was even worse. The
Southern States had never done any great amount of ship-building. The
people were almost all engaged in farming. The crops of cotton and
sugar that they raised were shipped in vessels built in Maine, and
manned by sailors from the seafaring villages of New England. At the
time the war broke out, there was hardly a shipyard in the confines of
the Confederacy. A few vessels were gained by the treachery of United
States officers. The capture of the Norfolk navy-yard brought them
large quantities of naval stores, and by wonderful activity a few
vessels were built for service on inland sounds and rivers. But at no
time could the Confederacy have been said to have a navy; and,
keeping this fact in view, the record the Confederates made with two
or three vessels is most wonderful. In war-vessels for service on that
wonderful network of rivers that make up the waterways of the
Mississippi Valley, the South was not so deficient as in ships of the
seagoing class. The long, crescent-shaped levee at New Orleans is
lined throughout certain seasons of the year by towering
river-steamers which ply up and down the Mississippi and connecting
streams, taking from the plantations huge loads of cotton, sugar, and
rice, and carrying to the planters those supplies which can only be
furnished by the markets of a great city. The appearance of one of
these towering river transports as she comes sailing down the turbid
stream of the great Father of Waters, laden to the water's edge with
brown bales of cotton, and emitting from her lofty, red crowned
smoke-stacks dense clouds of pitchy black smoke, is most wonderful.
Unlike ocean-steamers, the river-steamer carries her load upon her
deck. Built to penetrate far towards the head-waters of rivers and
bayous that in summer become mere shallow ditches, these steamers have
a very light draught. Many of them, whose tiers of white cabins tower
sixty or seventy feet into the air, have but three feet of hull
bene