ent than in the south. The attack on Charleston in June, 1776, failed, and as a consequence of that failure South Carolina remained in the hands of the Americans for three years. Afterwards, in 1780, when Charleston fell before a combined attack, South Carolina was overrun by the British. Savannah was captured in 1788 and Georgia was overrun. The force that under General Greene regained South Carolina and Georgia had made long and tedious marches from Virginia.

Situated as the colonies were, it soon became apparent to Washington, their great leader, that the sea power of the enemy gave him an advantage that rendered wellnigh hopeless the cause of independence unless the Americans could call sea power to their aid. Fortunately, at last, aid was to come from France. Washington communicated with De Grasse, the commander in chief of the French fleet, and made with him the combinations that were to result in the surrender of Cornwallis and his army at Yorktown. He subsequently put the case thus, in view of the next campaign:

"With your excellency I need not insist upon the indispensable necessity of a maritime force capable of giving you an absolute ascendancy in these seas. You will have observed that, whenever efforts are made by the land armies, the navy must have the casting vote in the present contest."

When the French and American forces beleaguered Cornwallis by land, and De Grasse with the French fleet held fast the lines of escape by water, the British commander surrendered his army, and independence was won.

In the war of 1812 similar conditions existed. The United States had grown from three millions to over six millions of inhabitants. It had a small navy whose gallant deeds in that war shed imperishable luster upon its officers and men. There is no portion of our history over which the patriotic American lingers with more pride than over the terrible combats our ships fought with the English, whenever the chances of battle were at all equal. But these duels at sea and the very considerable damage inflicted upon the English commerce decided nothing. In spite of its gallant struggles our little navy of that day was practically swept from the seas by the British almost as effectually as in the Revolutionary war. The enemy chose

ana.

his points of attack along a line of seacoast that extended from the northern point of Maine to the western boundary of LouisiThe means of communication, of transporting troops and supplies from one portion of the country to another were almost as primitive as in the war of the Revolution. The British landed expeditions on the borders of the lakes from Canada, in New Orleans from the gulf of Mexico, and through the Chesapeake bay, striking at the center of our long line of seacoast. They succeeded in capturing Washington and destroying the capitol of the United States.

A naval expedition, during the war of 1812, out on the high seas, or on one of the great lakes upon our northern border, headed for no one knew what point on our shores, with no spies to report its purposes, was naturally an object of undefined terror. The unexpectedness with which expeditions thus appeared from Canada was doubtless one of the causes contributing to the demoralization which American historians confess with so much reluctance to have existed, during the larger part of the war, among the American troops, especially along our northern border. No government by any plea whatever can justify a state of unpreparedness for war. As our country was situated in 1814, after our little navy had been driven from the seas, whether or not it had successfully resisted an expedition sent by water against any part of its soil, depended as a rule, on luck rather than on the courage of its people, or the strategy or generalship of its enemy. The British captured Washington because the Americans were not in luck; they struck at a point which, it had been supposed, would not be assailed, and which they were not prepared to defend. In the battle of New Orleans we were in luck; we were able to assemble troops there, and we had a general to lead them.

The victories won by Macdonough on Lake Champlain, by Perry on Lake Erie, and by Andrew Jackson at New Orleans, raised our prestige and, together with the gallant deeds of our little navy on the high seas, brought us out of that war with credit. But here again was illustrated, as in the Revolutionary war, the vulnerability of our long lines of coast and the absolute necessity to the United States of a navy.

When the great Civil war of 1861 came on, conditions had

been changed. The population of the United States had grown to thirty millions. It had extended westward to and even beyond the Rocky mountains. A distinctive feature of the situation then was that, for intercommunication, water transportation was being supplemented, and to some extent supplanted by railroads. There was, indeed, a network of railroads covering the whole country,-the south as well as the north,-but notwithstanding this, transportation by water was nevertheless a factor in the great struggle about to ensue, that was quite a potential, and in some respects even more decisive than in the war of the Revolution and of 1812.

The confederacy, strategically considered, was largely a compact body of states. Its railroad communications, though not equal to those of the north, were nevertheless sufficient. When the armies of the union sought to invade its territory from different points, the confederacy had the advantage of interior lines. By these lines it might have concentrated its armies, now upon one and then upon another point, in such a manner possibly as to have given it ascendancy; but all the advantages which would otherwise have been derived from interior and shorter lines were completely neutralized by the naval power of the United States.

The confederacy had entered upon this conflict for independence without a navy, and it manfully struggled to create one. It constructed here and there good ships and fought them gallantly, but they were unequal to the forces they were to meet. The career of destruction upon which the Merrimac had successfully entered at Hampton Roads was arrested by the Monitor. It was not long after this combat that the confederates felt compelled to destroy their famous vessel to prevent it from falling into the hands of the United States.

The Albemarle, the Mississippi, the Arkansas, the Tennessee, and other ships, constructed with so much pains and industry by the confederates out of their slender resources, fell one after the other into the hands of the enemy or were destroyed. Speaking largely, the confederacy, therefore, had no navy. The exploits of the Alabama and the Shenandoah, when noised abroad through the confederate army, were well calculated to improve its morale, and certainly did inspire its soldiers with

the belief that the destruction being wrought in the enemy's commerce would aid in bringing the United States to terms. But it can scarcely be alleged that these ships were of any real value to the confederacy. The destruction in commerce, amounting in value to about $15,000,000, did not seriously cripple the immense resources of the United States. It assuredly did not dispirit the armies of the union or incline its voters to make peace. On the contrary, the moral effects of these raids upon commerce, although they were sanctioned by the cruise of Paul Jones in the North sea during the Revolutionary war, and of the Essex and other ships during the war of 1812, was only to exasperate the people of the United States and to incite them to still more patriotic efforts, if possible, to put down the confederacy, which, as the people were then taught by their newspapers to believe, was resorting upon the high seas to piratical and uncivilized methods of war.

The military situation of the confederacy was this: Five millions two hundred thousand of white people had engaged in a desperate effort to establish and maintain their independence; they had four millions and a half of slaves to produce food and cotton; they had iron and coal in abundance, but were without furnaces or foundries or workshops; they were poorly supplied with arms; they were at the time producing cotton that clothed the world, but they had few cotton manufacturies and practically no other factories whatever; they had imported everything they used, except what was produced from their soil. With cotton they might have bought ships, arms and munitions of war, and might have obtained abroad the financial credit of their government. But the United States navy was everywhere at their doors; every part of the long line of seacoast which hemmed them in was successfully blockaded; instead of the abundant supplies of things, essential to their home life and the life and success of their armies, which would have come to them had they been able to assert their dominion over the sea, only scant articles of necessity were brought now and then through the blockade. The advantage of the interior lines of communication which the confederates would otherwise have enjoyed was neutralized by the necessity of keeping garrisons in Wilmington, Charleston, Savannah,

Brunswick, Pensacola, Mobile, New Orleans, Galveston and other ports. It was impossible to say when an army might be landed at any one of these points. Who shall estimate the value to the United States of the service of its navy which thus isolated the confederacy, cut it off from communication with the outside world, and at the same time compelled it to guard every point against a raid like that which destroyed the capitol of the United States in 1814?

Had the confederacy, instead of the United States, been able to exercise dominion over the sea; had it been able to have kept open its means of communication with the countries of the old world, to send its cotton abroad and bring back supplies of which it stood so much in need; had it been able to blockade Portland, Boston, Newport, New York, the mouth of the Delaware and the entrance of Chesapeake bay; had it possessed the sea power to prevent the United States from despatching by water into Virginia its armies and their supplies, as the United States was blockading and intercepting its supplies, it is not too much to say that a reversion of conditions would have reversed the outcome of the Civil war.

But this brief generalization of the results of naval operations on the Chesapeake and on the high seas, as they affected the military operations gives no adequate idea of all that was really wrought by the navy of the United States during that memorable conflict. When the Civil war came on, the influence of sea power had become vastly extended by reason of the changes which had been wrought by the substitution of steam for sail in the propelling of vessels. Every river that permeated the confederacy was to bear upon its bosom a hostile fleet. Fortress Monroe speedily became a base of supplies, and the gunboats above it on the James river were a continual menace to the capital of the confederacy. When McClellan's army, routed on the battlefield of Chickahominy, eventually made a successful stand upon Malvern Hill against the victorious troops of General Lee, the gunboats on the James powerfully aided in repelling the desperate assaults upon that position, by hurling huge shells from 15-inch guns into the charging columns of the confederates; and finally the war was practically closed by the army under Grant operating along the line of