The Battle of Principles Part 7

The popular opinion is that Beecher went to England, not openly, but secretly as a messenger of the government. Like other myths, the fable grew slowly, but is now well entrenched in the minds of mult.i.tudes.

There is no foundation for the story. Indeed, Mr. Beecher is on record plainly, stating that no request, no suggestion, no hint, even, came from Was.h.i.+ngton. At the time, his relations with the Cabinet were strained. Seward was unfriendly. Stanton was hurt by his insistence, through the _Independent_, upon immediate emanc.i.p.ation. For a time even Lincoln cla.s.sed him with Horace Greeley, as extremist. His editorials during the spring of 1862 had one thought, "Carthago delenda est." It was only after Lincoln came around by a gunboat into New York Harbour, and secretly met General Winfield Scott in a friend's house, and had another secret interview with Henry Ward Beecher, and returned (letters exist from Secretary Hay, following an interview with him over the records in Was.h.i.+ngton, which establish this trip to New York to see Scott and Beecher), that Beecher changed the tone of his editorials, and went over to Lincoln's position,--that the Union was first, and the destruction of slavery the secondary thing. The Great Emanc.i.p.ator loved and trusted Beecher, but the Cabinet was critical, and Lincoln, as he said, "did not have much influence with the administration."

The only power and the whole power behind Beecher was that of Plymouth Church, that gave him the money for all of his expenses, and took from him a pledge that if he spoke at all he was to speak at their expense, but under no circ.u.mstances to either preach or lecture until he had recovered his strength. He was ill during the entire voyage, and was not able to appear on deck until the vessel entered the Mersey. The news of Beecher's coming had preceded him, and on opening the papers he found even church leaders antagonistic. They deplored his coming, lest he increase the excitement. The n.o.bility was in favour of the South, as were the s.h.i.+p-builders, the mill-owners, the bankers and all who had investments or loans in the cotton industry of England and of the South.

One hundred and fifty Congregational ministers greeted Beecher with a breakfast in London. They asked him to preach and speak on religious topics, but to avoid all reference to slavery on account of the inflamed condition of the English mind. The man who introduced him deplored the war, and described the patience of G.o.d in permitting the North to go on.

When Beecher arose to speak he was in a towering rage. He told them that he would neither preach nor lecture nor speak in a mother land that was openly hostile to her own daughter, and unfriendly to every principle of liberty that was dear to England and embedded in English tradition and history.

In substance, he said: "Your conscience here in England is very sensitive on the subject of war, providing some one else is fighting the war, but England has no conscience at all as to war when she is prosecuting the campaign." At that very hour England was fighting a war in j.a.pan, and a war in China, and a war in New Zealand for territory.

Three wars being quite proper, if England fought them, but oh, the patience of G.o.d in permitting the North to exist even for one moment, while fighting for liberty, the Union and the emanc.i.p.ation of slaves! He told them that they thought it was a crime for the North to have a war for emanc.i.p.ation, but quite proper for England to threaten a war over two men named Mason and Slidell! Beecher understood Old England. No nation in history ever conducted so many wars. No other nation's statesmen ever had such skill to invent moral excuses for seizing territory, in Africa, Egypt, India, Thibet, Australia, New Zealand and all the islands of the sea. He best described it in his final speech in London, when returned from the Continent: "On what sh.o.r.e has not the prow of your s.h.i.+ps dashed? What land is there with a name and a people where your banner has not led your soldiers? And when the great _reveille_ shall sound, it will muster British soldiers from every clime and people under the whole heaven." What? "Speak in England on religion and keep still on slavery, and the North and the South?" When an engine is full of steam, it is a bad thing to sit on its safety-valve.

Figuratively speaking, the chairman and the hundred and fifty ministers, who were trying to get Beecher to speak on religion and keep still on slavery, sat pa.s.sively and serenely on the safety-valve for about five minutes, but finally the engine blew up. Mr. Beecher was not the man to stifle his convictions in the name of peace, for he knew that in an evil world a good man has no right to dwell at peace with the devil and his minions. So he declared his hostility, turned his back on England, and went to the Continent; and thus ended the first chapter in the European trip.

Looking backward, it is easy to discover the explanation of England's att.i.tude towards slavery and the Southern leaders. During the early forties England had herself pa.s.sed through an industrial revolution.

Because she had little agricultural land, and thirty millions of people, the cost of living was high. When the cry of the people for bread became bitter, Cobden, Bright and their a.s.sociates inaugurated and carried through the Free Corn Movement. With the incoming of free raw materials England became the great manufacturing centre. What her farmers lost through free trade in selling grain they gained in the lowered price on which they bought. Within ten years after the victory of free trade England became a hive of industry, filled with cl.u.s.tering cities, while the whole land resounded with the stroke of engines.

Abundance succeeded to poverty and work trod closely upon the heels of want. So prosperous had England become that by 1860 she was importing two million bales of cotton from Southern States. The s.h.i.+pyards of Glasgow built s.h.i.+ps to carry cotton, the bankers in London made loans to Southern planters, the mill-owners in Manchester bought shares in the Southern cotton fields. The rich men of the South were constant guests of the mill-owners in Central England and of the bankers in London.

Little by little England was drawn in through financial channels, and cast her lot in with the production of cotton,--and slavery.

Then came the Civil War. The planters went to the front with Lee's army; the slaves freed from overseers would not work. The production of cotton was halved. The Northern navy blockaded the exit of cotton s.h.i.+ps from the Southern ports. English s.h.i.+ps hung around the Southern sh.o.r.es trying in vain to find access, hoping to run the gauntlet and obtain a cargo of cotton. One by one the great English mills shut down for want of raw material, and when two winters had pa.s.sed, and the autumn of 1863 had come, and the English working people fronted a third winter, the spectacle became pathetic and terrible. Gaunt Famine stalked the land.

The skeleton Want stood in the shadow of the poor man's house. But the courage and fidelity of the English cotton spinners held out for two years. The poor always love the poor. The cla.s.ses have always been wrong, the ma.s.ses have always been right. Luxury puts wax into the ears of the aristocrats, but want makes the hearing of the poor very sensitive to a sob of pain. The sympathy of the cotton spinner was with the Northern working man. An English working man did not want to be put in the same cla.s.s with a Southern slave. He saw that any law that riveted fetters on black slaves in the South helped forge a manacle for the cotton spinner's wrist in the mother land. These poor English folk believed in the dignity of labour, in the right to a good wage, and in the necessity for all working people standing together.

But the mill-owner wanted raw cotton. The banker wanted the mill-owner to have his cotton that his loans might be paid. The s.h.i.+p-builders wanted Southern cotton that their industry might thrive. Investors who for two years had had no interest on their Southern loans sympathized with the South; the politicians, controlled by their financial interests, wanted the South to succeed. In that hour of temptation Avarice drew near and choked Justice. Greed offered bribes to Conscience. Old England's ruling cla.s.ses, with the full sympathy of men like Gladstone and hundreds of others, favoured the speedy recognition of the Southern Confederacy in the hope that that would end the war and restore England's prosperity.

In a word, the situation was this: The North had to fight the South, and England with her influence as well. For here was the North, struggling for the principles of the Pilgrim Fathers, for liberty, for democracy and for the slaves, and just in the darkest hour of the struggle, when she was burying her dead and the whole North was hung with funeral c.r.a.pe, England, with s.h.i.+ps on every sea, England, strong and powerful, taking advantage of the capture of two Southern emissaries--Mason and Slidell--from the British s.h.i.+p _Trent_ on the high seas, declared she would send an army to Canada and s.h.i.+ps to batter down our Northern cities. Even Gladstone bought Southern bonds, but later Gladstone deeply lamented his sympathy with slavery and the South, and asked the world to forgive and forget it. Yet if the North has long ago forgiven England, it must be a hard thing for England to forgive herself that she gave to slavery every ounce of influence she had, her threats, her frowns, her diplomacy and her s.h.i.+ps. Long afterwards a court of arbitration in Geneva punished England with an enormous fine for the American s.h.i.+pping that she helped destroy in her effort to help break down the North and defeat liberty in a war that her own statesman, John Bright, has characterized as one of the few wars not only justifiable but glorious in all history.

Now this was the att.i.tude of England. Her upper cla.s.ses and financial interests were all on the side of slavery and the South. Her great middle cla.s.s were largely in favour of liberty. Her working people were naturally on the side of free labour and the North, but they were weakened by starvation till their endurance and fort.i.tude were almost gone. And then it was that Beecher entered the scene, returning from the Continent to England. Recognition of the Confederacy and other unfriendly official acts were trembling in the balance; yet there was hesitation, on account of the common people, who sympathized with the North. In telling of this afterwards, Mr. Beecher said: "To my amazement I found that the unvoting English possessed great power in England; a great deal more power, in fact, than if they had a vote. The aristocracy and the government felt, 'These men know they have no political privileges, and we must administer with the strictest regard to their feelings or there will be a revolution.'" There were many n.o.ble exceptions among the higher cla.s.ses, and the Queen, doubtless under the influence of the Prince Consort Albert, who died in 1861, and had been a firm friend of America, was also friendly to the North; but her Government was not.

The argument finally used to persuade Beecher to speak was that the English Anti-Slavery Society was already discredited, unpopular, and frowned upon by the n.o.bility and the upper cla.s.ses, and that if Beecher would not recognize them by at least one speech their cause and ours would be still further weakened.

He began his work with a speech at Manchester, the very centre of the cotton spinning industry. For weeks the streets had been placarded against him. On his way to the Free Trade Hall he found, not a mult.i.tude, but a mob, filling the streets. The meeting had been packed in advance. Within five minutes after his introduction the storm let loose its fury. There were two or three centres of conflict that became veritable whirlpools of excitement. All the rest of the audience climbed on their chairs to see what was going on in the tumultuous centres.

Everybody seemed to be yelling, some for order, and others with the purpose of breaking up the meeting. Mr. Beecher saw that many were determined that he should not speak, and he realized that if they broke him down, other cities would withdraw their invitation, and it would appear that all England was unalterably opposed to the North, so that the recognition of the Confederacy might follow. When his enemies began to wear themselves out and the tumult to subside, Mr. Beecher shot a few sentences into the noise. "I have registered a vow that I will not leave your country until I have spoken in your great cities. I am going to be heard, and my country shall be vindicated."

The orator soon found that about one-quarter of the audience were bitterly hostile. Another quarter applauded his sentiment. The great ma.s.s was hesitant, undecided, unconvinced, and he determined to conquer that undecided cla.s.s, and add them to that portion that was friendly. He scornfully reminded them that he had before met men whose cause could not bear the light of free speech. He roused them by saying that American inst.i.tutions were the fruit of English ideas, and that the fruit of American liberty was from seed corn that was English.

When some one shouted that he was harsh and unfair, he answered, What if some exquisite dancing master should stand on the edge of a battle-field where a hero lifted his battle-axe, and criticize him by saying that "his gestures and postures violated the proprieties of polite life!" He added, "When dandies fight they think how they look; when men fight, they think only of deeds." He said that what the North desired was not material aid, but simply that England should keep hands off, and that France should keep hands off. He affirmed that even if they both interfered, the North would fight on, that slavery must be destroyed, and that liberty must be established on the American continent; that the victory of democracy and liberty in the North would mean their victory over the North and South American continent, and that if the day ever should come when the old flag should wave again over every state in the South, and the atrocious crime of slavery should be destroyed, there should be liberty for the press, and liberty for the poor in the schoolhouse; if plantations should be broken up and distributed among the poor farmers, and the privileges of civil liberty be won, that it would be worth all the blood and tears and woe.

When he said that Great Britain had frowned upon the North, but hastened to fling her arms around the neck of the imperious South, one Englishman waved his arms and shouted: "She doesn't!" and the six thousand people began to cheer the disclaimer of England's being Romeo.

To which Beecher answered: "I have only to say that she has been caught in very suspicious circ.u.mstances."

Beecher's unshakable good humour, his witty, lightning-like answers to their questions and contradictions, his solid sense and--when he got the chance--his flaming eloquence, finally quelled and captured them. Then he traversed the entire history of slavery in its relation to the Colonies, the States, and the different forms of legislation up to the Kansas and Nebraska Bill. When he concluded his speech, and the sentiment of the audience was called for, to the astonishment of his friends, men lifted up their voices with a sound like the sound of many waters, and lined up for the North and liberty. The enthusiasm was overwhelming. Within three hours January's frost had turned to the bloom of June, and the moment was radiant with hope. The London _Times_ contained four columns of this speech, and the address became the topic of the hour in every club in England. And either of these facts in those days meant that Henry Ward Beecher was famous in England.

His speeches in Glasgow and Edinburgh took up the second and third steps in the development of slavery and liberty on the American continent. He told these s.h.i.+p-builders in Glasgow how the providence of G.o.d seemed to be exhibiting to all the peoples of the world the reflex influence of slavery upon the strongest people and the richest resources, and how slavery cursed whatever it touched. That the lesson might be the clearer He gave liberty an unfriendly clime, and gave slavery a rich arena. To the North He gave short summers, bleak skies, the rocks of New England hills, the thin soil of New York, the sand dunes of Michigan. To the South He gave sunny Virginia, the riches of the Gulf States, the fruitful skies, the abundant rains, the treasures of the cotton, the sugar and the rice. Above all, G.o.d sifted all the nations of the Old World to find blood rich enough to people the Southern States. The men who laid the foundations of the great South were people of a heroic type, giants and heroes of fort.i.tude. G.o.d brought the Huguenots, and the very flower of French chivalry into Florida and Georgia. He sifted all Scotland and North Ireland for outstanding men for South Carolina.

He took the best blood of England for Virginia. These Southern founders and fathers had fought in France, endured for their convictions in Scotland, conquered their enemies in England and North Ireland, and G.o.d rewarded them with the richest, choicest meadows and valleys of the sunny South. And yet Slavery wrought weakness, while Liberty made the bleak North to blossom like the rose.

It is said that plants exude poison from the roots, and soon destroy the soil unless there is a rotation of crops. Slavery was a noxious plant, deadlier than the nightshade, and it poisoned the South. The longer slavery existed, the weaker the Southern giant became, until, toiling on, the South became bankrupt through slavery, and toiling on, every year of the war under free labour found the North growing ever richer and stronger. Liberty is a giant that when it touches the soil renews its strength.

Oh, if the South had but had a better cause! History affords nothing finer than the bravery of Southern soldiers and their leaders; had they been fighting for liberty, or some great cause that would have supported them during the struggle instead of bankrupting them as slavery did, it is doubtful whether any army could have defeated their soldiers.

In Liverpool Beecher literally fought with the lions of Ephesus. The bill-boards were posted with placards in red type. All men in England who had investments in the South and wanted to break Beecher and his cause seemed to have a.s.sembled. From the moment he entered the room the great audience became a mob, and with groans, hisses, cat-calls, epithets, men interrupted the orator with cheers for the South. Speaking was like lifting up one's voice in the midst of a hurricane, or trying to speak while a typhoon was raging on the sea. For one hour the tumult raged. From time to time the police would succeed in carrying out some obstreperous individual but there were enough men scattered through the hall, each bellowing like a bull of Bashan, to make hearing impossible.

To add to the tumult, from time to time, an Englishman would climb on his chair and shout, "I am ashamed of Liverpool and my country," and the confusion would break out afresh. It took one hour to wear the voices out. When Beecher told the reporters that he would speak slowly so they could hear, and thus he could reach all England, the audience grew quieter.

Beecher urged three arguments,--first, that the national prosperity is dependent upon the production of wealth, and this meant independence for the producer; second, that prosperity depends upon manufacturing and that means a high quality of educated workman; third, that prosperity is dependent upon commerce and the exchange of commodities between nations, and that means brotherhood. He urged that the more intelligent and prosperous the workman, the higher his wage, and, therefore, the better he supports as a buyer. A slave uses his feet and hands, and produces a few cents a day. A poor white labourer uses his hands and his lower head, and earns fifty cents a day. An intelligent Northern working man uses his hands and his creative intellect, and he produces a dollar a day. A highly educated worker becomes an inventor as well as a freeman, and earns five dollars a day. With this wage he buys comforts, tools, products of the loom, builds up manufactures, and promotes prosperity.

For that reason a few patricians only in the South buy in the English market, while the millions of slaves demand from Sheffield only whips and manacles. Therefore slavery starves English trade.--And at last Liverpool heard him.

In Exeter Hall in London, Beecher closed his argument: "Shall we let the South go, and carry slavery with her? If a Northern working man has a mad dog by the throat shall he let that animal go to spread death?

Letting the South go as a free nation is one thing, but letting her go to spread slavery over Mexico and Central America is another thing. When we kill the mad dog we will talk about letting the South go."

Beecher returned home to find himself the hero of the hour. In Plymouth Church, on Sunday morning, the audience stood for five minutes, and with their tears and silence told him of their grat.i.tude and love. From that hour Stanton asked for his friends.h.i.+p, and was weekly and even daily in correspondence. He promised Beecher that immediately upon the receipt of any news from the battle-field he would send him a telegram. Indeed, the first news that the country had from Stanton of one of the great victories came to Beecher's pulpit and was read over his desk. Other great men, the President, secretaries, the generals, the statesmen, editors, lecturers, preachers, did their part, but high among co-workers ranks Henry Ward Beecher. G.o.d gave him a great task, and armed him for the battle. He loved the poor, he broke the shackles from the slave, he discovered to the world the love of G.o.d, and dying he flung his helmet into the thick of the enemy. It is for us and our children to fight our way forward to that helmet, and fling our own at last into some new fight for the emanc.i.p.ation of the mind and heart of earth's troubled millions.

It must be confessed that the aristocracy of England and her upper middle cla.s.s, in the main, still sympathized with the South, while the English cabinet tried to maintain neutrality. Four-fifths of the House of Lords were "no well-wishers of anything American, and most of the House of Commons voted in sympathy with the South."

But the att.i.tude of the "cla.s.ses" of England was only the reflection of her scholars. Carlyle, whose early books had no sale in England, and who wrote Emerson that he had received his first money to keep him from starvation from Boston and New York, "when not a penny had been realized in England," had no sympathy with liberty and the North. As soon as his own physical wants were supplied by the American check which Emerson sent him, Carlyle began to call the war "a smoky chimney that had taken fire." "No war ever waged in my time was to me more profoundly foolish looking." (Slovenly English, contradictory thinking, and poor morals!) "Neutral I am to a degree." Then Carlyle tried to sum up his view of the situation: "Now speaks the Northern Peter to the Southern Paul: 'Paul, you unaccountable scoundrel! I find you hire your servants for life, not by the month or year as I do. You are going straight to h.e.l.l.' Paul: 'Good words, Peter; the risk is my own. Hire you your servants by the month or day, and go straight to heaven. Leave me to my own method.'

Peter: 'No, I won't. I will beat your brains out.' And he's trying dreadfully ever since, but cannot quite manage it."

No one knew better than Carlyle that there is a world diameter between the South hiring a man for life, and by force holding him in slavery.

But Carlyle for three years poured out such vapid humbug, cant and hypocrisy as this, and never once was sound in his thinking or fair in his view-point during the entire war.

Even Charles d.i.c.kens, who had written denouncing slavery in his "American Notes," returned to England in the spring of 1863 to predict the overwhelming victory of the South, and to characterize the hopes of Lincoln as "a harmless hallucination." But little by little, English sentiment began to change. Goldwin Smith, of Oxford University, consented to speak at a meeting in Manchester to protest against the building and sending out of piratical s.h.i.+ps in support of the Southern Confederacy. He affirmed boldly that "no nation ever inflicted upon another more flagrant or more maddening wrong" [in permitting the _Alabama_ to escape]. No nation with English blood in its veins had ever borne such a wrong without resentment.

Richard Cobden wrote to Mr. Beecher as to the feeling in England: "In every other instance ... the popular sympathy of this country has always leaped to the side of the insurgents the moment a rebellion has broken out. In the present case, our ma.s.ses have an instinctive feeling that their cause is bound up in the prosperity of the United States. It is true that they have not much power in the direct form of a vote; but when the millions of this country are led by the religious middle cla.s.s they can together prevent the government from pursuing a policy hostile to their sympathies."

When Beecher appeared and spoke, he aroused, intensified, unified, and made effective this great underlying force of English popular feeling, and the unfriendly purposes of the governmental and "upper-cla.s.s"

element were paralyzed.

Beecher himself was very modest about his achievement. Said he: "When in October you go to a tree and give it a jar, and the fruit rains down all about you, it is not you that ripened and sent down the fruit; the whole summer has been doing that. It was my good fortune to be there when it was needed that some one should jar the tree; the fruit was not of my ripening."

Beecher returned home in November of 1863, conscious that he had risked everything in the service of his imperilled country. He found the entire North had const.i.tuted itself a Committee of Reception to welcome him home. A great public meeting was arranged in the Academy of Music in New York, and the Music Hall was crowded from pit to dome with the leaders of the city and of the North. Mr. Beecher entered the room at eight o'clock, and the whole audience rose to its feet to greet him, but not until many minutes had pa.s.sed in tumultuous cheering did he have an opportunity to speak. From that hour his influence in the country was second only to that of the President, two or three members of his cabinet, and General Grant. Abraham Lincoln wrote to Mr. Beecher words of warmest grat.i.tude and invited him to the White House. "Often and often," wrote Secretary Stanton, "in the dark hours you have come to me, and I have longed to hear your voice, feeling that above all other men you could cheer, strengthen, quiet and uplift me in this great battle, where by G.o.d's providence it has fallen upon me to hold a part, and perform a duty beyond my own strength." When therefore Lee surrendered, and the war came to a close, President Lincoln and the cabinet felt that Beecher's service to the cause of liberty had earned for him the most unique distinction granted to any man during the war. And so it came about that four years after Beauregard fired upon Fort Sumter, and the flag of the Union was lowered to give place to the flag of Secession, that not a general nor an admiral, but that a minister, Henry Ward Beecher, was selected to lift into its place again the old flag, that proclaimed to all the nations of the earth that government of the people, by the people and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

X

HEROES OF BATTLE: AMERICAN SOLDIERS AND SAILORS

One of the wariest and most capable of the Confederate commanders was General Joseph E. Johnston. In his report of the battle of Kenesaw Mountain in Northwestern Georgia, in June, 1864, when Sherman had at last driven him to bay, he thus describes the attack and the repulse: "The Federal troops pressed forward with the resolution always displayed by the American soldier when properly led. After maintaining the contest for three-quarters of an hour, they retired unsuccessful, because they had encountered entrenched infantry, unsurpa.s.sed by that of Napoleon's Old Guard, or that which followed Wellington into France, out of Spain."

It would be difficult to find a more soldierly appreciation of both officers and men of those two American armies. And in a recent interesting book on Grant and Lee[2] is cited a remark of Charles Francis Adams when American Minister to Great Britain in the early years of our Civil War. Some one sarcastically asked him his opinion of the Confederate victories of that time. He quietly replied, "I think they have been won by my countrymen." In all those four strenuous years, heroic qualities--enterprise, resolution, valour, self-control, exercise of judgment amid dangers, endurance and fidelity in disaster--were plentifully developed throughout both parties of the then divided American people. The lonely picket-duty, the toilsome march, the endless duties of the soldier, were a constant drain upon enduring faithfulness, harder to bear, often, than the cras.h.i.+ng excitement of the battle, while the deadly suffering of camp and hospital were at times easily worse than all.

Most fascinating the story of the leaders of the two armies. The career of two preeminent military leaders of the South, Lee and Jackson, has already been reviewed--cursorily, as must be the case in all the references to example--and we have noted them especially as to character. But it should be said further that in the opinion of military critics and soldiers, both American and foreign, Robert E. Lee was one of the most masterly strategists in warlike annals. In his defense of Richmond as the vital point of the Confederacy he did have the advantage of operating on interior lines; but when that is said all is said, for in numbers of men, equipment and military resources, he was always more meagrely supplied than his Federal opponents. His available means were mostly in his fertile brain, his prompt judgment, and his dauntless heart, together with the spirited support of his officers and the indomitable marching and fighting energy of his soldiers. The intense and tireless Jackson was indeed the chief's "right arm," and more than that, a keen intelligence, instant to see and seize the right way, and to follow it so swiftly that his rarely defeated infantry earned the proud nickname of "foot-cavalry."

Out of the many gallant officers of the Southern armies were some others whose names became familiar throughout the North. Among them were: Generals Pierre G. T. Beauregard, prominent in service from Bull Run to the end; the brilliant Albert Sidney Johnston, killed at Pittsburg Landing in 1862; J. E. B. Stuart, renowned as a fearless cavalry officer; James Longstreet, a leader of great distinction; the two Hills--Daniel H. and Ambrose P., both renowned fighters, the latter immortalized by Stonewall Jackson's last words, "A. P. Hill, prepare for action!" Another was Richard S. Ewell--not, like all the foregoing, a West Point graduate, with training and notable service in United States armies and wars, but, like many Federal generals, a volunteer, who achieved high rank by efficient activity.

In naval affairs, naturally, the South had little chance to show her mettle, having neither navy-yards nor navy, and all her ports being blockaded. The chief attempts on the water were the iron-plated ram _Merrimac_, commanded by Commodore Franklin Buchanan, which after sinking several wooden men-of-war in Hampton Roads was defeated by the new iron-turreted _Monitor_ under Lieutenant (later Admiral) John L.

Worden; the iron-clad ram _Albemarle_, which damaged Northern s.h.i.+pping until blown up by Lieutenant W. B. Cus.h.i.+ng, U. S. Navy, in a daring personal adventure; and the British built, equipped and manned _Alabama_, under Commodore Raphael Semmes of the Confederacy, which destroyed millions of dollars in Northern s.h.i.+ps on the high seas in 1862-1864, until sunk by the war-steamer _Kearsarge_ under Captain (later Admiral) John A. Winslow, off Cherbourg, in June, 1864.

The princ.i.p.al naval activities of the Federals during the war were in the reduction of fortified places on land in cooperation with the armies, and in blockading ports of the South to keep in their cotton and to keep out foreign supplies. One of the earliest feats was the effective use by Captain Andrew H. Foote in February, 1862, of the gunboats built in 1861 by Fremont for river warfare, when Foote daringly sh.e.l.led Forts Donelson and Henry on the c.u.mberland River, enabling Grant to attack and summon them to "unconditional surrender." And on the long seaboard, the North soon had a line of battle-s.h.i.+ps stretching from Cape Hatteras around to Florida, New Orleans and the further coast of Texas.

Besides its few original war-s.h.i.+ps, out of coasters, steamers and old junk the Navy Department constructed a fleet. But it was the man behind the gun who maintained the blockade, starved the Confederacy, and cleared the Mississippi River.