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THE BLOCKADE

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side the Confederacy, could be sold inside in gold for a profit or 20,000 per cent.

For one moment it looked as if the Union fleets would b swept from the seas, and the blockade raised. When the gov ernment troops abandoned Norfolk navy yard (on the secession of Virginia), they left there, only partially destroyed, the frigate Merrimac. The Confederates built on her hull an iron roof

CONFEDERATE BLOCKADE-RUNNER, Teazer, near Charleston harbor,captured soon after this photograph was taken.

ing, and sent her forth as the Virginia against the wooden frig. ates of the United States in Hampton Roads. This first armored ram on the American coast sank two towering ships (March 8, 1862) and steamed back to her anchorage, confident of completing her mission on the morrow. But, during that night, arrived at the Roads another type of iron vessel, the Monitor, with low, flat deck surmounted by a revolving turret mounting two huge guns, "cheese box on a raft." a After a sharp engagement, the Virginia was driven to seek shelter.

The blockade was saved, and the knell had sounded for wooden men-of-war.1

669. Invasion of the Confederacy had been simplified tremendously by the saving of the Border States to the Union. There were three primary lines of attack. (1) The Army of the Potomac, with headquarters about Washington, must try to

MONITOR AND MERRIMAC. From a painting.

capture Richmond, the political center of the Confederacy, and crush the army of defense-the Army of Northern Virginia. (2) In the West, the Unionists must secure the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, so as to occupy Tennessee and to open roads into Mississippi and Alabama. And (3) the course of the Mississippi had to be secured by the capture of such Confeder

1 Vessels had been covered with iron plates in some of the earlier campaigns on the Mississippi; and England and France had constructed some ironclads; but it was the spectacular battle of "the Monitor and Merrimac" which demonstrated to the world the arrival of a new order - following the victories of the Merrimac on the preceding day.

The Monitor was the invention of a Swedish immigrant, John Ericsson; and she had been just completed, after a hurried three months.

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THE SOUTH EXHAUSTED

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ate strongholds as New Madrid, Island No. 10, Port Hudson, Memphis, and New Orleans.

Secondary lines of invasion were pointed out by the location of the more important railways-especially those from west to east, such as the Memphis and Charleston Road. To secure these roads, engagements were fought in 1862 at Corinth, Pittsburg Landing, Shiloh, and Memphis.

Vicksburg, the last of the river fortresses to hold out, was forced to surrender to General Grant on July 3, 1863 (the final day of Gettysburg); so that the Father of Waters "once more rolled unvexed

to the sea," cutting off Arkansas, Texas, and most of Louisiana from the main body of the Confederacy. The second task had begun earlier, but lasted longer. Grant had captured Forts Donelson and Henry, commanding the lower courses of the Tennessee rivers, in 1862; but Union occupation of Tennessee, and indeed of the line of the Ohio, was not assured, until, after oscillating campaigns and some of the most bloody fighting of the war, Grant, Thomas,

Brady Photograph.

GENERAL ULYSSES S. GRANT. From a photograph in 1865.

and Sherman drove the Confederates from Chattanooga, in November of 1863.

This decisive victory opened up a fourth line of invasion, to Atlanta, at the farther end of the Atlanta and Chattanooga

Railway, only 135 miles distant, but with an intervening region of rugged mountains. Atlanta was located in the iron and coal region of northern Georgia and was becoming a center for manufacturing arms and railway material. As the only such center in the Confederacy, its capture was of supreme importance. This became Sherman's task in the summer of '64 in a four months' campaign, against the skillful opposition of the outnumbered Johnston and the pounding of his desperate successor, Hood.

Atlanta was taken September 3. Leaving its factories in ashes, and detaching Thomas with sufficient force to engage Hood,

Sherman then (November) struck out a fifth line of invasion, through the heart of the Confederacy for Savannah,- living on the country and finding not even a militia to oppose him. Meantime, in the East, the genius of Lee2 and the splendid

1 Cf. with map on page 558.

2 Robert E. Lee ranks among the noblest figures in American history. He loved the Union deeply; but when Virginia seceded, he declined an offer of the command of the Union armies, and gave his sword to the Confederacy.

§ 670]

FORCES, NORTH AND SOUTH

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fighting qualities of his devoted but diminishing army, aided, too, by geographical conditions, -trackless swamps and broad streams subject to sudden floods, - held the Union forces at bay year after year, until Grant was brought from the West and given men in ever fresh multitudes to wear down his opponents. Even then, Lee's thinned and starving veterans remained unconquered, until the empty shell of the Confederacy had been pierced from circumference to circumference, and its absolute exhaustion bared to the world, by Sherman's devastating "March to the Sea." The South did not yield: it was pulverized.

II. FORCES

670. In the North one man out of two bore arms at some period of the war; and one man out of three served three years. In the South nine men out of ten bore arms, and eight out of ten served three years. The total enlistments in the North counted 2,900,000; in the South, 1,400,000. The three-year average for the North was 1,557,000; for the South, 1,082,000. With far less effort than the South, the North kept a half more men in the field.

But this does not take account of the slaves who served as teamsters, laborers on fortifications, cooks, and servants, in Southern armies, doing work that had to be performed by enlisted men on the other side.' The Southern forces, too, were able to concentrate more rapidly, because they moved on the inside lines and knew the roads better. Perhaps, too, they were handled with greater skill. Certainly, until the final year, the armies in actual conflict did not often vary greatly in numbers.

Then, indeed, the exhausted South could no longer make good her losses in battle-though her stern recruiting system

The recent acceptance by Congress of his statue, to stand in Statuary Hall in the Capitol beside Virginia's other great son, Washington, fitly denotes the reunion of North and South as one people.

1 On the plantations, too, under the management of women, slaves raised the food crops for the South. Wonderful to say, there was no hint of a slaverising during the war, and, until 1863, very little increase of runaways.