embarrassing to the Confederate authorities.  The presence of a Federal force at New Berne, in North Carolina, threatened the main line of railway by which Wilmington and Charleston communicated with Richmond, and these two ports were of the utmost importance to the Confederacy.  So enormous were the profits arising from the exchange of munitions of war and medicines* (* Quinine sold in the South for one hundred dollars (Confederate) the ounce.  O.R. volume 25 part 2 page 79.) for cotton and tobacco that English ship-owners embarked eagerly on a lucrative if precarious traffic.  Blockade-running became a recognised business.  Companies were organised which possessed large fleets of swift steamers.  The Bahamas and Bermuda became vast entrepots of trade.  English seamen were not to be deterred from a perilous enterprise by fear of Northern broadsides or Northern prisons, and despite the number and activity of the blockading squadrons the cordon of cruisers and gunboats was constantly broken.  Many vessels were sunk, many captured, many wrecked on a treacherous coast, and yet enormous quantities of supplies found their way to the arsenals and magazines of Richmond and Atlanta.  The railways, then, leading from Wilmington and Charleston, the ports most accessible to the blockade-runners, were almost essential to the existence of the Confederacy.  Soon after the battle of Fredericksburg, General D.H.  Hill was placed in command of the forces which protected them, and, at the beginning of the New Year, Ransom’s division* (* 3594 officers and men.  Report of December 1.  O.R. volume 21 page 1082.) was drawn from the Rappahannock to reinforce the local levies.  A few weeks later* (* Middle of February.) General Lee was induced by Mr. Seddon to send Longstreet, with the divisions of Hood and Pickett,* (* Pickett, 7,165; Hood, 7,956:  15,121 officers and men.) to cover Richmond, which was menaced both from Fortress Monroe and Suffolk.* (* Lee thought Pickett was sufficient.  O.R. volume 21 page 623.)

The Commander-in-Chief, however, while submitting to this detachment as a necessary evil, had warned General Longstreet so to dispose his troops that they could return to the Rappahannock at the first alarm.  “The enemy’s position,” he wrote, “on the sea-coast had been probably occupied merely for purposes of defence, it was likely that they were strongly intrenched, and nothing would be gained by attacking them.”

The warning, however, was disregarded; and that Mr. Seddon should have yielded, in the first instance, to the influence of the sea-power, exciting apprehensions of sudden attack along the whole seaboard of the Confederacy, may be forgiven him.  Important lines of communication were certainly exposed.  But when, in defiance of Lee’s advice that the divisions should be retained within easy reach of Fredericksburg, he suggested to Longstreet the feasibility of an attack on Suffolk, one hundred and twenty miles distant from the Rappahannock, he committed an unpardonable blunder.