Nevertheless, despite the extent of her territory and her scanty means of communication, the South was peculiarly vulnerable.  Few factories or foundries had been established within her frontiers.  She manufactured nothing; and not only for all luxuries, but for almost every necessary of life, she was dependent upon others.  Her cotton and tobacco brought leather and cloth in exchange from England.  Metals, machinery, rails, rolling stock, salt, and even medicines came, for the most part, from the North.  The weapons which she put into her soldiers’ hands during the first year of the war, her cannon, powder, and ammunition, were of foreign make.  More than all, her mercantile marine was very small.  Her foreign trade was in the hands of Northern merchants.  She had ship-yards, for Norfolk and Pensacola, both national establishments, were within her boundaries; but her seafaring population was inconsiderable, and shipbuilding was almost an unknown industry.  Strong on land, she was powerless at sea, and yet it was on the sea that her prosperity depended.  Cotton, the principal staple of her wealth, demanded free access to the European markets.  But without a navy, and without the means of constructing one, or of manning the vessels that she might easily have purchased, she was unable to keep open her communications across the Atlantic.

Nor was it on the ocean alone that the South was at a disadvantage.  The Mississippi, the main artery of her commerce, which brought the harvests of the plantations to New Orleans, and which divided her territory into two distinct portions, was navigable throughout; while other great rivers and many estuaries, leading into the heart of her dominions, formed the easiest of highways for the advance of an invading army.  Very early had her fatal weakness been detected.  Immediately Fort Sumter fell, Lincoln had taken measures to isolate the seceding States, to close every channel by which they could receive either succour or supplies, and if need be to starve them into submission.  The maritime resources of the Union were so large that the navy was rapidly expanded.  Numbers of trained seamen, recruited from the merchant service and the fisheries, were at once available.

The Northern shipbuilders had long been famous; and both men and vessels, if the necessity should arise, might be procured in Europe.  Judicious indeed was the policy which, at the very outset of the war, brought the tremendous pressure of the sea-power to bear against the South; and, had her statesmen possessed the knowledge of what that pressure meant, they must have realised that Abraham Lincoln was no ordinary foe.  In forcing the Confederates to become the aggressors, and to fire on the national ensign, he had created a united North; in establishing a blockade of their coasts he brought into play a force, which, like the mills of God, “grinds slowly, but grinds exceeding small.”