became only too famous in England, from whose ship-building yards they had escaped.  The North failed too in some out of the fairly numerous combined naval and military expeditions, which were undertaken with a view to making the blockade more complete and less arduous by the occupation of Southern ports, and perhaps to more serious incursions into the South.  Among those of them which will require no special notice, most succeeded.  Thus by the spring of 1863 Florida was substantially in Northern hands, and by 1865 the South had but two ports left, Charleston and Wilmington; but the venture most attractive to Northern sentiment, an attack upon Charleston itself, proved a mere waste of military force.  Moreover, till a strong military adviser was at last found in Grant there was some dissipation of military force in such expeditions.  Nevertheless, the naval success of the North was so continuous and overwhelming that its history in detail need not be recounted in these pages.  Almost from the first the ever-tightening grip of the blockade upon the Southern coasts made its power felt, and early in 1862 the inland waterways of the South were beginning to fall under the command of the Northern flotillas.  Such a success needed, of course, the adoption of a decided policy from the outset; it needed great administrative ability to improvise a navy where hardly any existed, and where the conditions of its employment were in many respects novel; and it needed resourceful watching to meet the surprises of fresh naval invention by which the South, poor as were its possibilities for ship-building, might have rendered impotent, as once or twice it seemed likely to do, the Northern blockade.  Gideon Welles, the responsible Cabinet Minister, was constant and would appear to have been capable at his task, but the inspiring mind of the Naval Department was found in Gustavus V. Fox, a retired naval officer, who at the beginning of Lincoln’s administration was appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy.  The policy of blockade was begun by Lincoln’s Proclamation on April 19, 1861.  It was a hardy measure, certain to be a cause of friction with foreign Powers.  The United States Government had contended in 1812 that a blockade which is to confer any rights against neutral commerce must be an effective blockade, and has not lately been inclined to take lax views upon such questions; but when it declared its blockade of the South it possessed only three steamships of war with which to make it effective.  But the policy was stoutly maintained.  The Naval Department at the very first set about buying merchant ships in Northern ports and adapting them to warlike use, and building ships of its own, in the design of which it shortly obtained the help of a Commission of Congress on the subject of ironclads.  The Naval Department had at least the fullest support and encouragement from Lincoln in the whole of its policy.  Everything goes to show that he followed naval affairs carefully,