rces and the unified Northern armies had worn out the fighting
force. Of the single million soldiers raised by the South only two
hundred thousand remained in arms, half starved, half clad, with the
scantiest of munitions, and without reserves of any kind. Meanwhile
the Northern hosts had risen to a million in the field, well fed,
well clothed, well armed, abundantly provided with munitions, and
at last well disciplined under the unified command of that great
leader, Grant. Moreover, behind this million stood another million
fit to bear arms and obtainable at will from the two millions of
enrolled reserves.

The cost of the war was stupendous. But the losses of war are not
to be measured in money. The real loss was the loss of a million
men, on both sides put together, for these men who died were of
the nation's best.

CHAPTER III

THE NAVAL WAR: 1862

Bull Run had riveted attention on the land between the opposing
capitals and on the armies fighting there. Very few people were
thinking of the navies and the sea. And yet it was at sea, and not
on land, that the Union had a force against which the Confederates
could never prevail, a force which gradually cut them off from
the whole world's base of war supplies, a force which enabled the
Union armies to get and keep the strangle-hold which did the South
to death.

The blockade declared in April was no empty threat. The sails of
Federal frigates, still more the sinister black hulls of the new
steam men-of-war, meant that the South was fast becoming a land
besieged, with every outwork accessible by water exposed to sudden
attack and almost certain capture by any good amphibious force
of soldiers and sailors combined.

Sea-power kept the North in affluence while it starved the South.
Sea-power held Maryland in its relentless grip and did more than
land-power to keep her in the Union. Sea-power was the chief factor
in saving Washington. Seapower enabled the North to hold such points
of vantage as Fortress Monroe right on the flank of the South.
And sea-power likewise enabled the North to take or retake other
points of similar importance: for instance, Hatteras Island.

In a couple of days at the end of August, 1861, the Confederate
forts at Hatteras Inlet, North Carolina, were compelled to surrender
to a joint naval and military expedition under Flag-Officer Stringham
and Major-General B. F. Butler. The immediate result, besides the
capture of seven hundred m