ping. But privateering soon withered off, because prizes could
not be run through the blockade in sufficient numbers to make it
pay; and no prize would be recognized except in a Southern port.
Raiders did better and for a much longer time. The _Shenandoah_
was burning Northern whalers in Bering Sea at the end of the war.
The _Sumter_ and the _Florida_ cut a wide swath under instructions
which "left much to discretion and more to the torch." The famous
_Alabama_ only succumbed to the U.S.S. _Kearsarge_ after sinking
the _Hatteras_ man-of-war and raiding seventy other vessels. Yet
still the South, in spite of her ironclads, raiders, and rams, in
spite of her river craft, of the home ships or foreigners that
ran the blockade, and of all her other efforts, was a landsman's
country that could make no real headway against the native sea-power
of the North.

Perhaps the worst of all the disabilities under which the abortive
Southern navy suffered was lubberly administration and gross civilian
interference. The Administration actually refused to buy the beginnings
of a ready-made sea-going fleet when it had the offer of ten British
East Indiamen specially built for rapid conversion into men-of-war.
Forty thousand bales of cotton would have bought the lot. The
Mississippi record was even worse. Five conflicting authorities
divided the undefined and overlapping responsibilities between
them: the Confederate Government, the State governments, the army,
the navy, and the Mississippi skippers. A typical result may be seen
in the fate of the fourteen "rams" which were absurdly mishandled by
fourteen independent civilian skippers with two civilian commodores.
This "River Defense Fleet" was "backed by the whole Missouri delegation"
at Richmond, and blessed by the Confederate Secretary of War, Judah
P. Benjamin, that very clever lawyer-politician and ever-smiling
Jew. Six of the fourteen "rams" were lost, with sheer futility,
at New Orleans in April, '62; the rest at Memphis the following
June.

As a matter of fact the Confederate navy never had but one real
man-of-war, the famous _Merrimac_; and she was a mere razee, cut
down for a special purpose, and too feebly engined to keep the
sea. Even the equally famous _Alabama_ was only a raider, never
meant for action with a fleet. Over three hundred officers left
the United States Navy for the South; but, as in the case of the
Army, they were followed by very few men. The total personnel