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COPYRIGHTED, 1911, BY PATRIOT PUBLISHING COMPANY, TAKEN FROM PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR.

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NAVAL OPERATIONS ON THE VIRGINIA RIVERS IN THE CIVIL WAR

By JULIUS W. PRATT, Instructor U. S. Naval Academy

In his treatise, "The Influence of Sea Power Upon History," Admiral Mahan makes a passing reference to the significance to the Southern Confederacy of her numerous inland waterways— the rivers penetrating the heart of her territory and the numberless sounds and inlets that fringed her coasts. These bodies of water, he remarks, which, had the South comprised a seafaring people, naturally disposed to naval activity, would have constituted an element of inestimable strength-for easy transportation, for the concealment and protection of vessels of war, and for secret concentrations against the enemy fleets-these same waterways in reality served as so many gateways through which the dominant naval power of the Federal Government, bringing armies of invasion in its train, entered for her paralysis and eventual overthrow.

The importance of the naval control of the Mississippi and its tributaries in facilitating the land operations in the West has been always and widely recognized; and the work of the Union squadrons in the North Carolina sounds has-largely because of Cushing's sensational feat in torpedoing the ironclad ram Albemarle-received considerable notoriety in the histories of the war. But there is one little-noted group of naval operations, performed quietly and for the most part without incidents of a striking

character, which nevertheless had a most important, not to say determining, effect upon two of the major and one of the decisive campaigns in the eastern Confederacy.

Without the

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steady support of the navy in the Virginia rivers, McClellan's peninsula campaign, if begun at all, would have ended in disaster instead of mere frustration, and Grant's final campaign against Richmond would not only have been beset with enormous diffi

culties, but must have been fought out on entirely different lines. It would be hard to exaggerate the importance to the safety of the Northern armies of the naval control of these waters; and that control, while never broken, was at times seriously threatened, and maintained only by vigilant and vigorous action on the part of the Northern fleet.

To compare Chesapeake Bay and the James River with the broad waters between our coast and France, or to mention the dozen or so improvised war vessels of the James River Flotilla in a breath with the Allied navies of the present day, may have a touch of the ludicrous. Yet the pygmy flotilla in those narrow waters did for the Union forces in '62 and '64 precisely what the great navies have been doing of late: it made possible the safe movement of troops across waters impassable without its aid, and it kept open the essential lines of communication between those troops and their ultimate base of supplies. If sea power is to be measured not in absolute ship tonnage and weight of guns, but in ability to control essential waterways and thus determine the outcome of wars, then the operations on the James River deserve a place in the history of sea power-a place never hitherto accorded them by even the naval historians.

The most serious danger to federal naval supremacy in these waters came early in the war and at a time most critical for the military plans of the government. It was in March, 1862, that the ironclad Merrimac made her sensational appearance in Hampton Roads, where in one afternoon she destroyed two vessels of the blockading squadron and left the others intact only because of darkness and the ebbing tide. The Merrimac's sortie was not only a threat at the entire blockade program of the North; it seemed for the moment to have frustrated in a few hours' time the elaborate plans already perfected for the movement of McClellan's army, by water, to Fortress Monroe and the blow at Richmond from that quarter, where the army must be dependent upon a long line of water communications. And it was not until the engagement with the Monitor had materially reduced this source of danger that the great convoy carrying McClellan's army moved from the vicinity of Washington to Fortress Monroe.

From the Monitor-Merrimac engagement to the end of the . Peninsula campaign the Union vessels on the York and James

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