Review

Spencer C. Tucker has produced a study that fills a large gap in the historiography of naval operations in the American Civil War. He provides considerable information regarding the types of vessels utilized by the Confederate States and the United States, but his tome is far more than a technical study. Using well crafted sentences that make for interesting reading, Tucker presents a concise and thorough examination of the naval war as a whole that clearly demonstrates the significant impact that C.S. and U.S. naval operations had on both the nature and outcome of the conflict. Noting that until quite recently, most Civil War scholars have focused their attention upon the land war, frequently isolating it from events of critical importance that took place on the nation's rivers and at sea, the author contends that no analysis of the Civil War is complete that fails to take account riverine and maritime operations.	1
Essential to the success of the so-called Anaconda Plan, devised by Union general-in-chief General Winfield Scott in 1861, was the establishment a naval blockade in the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico to restrict trade between the Confederacy and Europe. Command of the Confederacy's 3,500-mile shoreline would also enable Union forces to launch amphibious landings against virtually any coastal location and permit access to major interior waterways of strategic and economic importance.Unquestionably, assembling such a blockade was a formidable and gradual task; the U. S. Navy consisted of a mere ninety vessels when the war began in 1861. U. S. industrial capacity, however, remedied the deficiency quickly and by the end of 1864, the U. S. Navy had a variety of ships, over 671 in all.	2
According to Tucker, the Confederate Navy developed largely in response to the Union blockade. In early 1861, while the blockade was still fairly ineffective, Confederate President Jefferson Davis supported the Confederate Congress' decision to curtail all cotton shipments to Great Britain, believing that such action would force the Royal Navy to attack the blockading squadrons. The British, however, did not respond, and this forced the South to resume trade and provide cotton as payment for badly needed products. As the blockade tightened, the Confederacy required faster, more maneuverable ships that could slip through the Union cordon. The value of such ships became apparent in September 1861 when the British steamship Bermuda, privately owned and steel hulled, arrived in a Southern port with dozens of artillery pieces, thousands of Enfield rifles, and ammunition. Despite their potential benefits to the Confederate war effort, the Davis administration never attempted to place blockade-runner production or operations under C. S. naval command, but chose instead to leave control to the private sector. In spite of this, and even though Confederate domestic production never reached fifty percent of that required by the war, shipments carried on blockade runners provided enough military equipment to enable the South to last four years against the North's industrial might. Thus, argues Tucker, the biggest problem for the Confederacy in battle was not inadequate resupply, but severe manpower shortages.	3
Even though the Confederate government did not direct blockade runners, it did develop a rational naval strategy. In 1861, the Confederacy's Secretary of the Navy, Stephen R. Mallory, understood that the South could never match the North ship for ship. Thus he determined to emphasize commerce raiding and ironclads. Targeting the U. S. merchant marine, reasoned Mallory, would damage the Union's economy, requiring it to divert warships from the blockade to hunt commerce raiders. Hopefully, these protracted operations would weaken the North's determination to continue the war. The South's most effective commerce raiders, the Alabama, Shenandoah, and the Tennessee, destroyed 137 of the 257 Union merchant ships sunk or burned during the war. In addition, benefiting from the mid-Nineteenth-Century revolution in naval warfare, the Confederacy built ironclad warships to attack the blockading squadrons. The most well known of these, the CSS Virginia, was deployed in an attempt to break up the Union flotilla at the confluence of the James and Nansemond Rivers at Hampton Roads, Virginia. The Union responded with the USS Monitor, the first of eighty-four U. S. ironclads—ships that would play extensive roles in naval battles, including the Union victory at Mobile Bay (1864). While Confederate ironclads and commerce raiders wreaked considerable havoc, the South could not obtain enough of either for them to have a decisive impact on the war.	4
Tucker's book contributes considerably to a greater understanding the role of sea power in the Civil War and is appropriate for undergraduate and graduate students and instructors teaching United States and Civil War history courses.	5
Rogers State University Paul B. Hatley

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