merica’s unpreparedness for the Civil War was strikingly evident on the high seas. The meager federal navy had in commission only ninety ships, and more than half of those were wooden sailing vessels, which had become obsolete with the advent of steam and steel. For the South, things were far worse. As Secretary of the Navy Stephen R. Mallory complained, “our present navy consists of 500 tons.”

Both sides, however, had large-scale plans for a war on water. Confederate naval strategy centered on two objectives—the development of ironclad rams, which individually had the potential for sinking an entire enemy fleet made of wood, and, second, the deployment of commerce destroyers designed to disrupt Yankee trade. The major federal objective, a blockade of 3,500 miles of Confederate seacoast, was more ambitious but central to the North’s primary goal of cutting off the exportation of cotton, the mainstay of the South’s economy.