Chatelain, Neil P. This Great Contest Afloat

The Civil War on the Seas, Coastline, Rivers, and Oceans

History knows of no example in which so much was achieved in such a short time, or in which so many events were condensed into four years, in which the navy was used to subdue a coastline of over four thousand miles and recapture a river coastline of more than five thousand miles, wrote Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter in 1886 in his work The Naval History of the Civil War . Porter's words illustrate the true extent of naval activity during the Civil War. Thousands of ships took part in the fighting, fought alongside the great armies and patrolled around the globe. The actions of more than 100,000 sailors on both sides impacted the military, maritime, economic, and diplomatic aspects of the war, while also providing the means to implement the Anaconda Plan, which aimed to isolate and divide the Confederacy. Unlike the army, which divided its efforts between theatres in the East, West, and beyond the Mississippi, the naval forces of the Civil War fought in four different theatres. The offshore blockade was an economic and logistical campaign that determined whether the Confederate armies could continue to be adequately supplied. The sailors who carried out this blockade worked simultaneously with the armies to attack cities and coastal areas and deprive the Confederacy of its ports and coastal infrastructure, while the sailors of the Confederacy fought to break through the blockade and maintain control of their ports. Meanwhile, the fleets of both sides fought for control of the Mississippi Valley, with the division of the Confederacy at stake. Finally, an economic and diplomatic war was waged across the oceans, where Confederate privateers hunted for Union merchant ships. In This Great Contest Afloat. The Civil War on the Seas, Coastline, Rivers, and Oceans, historian and professor Neil P. Chatelain illuminates each of these maritime battlefields. Drawing on numerous eyewitness accounts and astute macro analysis, Chatelain takes readers aboard blockade runners, to the beaches of coastal assaults, to river gunboats and to merchant ships under attack, showing them the scale and impact of naval warfare in the Civil War.