A Confederate Navy did not exist, except for those officers who had left the U. S. Navy. Ships were purchased and built as the war progressed. By February 1862, 47 vessels of various categories were in service—14 under construction, and others planned. Personnel strength by April 1864 numbered 753 officers and 4,460 enlisted men. At least six large ironclads and ten ocean-going sea raiders actually operated at various times during the war, but the number of improvised gunboats and armed river craft—Confederate Navy, the various State navies and privateers—cannot be accurately enumerated.
Due to the vast inferiority of Confederate naval strength, the scope of its activities was confined to attempts to break the blockade, and to defensive rivers and sounds, and the extensive use of commerce destroyers preying on unarmed Northern commerce. Some naval engagements of note were the attack of the Confederate ironclad Virginia (ex-U. S. S. Merrimack) on a Union blockading squadron, which ended in an indecisive single-ship action with the U. S. S. Monitor, the engagement between U. S. S. Kearsarge and C. S. S. Alabama, ending in the sinking of the latter, and the C. S. S. Tennessee’s action with Admiral Farragut’s force at Mobile Bay.
The United States Navy, on the other hand, played a major role in the Union prosecution of the war. It strangled the South by blockading ports; participated in a number of joint amphibious Army–Navy operations, several squadron actions against fortified places, and river operations which split the Confederacy along the line of the Mississippi. By the end of the war the United States Navy had risen to a strength of 670 ships, more than 60 of them ironclads, and a personnel strength of 6,700 officers and 51,500 men.
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