Died for Their State." 125
was almost entirely shut up within herself and her own limited re sources.
Among all these advantages possessed by the North, the 'first, the main and decisive, was the navy. Given her all but this, and they would have been ineffectual to prevent the establishment of the Confederacy. That arm of her strength was at the beginning of the war in an efficient state, and it was rapidly augmented and improved. By it, the South being almost without naval force, the North was enabled to sweep and blockade her coasts everywhere, and so, aside from the direct distress inflicted, to prevent foreign recognition ; to capture, one after another, her seaports ; to sever and cut up her country in every direction through its great rivers ; to gain lodg- ments at many points within her territory, from which numerous destructive raids were sent out in all directions ; to transport troops and supplies to points where their passage by land would have been difficult or impossible; and finally to cover, protect and save, as by the navy was so olten done, the defeated and otherwise totally destroyed armies of the North in the field. But for the navy Grant's army was lost at Shiloh ; but for it on the Peninsula, in the second year of the war, McClellan's army, notwithstanding his mas terly retreat from his defeats before Richmond, was lost to a man, and the independence of the Confederacy established. After a glo- rious four years' struggle against such odds as have been depicted, during which independence was often almost secured, when succes- sive levies of armies, amounting in all to nearly three millions of men, had been hurled against her, the South, shut off from all the world, wasted, rent and desolate, bruised and bleeding, was at last over- powered by main strength; outfought, never; for, from first to last, she everywhere outfought the foe. The Confederacy fell, but she fell not until she had achieved immortal fame. Few great estab- lished nations in all time have ever exhibited capacity and direction in government equal to hers, sustained as she was by the iron will and fixed persistence of the extraordinary man who was her chief; and few have ever won such a series of brilliant victories as that which illuminates forever the annals of her splendid armies, while the fortitude and patience of her people, and particularly of her noble women, under almost incredible trials and sufferings, have never been surpassed in the history of the world.
Such exalted character and achievement were not all in vain. Though the Confederacy fell as an actual physical power, she lives, illustrated by them, eternally in her just cause, the cause of constitu-
