without advice from them or any one. More often he tried to arrive with them at a real community of decision. It is often impossible to guess what acts of an Administration are rightly credited to its chief. The hidden merit or demerit of many statesmen has constantly lain in the power, or the lack of it, of guiding their colleagues and being guided in turn. If we tried to be exact in saying Lincoln, or Lincoln's Cabinet, or the North did this or that, it would be necessary to thresh out many bushels of tittle-tattle. The broad impression, however, remains that in the many things in which Lincoln did not directly rule he ruled through a group of capable men of whom he made the best use, and whom no other chief could have induced to serve so long in concord. As we proceed some authentic examples of his precise relations with them will appear, in which, unimportant as they seem, one test of his quality as a statesman and of his character should be sought. The naval operations of the war afford many tales of daring on both sides which cannot here be noticed. They afford incidents of strange interest now, such as the exploit of the first submarine. (It belonged to the South; its submersion invariably resulted in the death of the whole crew; and, with full knowledge of this, a devoted crew went down and destroyed a valuable Northern iron-clad.) The ravages on commerce of the _Alabama_ and some other Southern cruisers became only too famous in England, from whose ship-building yards they had escaped. The North failed too in some out of the fairly numerous combined naval and military expeditions, which were undertaken with a view to making the blockade more complete and less arduous by the occupation of Southern ports, and perhaps to more serious incursions into the South. Among those of them which will require no special notice, most succeeded. Thus by the spring of 1863 Florida was substantially in Northern hands, and by 1865 the South had but two ports left, Charleston and Wilmington; but the venture most attractive to Northern sentiment, an attack upon Charleston itself, proved a mere waste of military force. Moreover, till a strong military adviser was at last found in Grant there was some dissipation of military force in such expeditions. Nevertheless, the naval success of the North was so continuous and overwhelming that its history in detail need not be recounted in these pages. Almost from the first the ever-tightening grip of the blockade upon the Southern coasts made its power felt, and early in 1862 the inland waterways of the South were beginning to fall under the command of the Northern flotillas. Such a success needed, of course, the adoption of a decided policy from the outset; it needed great administrative ability to improvise a navy where hardly any existed, and where the conditions of its employment were in many respects novel; and it needed resourceful watching to meet the