But the South occupied every fort and began war. To the trained strategist the action to be taken so far as the navy was concerned was simple: to blockade every port and to occupy the Mississippi. The former would cut off the importation of military supplies, in which the South was terribly deficient; the latter would cut the Confederacy in twain and isolate the great food supply of her armies. The former of course to be effective was a matter of ships, and it took time to supply these; the latter could and should have been done at once, before the defences of the Mississippi were thoroughly established and organized as they were to be. The magnitude of the work of blockade is evident in the fact “that there were 185 harbor and river openings in the Confederate coastline.... This coastline extended from Alexandria, Virginia, to the Mexican port of Matamoros, which lies forty miles up the Rio Grande. The Continental line so measured was 3,549 miles long.”[49] Our few ships were scattered over the world. There were but three instantly available. During the war these were increased to 600 by building and by purchasing everything which could steam and carry a gun, down to ferry-boats. We improvised a great navy--of a kind. It could not, however, until our ironclad fleet of turreted vessels were built, have stood for a moment before a great regular force. Fortunately, foreign complications were avoided and we had to do with a government which itself had to improvise such vessels as it could or get them from England and France, and the former was full willing until she came herself to the verge of war on that account. She launched the _Alabama_ and _Shenandoah_ which, though officered by Southerners, were manned by Englishmen, and built blockade runners by the hundreds, which kept the Confederacy alive. By great good fortune the Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles, himself a civilian of fine mind and good hard sense, though with no initiative and with no knowledge of war, was supplemented by an Assistant-Secretary, Gustavus V. Fox, a former officer of the navy, of strong character and great energy. He was to become practically a chief-of-staff. There had been no plan of operations, no laying down of a broad scheme such as, had there been any real organization of the services, there would have been by a general staff. Congress has resisted such an organization in the navy to this day. Even the Civil War has not been able to teach it the wisdom of this. Thus, admits Mr. Welles himself, “but for some redeeming successes at Hatteras and Port Royal the whole belligerent operations of 1861 would have been pronounced weak and imbecile failures.”