![]() ![]() Aboard his new command, Wake learns that the wartime naval glories and exploits he read about in the northern papers don’t exist down on the steamy coasts of subtropical Florida. He is assigned command of the Rosalie, a small armed sloop which only months before had been an enemy blockade-runner in South Carolina. He is sent to the East Gulf Blockading Squadron, based at Key West, an island off the extreme southern end of Florida. Wake follows that advice and joins the U.S. Soldiers live and die in the mud,” is the advice from his father. “If you’ve got to go to war, son, go as a sailor. The American Civil War is leaving its bloody trail across the nation and Peter Wake, a third generation New England schooner sailor, is out of work and facing conscription. Eads' "Pook's Turtles" - Union ironclads named after contractor Samuel Pook - were used successfully to conquer Fort Henry in Tennessee in 1862 and how eccentric genius Alfred Ellet's specially outfitted ramming ships, inspired by ancient Roman triremes, were effectively deployed at the Battle of Memphis.The year is 1863. ![]() McPherson describes the war along the South's strategic inland waterways, the Mississippi, Cumberland and Tennessee rivers. And, McPherson points out, not only were Rebel ships breaking through the blockade, Confederate commerce raiders also wreaked havoc upon Union merchant shipping. ![]() Five out of six made it through the blockade. Fast, nimble, shallow-drafted Confederate ships - designed to evade the big, slow, steam-powered Union frigates - were immediately deployed. No sooner was the Union's blockade put into effect, however, than the Confederacy found ways to avoid it. President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles went along with this strategy. Its purpose was to strangle the Confederacy by closing it off from trade with the rest of the world by coastal blockade and by control of the Mississippi River. Winfield Scott outlined his famous Anaconda Plan. The author informs us that it was in May 1861, one month after the battle at Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, S.C., that U.S. ![]()
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