"The Navy "changed the trajectory of the war" was the way one of the nation's leading historians described the service's contribution to the ultimate Union victory in 1865.
Speaking April 16 at the United States Naval Institute's annual meeting in Washington, Dr. Craig Symonds, co-winner of the 2009 Lincoln Prize for his Lincoln and His Admirals, said the blockade of Confederate ports from the Carolinas on the Atlantic to the Texas Gulf Coast "was the largest enterprise the Navy undertook," ultimately involving more than 500 ships, more than 400 of them converted merchantmen -- "the last time that was still possible," and 100,000 men.
The Union Navy transformed itself from a fleet of 42 ships scattered around the globe or in ordinary at shipyards with a few thousand officers and experienced tars in 1861 to a technologically adept force with rifled guns, iron-plated, screw propellers, etc. operating with a "changed lower deck" of "volunteers. contrabands from the South, free blacks from the North" in 1865.
When President Abraham Lincoln announced the blockade, Symonds, a professor emeritus of history at the Naval Academy, contends that he and Secretary of State William Seward understood that it "was an act of war" and implied "a kind of recognition" of the Confederacy…"
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