South in mileage, strategic disposition, and every other way.

The South had only one through line from the Atlantic to the
Mississippi; and this ran across that Northern salient which
threatened the South from the southwestern Alleghanies. The other
rails all had the strategic defect of not being convenient for
rapid concentration by land; for most of the Southern rails were
laid with a view to getting surplus cotton and tobacco overseas.
The strategic gap at Petersburg was due to a very different
cause; for there, in order to keep its local transfers, the town
refused to let the most important Virginian lines connect.

Taking sea-power in its fullest sense, to include all naval and
mercantile parts on both salt and fresh water, we can quite
understand how it helped the nautical North to get the
strangle-hold on the landsman's South. The great bulk of the
whole external trade of the South was done by shipping. But,
though the South was strong in exportable goods, it was very weak
in ships. It owned comparatively few of the vessels that carried
its rice, cotton, and tobacco crops to market and brought back
made goods in return. Yankees, Britishers, and Bluenoses (as Nova
Scotian craft were called) did most of the oversea
transportation.

Moreover, the North was vastly stronger than the South on all the
inland waters that were not "Secesh" from end to end. The map
shows how Northern sea-power could not only divide the South in
two but almost enisle the eastern part as well. Holding the
Mississippi would effect the division, while holding the Ohio
would make the eastern part a peninsula, with the upper end of