If They Will Only Give Us a Chance

Abstract In June 1861 Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles appointed a naval strategy board. Its first priority was to make the blockade more efficient. As Lamson points out in several letters included in this book, the task of blockading 3500 miles of Southern coastline containing a dozen major ports and scores of minor ones where cargo could be landed was a formidable one. In July 1861 the naval strategy board made two important decisions: Union forces would seize as many such ports and harbors as possible in order to deny them to blockade runners, and the navy would convert some of these harbors into additional bases for the Atlantic and Gulf blockade fleets so that they did not waste so much time steaming back and forth to Hampton Roads and Key West for coal and supplies.