This Great Contest Afloat: The Civil War on the Seas, Coastline, Rivers, and Oceans

“History offers no example where so much was accomplished in so short a time, or where so many events were crowded into the space of four years, in which the Navy was employed subduing a coast over four thousand miles in length, and recapturing a river-coast of more than five thousand miles,” wrote Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter in his 1886 The Naval History of the Civil War.

Porter’s words demonstrate the true scale of the war’s naval activity. Thousands of ships took part, fighting battle...