...eld commissions and fifty-one thousand sailormen. The blockade was no child's play, as England and the Continent soon learned, and for those engaged in it, it was work of serious character. The Comte de Paris , in his History of the Civil war, has summed up the work of officers and men who, for four years, policed that seaboard of three thousand miles: Their task was the more arduous on account of its ext...