For thirty years world-renowned author and scholar Raimondo Luraghi has sought answers to the question: How did an overwhelmingly agricultural country with little industry and nearly no merchant marine succeed in building a navy that managed to confront the formidable Union navy for four years?

Pushing aside the long-held belief that the answers went up in flames when the Confederate Navy archives were torched during the evacuation of Richmond, Luraghi combed fifty archives in four countries and uncovered information that shattered prevailing myths about that service's contributions.

Focusing on the South's ironclads, commerce raiders, torpedoes, and mines, this study breaks new ground by giving the Confederate Navy proper credit for its strategic successes, international range, and technical advances. For example, the author disproves the widely held notion that the South's ironclads were a failure, built only to break the Union blockade and relegated to other duties because they could not leave protected harbors.

Luraghi also argues successfully that breaking the blockade was not the Confederate Navy's single strategic aim, and thus that the navy must not be judged a total failure, as is so often asserted. With this translation of Luraghi's masterwork the English-speaking world has both a complete account of Confederate naval operations and a balanced and realistic analysis.