Henry,

I agree, the lack of credible naval power was the achilles heel of coastal/river defense. The loss of New Orleans, Memphis, etc. early on dealt severe blows to the Confederacy. In short order the CSA lost about half its cannon manufacturing capacity and in particular this was a heavy blow to the West and Trans-Mississippi theaters. This is where the war was decided.

A few good quality rams working together might have been sufficient to break up many naval efforts, but the ironclad rams the Confederacy had were mostly not up to the task. Typically they only had one in place, not enough to cover one another and deal crippling blows. A recurring problem for the CSA was lack of engine building, engineering, and maintenance expertise for these vessels. There was a lot of wasted manufacturing effort in poorly engineered designs--for example one with a boiler surface that was off by a factor of 10 or more. When good propulsion systems were imported, the boilers often became fouled, or were subject to other mechanical failures that could not be addressed quickly enough. (It is interesting that one of the successes was the Hunley...the ultimate in simplicity of propulsion, hand cranked.)

The is not to denigrate CSA efforts in general, but instead to realize that there were some major gaps in naval defense that would have required considerable forethought and focus to bridge. The Confederacy could afford few mistakes in facing the naval threat and its leadership made many. The CSA could not afford the luxuries of time and inefficient planning in working out what it needed to do. The Secretary of the Navy doesn't seem to have understood what was needed, nor did Davis. The CSA reliance on King Cotton and private enterprise was an abysmal failure and denied her greater imports when they could have done the most good--early, when the blockade was weak and she had the men to put in the field. The anti-federalist mindset made the CSA/Davis slow and reluctant to adopt centralization to the necessary degree. There is fatal irony in that, as Davis' suggested for a CSA epitaph: "Died of a theory."