Charles Henry Davis was a self-educated American astronomer and rear admiral of the United States Navy. While working for the United States Coast Survey, he researched tides and currents, and located an uncharted shoal that had caused wrecks off of the coast of New York. During the American Civil War, he commanded the Western Gunboat Flotilla, where he won an important engagement in the First Battle of Memphis before capturing enemy supplies on a successful expedition up the Yazoo River. Davis was also one of the founders of the National Academy of Sciences in 1863 and he wrote several scientific books.

The Blockade Strategy Board, also known as the Commission of Conference, or the Du Pont Board, was a strategy group created by the United States Navy Department at outset of the American Civil War to lay out a preliminary strategy for enforcing President Abraham Lincoln's April 19, 1861 Proclamation of Blockade Against Southern Ports. Enforcing this blockade would require the monitoring of 3,500 miles (5,633 km) of Atlantic and Gulf coastline held by the Confederate States of America, including 12 major ports, notably New Orleans and Mobile. The group, consisting of: Samuel Francis Du Pont, who acted as chairman; Charles Henry Davis; John Gross Barnard; and Alexander Dallas Bache, met in June to determine how best to cut off maritime transport to and from these seaports. Their reports for the Atlantic seaboard were used, with modifications, to direct the early course of the naval war. Their analysis of the Gulf Coast was not so successful, largely because the detailed oceanographic knowledge that marked the Atlantic reports was not available for the Gulf.