The navy achieved some of the Union's most important military successes in 1861. The primary naval task was the blockade. It was no easy task. The Confederacy's 3,500 miles of coastline included ten major ports and another 180 inlets, bays, and river mouths navigable by smaller vessels. By June 1861 three dozen blockade ships were patrolling this coastline. Additional blockaders were commissioned or chartered every week—some of them old sailing brigs, others converted sidewheeler ferryboats—which joined the modern steam frigates and sloops of war in the ceaseless, tedious cruising off southern ports.1
At first these ships were too few to apprehend more than one out of every dozen merchant vessels running the blockade. Even as the blockaders gained in numbers and effectiveness, another difficulty became obvious. The navy had only two bases in the South: Hampton Roads at the mouth of the James River opposite Confederate-held Norfolk; and Key West, Florida. Some ships spent nearly as much time going to and from these bases for supplies and repairs as they did on blockade duty. To remedy the problem, the navy decided to seize additional southern
1. A frigate was a three-masted warship mounting thirty to fifty guns; a sloop, also generally three-masted, carried ten to twenty-four guns. Using its steam-powered screw propeller for maneuvering and fighting, a steam warship could switch to sails for long-distance cruising.
harbors to serve as bases. While plans for the first such operation went forward, the navy scored its initial victory of the war at Hatteras Inlet in North Carolina.
For 200 miles along the North Carolina coast runs a series of barrier islands penetrated by a half-dozen inlets, of which Hatteras Inlet was the only one navigable by large ships. Behind this barrier lay the Albe-marle and Pamlico sounds, inland seas with rail and canal connections to the interior. This transport network served as Richmond's back door to the Atlantic, the front door being closed by Union control of Hampton Roads. Numerous blockade runners passed through Hatteras Inlet during the war's early months. The North Carolina sounds also served as a haven for privateers that dashed through the inlets to capture unwary merchant vessels. What the privateers failed to snatch, the frequent storms off Cape Hatteras sometimes wrecked, for the rebels had dismantled the lighthouse and removed all navigation buoys from this treacherous coast.
No self-respecting navy could tolerate this "nest of pirates." Commodore Silas Stringham of the Atlantic blockading squadron put together a flotilla of seven ships carrying 141 guns to wipe it out. Two transports carrying 900 soldiers and marines under Benjamin Butler's command accompanied the task force. The soldiers' job was to assault the rear of the two forts guarding Hatteras Inlet after the ships had shelled them from the sea. Naval doctrine held that ships alone could not destroy well-armed forts. Perhaps this would have proved true if the half-finished forts had been well armed. As it turned out, however, the flotilla's rifled cannon battered them into submission on August 28–29 while cruising just out of range of their nineteen smoothbore guns. On August 29 the 670 men in the forts surrendered without Butler's troops having fired a shot. When news of this victory reached the North it took some of the sting out of Bull Run and Wilson's Creek. In North Carolina panic reigned along the tidewater as Tarheels expected Yankee hordes to descend on all their coastal towns. But the bluejackets were not ready to follow up their victory—yet.
The next naval success required scarcely any effort at all. Off the coast of Mississippi halfway between New Orleans and Mobile lies Ship Island. In September 1861 the Confederates obligingly abandoned its half-completed fortifications after a token shelling by the U. S. S. Massachusetts. The Federals occupied the island and built up a base for the Gulf blockade squadron and for a campaign to capture New Orleans.
Meanwhile a formidable fleet was heading down the Atlantic coast toward Port Royal, South Carolina. This task force consisted of seventeen warships, twenty-five colliers, and thirty-three transports carrying 12,000 infantry, 600 marines, and their supplies. A gale off Cape Hat-teras on November 1 scattered the fleet and foundered several transports carrying much of the army's ammunition and most of its landing boats. This mishap canceled the original plan for troops to land and assault the two forts guarding the entrance to Port Royal Bay. Once again the navy would have to do the job alone.
This was not a pleasant prospect for Flag Officer Samuel du Pont, nephew of the founder of the du Pont gunpowder company and a veteran of forty-six years in the navy. The traditional belief that one gun on shore was equal to four on shipboard seemed to give the forty-three guns in the forts a better than even chance against 157 in the fleet. But du Pont was about to overturn the tradition. Using tactics made possible by steam power, he ordered his ships to steam back and forth past the forts in an oval pattern, pounding them with heavy broadsides while presenting moving targets in return. On November 7 the Union fleet carried out this plan with deadly precision, knocking out both forts after only four hours of firing. The Confederate defenders and white civilians fled the coastal sea islands connected by waterways radiating out from Port Royal Bay. Union forces occupied this region of rich long-staple cotton plantations. Left behind by their owners were some ten thousand contrabands who soon became part of an abolitionist experiment in freedmen's education and cotton planting with free labor.
At the cost of thirty-one casualties, the Union navy secured the finest natural harbor on the south Atlantic coast. More than that, the navy acquired a reputation of invincibility that depressed morale along the South's salt-water perimeter. The day after the capture of Port Royal, Robert E. Lee arrived in Savannah as the newly appointed commander of the south Atlantic coastal defenses. He regarded this assignment as "another forlorn hope expedition—worse than West Virginia." Lee recognized that sea power gave Yankees the option of striking when and where they pleased. "There are so many points to attack, and so little means to meet them on water," he sighed, "that there is but little rest."2 Lee had little choice but to concentrate Confederate defenses at strategic points, yielding most of the coastline to the enemy. During the next
2. Lee to Mildred Lee (his daughter), Nov. 15, 1861, in Robert E. Lee, Jr., Recollections and Letters of Robert E. Lee (New York, 1904), 55; James M. Merrill, The Rebel Shore: The Story of Union Sea Power in the Civil War (Boston, 1957), 44.
few months, bluejackets seized several other harbors and ports as far south as St. Augustine, Florida. In April 1862, siege guns planted on an island at the mouth of the Savannah River battered down Fort Pulaski, giving the Federals control of the entrance to Savannah.
Another joint army-navy expedition—in which the army for once did most of the fighting—sealed off all harbors in North Carolina except Wilmington. This expedition launched the checkered career of Ambrose E. Burnside, a handsome, florid, personable Rhode Islander whose imposing muttonchop whiskers would contribute a new word to the language with an anagram (sideburns) of his name. After leading a brigade at Bull Run, Burnside had gone home to organize a division of soldiers accustomed to working around water and boats. They would need such skills, for their objective was to follow up the capture of Hatteras Inlet by gaining control of the North Carolina sounds. The Yankees' toughest foe in this enterprise turned out not to be the rebels, but the weather. Burnside's flotilla of makeshift gunboats, coal scows, and passenger steamboats carrying his 12,000 troops was scattered by a gale off Hatteras on January 13 that wrecked three of his vessels. Two more weeks of gale-force winds forced the expeditionary force to hunker down in misery just inside Hatteras Inlet. When the weather finally moderated, seasick soldiers welcomed the prospect of combat as a lesser evil.
Their first target was Roanoke Island, a swampy piece of land ten miles long, two miles wide, and rich in legend—a land where the memory of Virginia Dare and the inscrutable word "Croatan" marked the mysterious fate of England's first North American colony. Controlling the passage between Pamlico Sound and Albemarle Sound, Roanoke Island was the key to Richmond's back door. Commander of the 3,000 Confederate soldiers, four batteries with thirty-two guns, and seven one-gun gunboats defending the island was Henry A. Wise, the political general transferred here from his feuds with fellow Virginian John Floyd in West Virginia. Wise had learned enough about war to recognize the inadequacy of his "mosquito-fleet" gunboats, badly sited batteries, and poorly trained, outnumbered troops. He pleaded with Richmond for more men and more guns, but Richmond seemed strangely indifferent.
This indifference cost them dearly, for the Yankees were coming with power. On February 7–8, Burnside's sixteen gunboats mounting sixty-four guns drove off the mosquito fleet and neutralized the Confederate shore batteries while steamers towed landing boats through the surf and 7,500 soldiers waded ashore on Roanoke Island. There they plunged through "impenetrable" knee-deep swamps and smashed through rebel entrenchments, suffering only 264 casualties. For this price they captured the island's 2,675 defenders. General Wise escaped but his son, an infantry captain, was killed in the fighting. Next day Union gunboats destroyed the mosquito fleet and seized Elizabeth City on the mainland. During the next several weeks, Yankees captured all the North Carolina ports on the sounds, including New Berne and Beaufort with their rail connections to the interior and Beaufort's fine harbor, which became another base for the blockade fleet.
Here was amphibious warfare with style. It won a promotion to major general for Burnside. It raised northern morale and dampened southern spirits. The Confederate Congress set up a committee to investigate the Roanoke Island disaster. The hue and cry forced Judah Benjamin to resign as secretary of war (though Davis, who liked Benjamin, promptly appointed him secretary of state). By April 1862 every Atlantic coast harbor of importance except Charleston and Wilmington (N.C.) was in Union hands or closed to blockade runners. Because of this, and because of the increasing number of Union warships, the blockade tightened considerably during the first half of 1862. Moreover, southern hopes to breach the blockade with their (not so) secret weapon—the ironclad C. S. S. Virginia—had been dashed by the U. S. S. Monitor.
Having no traditions and few old-navy prejudices to overcome, the rebels got a head start into the new era of ironclad warships. In July 1861 they began grafting an armor-plated casemate onto the salvaged hull of the frigate Merrimack. Work began in July. The capacity of the Tredegar Iron Works was stretched to the limit to construct two layers of two-inch iron plate sufficient to protect a superstructure 178 feet long and 24 feet high above the waterline and one-inch plate covering the 264-foot hull down to three feet below the waterline. The superstructure sloped at an angle of 36° to give added protection by causing enemy shots to ricochet. The strange appearance of this craft, rechristened the Virginia, reminded observers of a barn floating with only its roof above water. The Virginia was armed with ten guns, four on each broadside plus fore and aft seven-inch pivot rifles. Attached to her prow was an iron ram to stave in the hulls of wooden warships. The principal defects of this otherwise formidable vessel were its unreliable engines and deep draft. Unable to build new engines of adequate horsepower, the rebels reconditioned the two old Merrimack engines that had been condemned by the prewar navy and slated for replacement. The weight of the Virginia's armor gave her a draft of twenty-two feet. This prevented operations in shallow water while her unseaworthiness prevented her from venturing into the open sea. The weak engines and ungainly design limited her speed to four or five knots and made her so unmaneuverable that a 180-degree turn took half an hour. Some of these problems would not become apparent until the Virginia was launched; in the meantime she inspired hope in the South and fear in the North.
This fear was the main factor in overcoming northern inertia on the ironclad question. With a conventional navy superior to anything the Confederates could construct, and preoccupied with the need to build up the blockade fleet, Secretary of the Navy Welles did not at first want to experiment with newfangled notions. But rumors of rebel activities caused Congress to force his hand with a law of August 3, 1861, directing the construction of three prototype ironclads. Welles set up a naval board to assess the dozens of proposals submitted by shipbuilders. The board accepted two, which resulted in the building of the Galena and the New Ironsides, ships of conventional design overlaid by iron plating.
No bid came from John Ericsson, the irascible genius of marine engineering who had contributed the screw propeller and several other innovations to ship design. Bitter about earlier feuds with the navy, Ericsson sulked in his New York office until a shipbuilder persuaded him to submit his radical design to the Navy Department. Ericsson's proposal incorporated several novel features. A wooden hull sheathed with thin iron plate would be overlaid by a flat deck 172 feet long with perpendicular sides extending below the waterline and protected by 4.5 inch armor plating. The propeller, anchor, and all vital machinery would be protected by this shell, which was designed to float with less than two feet of freeboard, giving the craft the appearance of a raft—and also presenting a small target to enemy fire. Sitting on the deck was Ericsson's most important innovation: a revolving turret encased in eight inches of armor and containing two eleven-inch guns. This turret, along with the shallow draft (11 feet), light displacement (1,200 tons, about one-fourth of the Virginia's displacement), and eight-knot speed would give Ericsson's ship maneuverability and versatility. She could almost literally dance around a heavier enemy and fire in any direction.
Lincoln and Welles were impressed by Ericsson's design. But would it float? More specifically, would it stay afloat in a heavy sea? Some members of the naval board were skeptical. They had never seen anything like this cheesebox on a raft. Ericsson appeared before the board and overcame their doubts with a bravura performance. They awarded him a contract, but ridicule of "Ericsson's folly" by senior navy officers caused Welles to hedge his bet: the ship must prove a "complete success" (whatever that meant) or its builders must refund every penny of the $275,000 the government agreed to pay for it. Ericsson was not concerned; he had confidence in his creation. He subcontracted the work to several firms to save time, and supervised almost every detail personally. Starting three months later than the South, northern industry launched Ericsson's ironclad on January 30, 1862, two weeks before the Confederates launched the Virginia. Doubters present at each launching predicted that these crazy craft would never float, but cheered the disproof of their predictions. Several more weeks were required to finish the fittings of both ships. Ericsson named his vessel Monitor (one who admonishes and corrects wrongdoers). There was no time for test runs to determine whether she fulfilled the terms of the contract; the Monitor's test would be trial by combat.
On March 8 the Virginia steamed out from Norfolk on what her crew assumed was a test run. But this too was to be the real thing. Five Union ships mounting a total of 219 guns guarded the mouth of the James River at Hampton Roads: the Minnesota, Roanoke, St. Lawrence, Congress, and Cumberland. The last three were sailing ships—pride of the navy in the 1840s but already made obsolescent by steam. The first two were steam frigates (the Roanoke was disabled by a broken shaft), pride of the navy in 1862. But the fighting this day would make them obsolescent as well. Rumors that the Merrimack (as the Federals continued to call the Virginia) was coming out had circulated for weeks. Today she came, heading first for the twenty-four-gun Cumberland, sending several shells into her side before ramming and tearing a seven-foot hole in her hull that sent her to the bottom. While this was happening, the Cumberland and Congress fired numerous broadsides at the Virginia, which "struck and glanced off," in the words of a northern observer, "having no more effect than peas from a pop-gun."3 This was not quite accurate; before the day was over two of the Virginia's guns were knocked out, every fitting on deck and part of her smokestack were shot away, her ram was wrenched off by the collision with the Cumberland, two of her crew were killed and several were wounded. But none of the ninety-eight shots that struck her penetrated the armor or did any disabling damage.
After sinking the Cumberland, the Virginia went after the fifty-gun Congress, raking the helpless vessel with broadsides which started fires that eventually reached the powder magazine and blew her up. The
3. William C. Davis, Duel between the First Ironclads (Garden City, N.Y., 1975), 89.
Minnesota having run aground in an effort to help her sister ships, the Virginia turned her attention to this flagship of the fleet that had captured Hatteras Inlet the previous August. But the Virginia's deep draft prevented her from closing with the Minnesota as night came on. The rebels left the Minnesota and the other ships for the morrow, and called it a day.
And what a day—the worst in the eighty-six-year history of the U. S. navy. The Virginia sank two proud ships within a few hours—a feat no other enemy would accomplish until 1941. At least 240 bluejackets had been killed, including the captain of the Congress—more than the navy suffered on any other day of the war. The whole Union fleet at Hampton Roads—still the main blockade base—was threatened with destruction. A taste of panic flavored the telegrams to Washington that night. The cabinet met in emergency session next morning. Secretary of the Navy Welles tried to calm Secretary of War Stanton's nerves with news that the Monitor was on its way from Brooklyn to Hampton Roads to confront the Virginia. But would she get there in time? And even if she did, was this two-gun "tin can on a shingle" any match for the rebel monster?
She did, and she was. The Monitor had arrived alongside the Minnesota the night before, her crew exhausted from fighting a storm that had almost sunk them on the way from Brooklyn. The prospect of fighting the Virginia, however, started their adrenalin pulsing again. When the Confederate ship steamed out on the morning of March 9 to finish off the Federal fleet, her crew spied a strange craft next to the Minnesota. "We thought at first it was a raft on which one of the Minnesota's boilers was being taken to shore for repairs," said a Virginia midshipman. But the boiler ran out a gun and fired. A Monitor crewman described the Virginia's response: "You can see surprise in a ship just as you can see it in a man, and there was surprise all over the Merrimac." The rebels turned their attention from the stranded Minnesota to this strange vessel that began circling the sluggish Virginia "like a fice dog" and hurling 175-pound shot from her eleven-inch guns. For two hours the ironclads slugged it out. Neither could punch through the other's armor, though the Monitor's heavy shot cracked the Virginia's outside plate at several places. At one point the southern ship grounded. As the shallower-draft Monitor closed in, many aboard the Virginia thought they were finished. But she broke loose and continued the fight, trying without success to ram the Monitor. By this time the Virginia's wheezy engines were barely functioning, and one of her lieutenants found her "as unwieldly as Noah's Ark." The Monitor in turn tried to ram the Virginia's stern to disable her rudder or propeller, but just missed. Soon after this a shell from the Virginia struck the Monitor's pilot house, wounding her captain. The Union ship stopped fighting briefly; the Virginia, in danger of running aground again, steamed back toward Norfolk. Each crew thought they had won the battle, but in truth it was a draw. The exhausted men on both sides ceased fighting—almost, it seemed, by mutual consent.4
This day saw the completion of a revolution in naval warfare begun a generation earlier by the application of steam power to warships. Doomed were the graceful frigates and powerful line-of-battle ships with their towering masts and sturdy oak timbers. When the news of the Monitor-Virginia duel reached England, the London Times commented: "Whereas we had available for immediate purposes one hundred and forty-nine first-class warships, we have now two, these two being the Warrior and her sister Ironside [Britain's experimental ironclads]. There is not now a ship in the English navy apart from these two that it would not be madness to trust to an engagement with that little Monitor."5
Of more immediate interest in Washington, the Union fleet at Hampton Roads was saved. For the next two months the Monitor and Virginia eyed each other warily but did not fight. With no ironclads in reserve, neither side could risk losing its indispensable weapon. When McClellan's army invaded the Virginia peninsula and forced the Confederates back toward Richmond in May 1862, Norfolk fell to the Federals and the Virginia was stranded. Too unseaworthy to fight her way into open water and too deep-drafted to retreat up the James River, the plucky ironclad was blown up by her crew on May 11, less than three months after she had been launched. The Monitor also failed to live until her first birthday. On the last day of 1862 she sank in a gale off Cape Hatteras while being towed south for a blockade assignment.
Despite their defects, the Virginia and Monitor were prototypes for the subsequent ironclads built or begun by both sides during the war: 21 by the Confederacy and 58 by the Union. Many of these never saw action; all were designed for bay and river fighting; none achieved the fame of their progenitors. The existence of rebel ironclads lurking in
4. Foote, The Civil War, I, 260; Davis, Duel between the First Ironclads, 120–21, 127.
5. Quoted in John Taylor Wood, "The First Fight of Iron-Clads," Battles and Leaders, I, 692.
southern rivers provoked a state of anxiety in the Union navy known as "ram fever," but had little effect on the course of the war. Steam/sail warships built of wood remained the mainstay of the Union's deep-water navy. But in the last third of the nineteenth century the world's navies converted to iron and steel, incorporating the principal features of Ericsson's folly: low profiles, speed and maneuverability, revolving gun turrets, and a few guns of heavy caliber rather than multiple-gun broadsides.
Blockade duty in the Union navy offered few opportunities for glory. The main enemy was boredom. About 500 ships took part in the blockade during the war, with perhaps an average of 150 on patrol at a given time over the four years of fighting. These ships captured or destroyed about 1,500 blockade runners. Assuming that for every runner captured, a blockade ship sighted or chased a dozen, this meant that the average blockader sighted a runner once every three or four weeks and participated in one or two captures a year. "Day after day, day after day, we lay inactive, roll, roll," was the description of blockade service by one officer. Another wrote to his mother that she could get an idea of what blockade duty was like if she were to "go to the roof on a hot summer day, talk to a half-dozen degenerates, descend to the basement, drink tepid water full of iron rust, climb to the roof again, and repeat the process at intervals until [you are] fagged out, then go to bed with everything shut tight."6
Only the chance to strike it rich kept blockade sailors sane and alert. The crew shared half and half with the government the proceeds from every prize they captured. This amounted to about 7 percent of the prize's value for the captain, a lesser portion for each officer, and 16 percent shared among the seamen. The dream of hitting the jackpot in this system sometimes came true: within nine days in the fall of 1864 the little gunboat Aeolus captured two runners unassisted, earning $40,000 for her captain, $8,000 to $20,000 for each of her officers, and $3,000 for each seaman.
Potential profits as well as actual excitement were greater for the crews of blockade runners. "Nothing I have ever experienced can compare
6. Richard S. West, Jr., Mr. Lincoln's Navy (New York, 1957), 60; Merrill, Rebel Shore, 69.
with it," wrote a British officer on a runner. "Hunting, pig-sticking, steeple-chasing, big-game hunting, polo—I have done a little of each—all have their thrilling moments, but none can approach running a blockade."7 But such a comment did not apply to the first year of the war. The blockade then resembled a sieve more than a cordon; the small risk of running it raised cargo prices and insurance rates but offered few thrills. By the summer of 1862, though, things were different. With most of the South's ports sealed off or occupied, the blockade fleet could concentrate on the few ports remaining open. Experience had taught northern captains to station smaller ships inshore as picket boats to send up rocket signals when a runner approached the harbor entrance attempting to enter or leave. All warships within sight would then converge on the runner. Several miles out a second cordon of Union ships patrolled a wider area, giving chase to outward-bound runners spotted by the picket boats or inward-bound ships spotted by themselves.
This system worked reasonably well against slow or large blockade runners in conditions of good visibility. But such craft trying to run the blockade in these conditions soon disappeared from southern shores. In their place came sleek, fast, shallow-drafted vessels built (mostly in Britain) for the purpose, painted gray for low visibility, burning smokeless anthracite, with low freeboard, telescoping smokestacks, and underwater steam-escape valves. With pilots on board who knew every inch of the coast, these ships chose moonless, foggy, or stormy nights to make their dash into or out of a channel from which all navigation markers had been removed except coded shore lights to guide the pilots. Under such circumstances, a runner might pass within 200 yards of a warship without being detected. Some runners carried signal rockets identical to those used by the Union navy, which they fired in a wrong direction to confuse pursuit.
Nassau, Bermuda, and Havana became the principal bases for blockade runners. There they took on cargoes of guns, ammunition, shoes, army blankets, medicines, salt, tea, liquor, hoop skirts, and corset stays. When the Union navy acquired enough ships it established a third cordon of blockaders patrolling these ports (despite British and Spanish protests) to intercept runners hundreds of miles from southern shores. The blockade runners usually escaped these patrols, however, and made the run to Wilmington, Charleston, Mobile, or some other port where they picked up cotton for the return run.
7. Robert Carse, Blockade: The Civil War at Sea (New York, 1958), 41.
Wilmington and Nassau became wartime boom towns—rowdy, violent, bawdy, awash with wealth and greed.8 The chance of profits from a successful voyage outweighed the one chance in three (by 1864) of capture. Owners could make back their investment in one or two round trips, clearing pure profit with every subsequent voyage. Cotton prices in European markets soared to six, eight, ten times their prewar levels, enabling speculators who bought cotton in the South and shipped it out to earn a return of several hundred percent. By 1864 captains of blockade runners received $5,000 or more in gold for a round trip, other officers from $750 to $3,500, and common seamen $250. In addition, captains reserved part of the cargo space for their own cotton (outgoing) or high-value goods (incoming) which they sold at auction. Many of the owners, captains, and crews were British, including some former royal navy officers who had resigned to pursue this more lucrative career. Although patriotism actuated the numerous southerners who also owned and operated blockade runners, the profit motive was not entirely absent. The North treated captured southern crews as prisoners of war but could not risk the diplomatic consequences of imprisoning foreign crew members, so let them go. The crowding out of war matériel by high-value consumer goods on incoming runners became so notorious that in early 1864 the Confederate government enacted (much evaded) regulations banning luxury goods and requiring all runners to allot at least half their space to the government at fixed rates. The government (especially Josiah Gorgas's Ordnance Bureau) and some southern states also bought their own blockade runners.
How effective was the blockade? There are two ways of answering this question. One way is to point out that during the war an estimated five out of six blockade runners got through (nine out often in 1861 scaling down to one out of two by 1865). They shipped out half a million bales of cotton and brought in a million pairs of shoes, half a million rifles, a thousand tons of gunpowder, several hundred cannon, and so on. The dollar value of Charleston's foreign trade was greater in 1863 than in the last year of peace. Confederate envoys to Britain compiled long lists of ships that had run the blockade to prove that it was a "paper blockade" entitled to no recognition by international law. In January 1863,
8. Wilmington became the principal Confederate port for blockade runners because of the tricky inlets and shoals at the mouth of the Cape Fear River guarded by Fort Fisher, whose big guns kept the blockade fleet from interfering when a runner came within their protecting range.
Jefferson Davis pronounced the "so-called blockade" a "monstrous pretension." A prominent historian of Confederate diplomacy agreed. The blockade, wrote Frank L. Owsley, was an "absurdity," "scarcely a respectable paper blockade," "old Abe's . . . practical joke on the world."9
But most southerners who lived through the blockade gave a different answer. "Already the blockade is beginning to shut [ammunition] out," wrote Mary Boykin Chesnut on July 16, 1861. It was "a stockade which hems us in," she added in March 1862. In July 1861 a Charleston merchant noted in his diary that the "blockade is still carried on and every article of consumption particularly in the way of groceries are getting very high." Four months later he wrote: "Business perfectly prostrated everything enormously high salt selling at 15 and 20 cents a quart hardly any shoes to be had dry goods of every kind running out." A southern naval officer conceded after the war that the blockade "shut the Confederacy out from the world, deprived it of supplies, weakened its military and naval strength."10
Historical opinion leans toward this latter view. While it was true that five out of six runners got through, that is not the crucial statistic. Rather, one must ask how many ships carrying how much freight would have entered southern ports if there had been no blockade. Eight thousand trips were made through the blockade during four years of war,11 but
9. Rowland, Davis, V, 401, 403; Frank L. Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy: Foreign Relations of the Confederate States of America, 2nd ed. rev. (Chicago, 1959), 229, 230.
10. Woodward, Chesnut's Civil War, 101, 306; Nevins, War, I, 289; John T. Scharf, History of the Confederate States Navy (New York, 1887), v.
11. These are estimates offered by Frank Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy, 250–90, based on records of the Confederate State Department and the Union Navy Department. Most of the successful runs (and unsuccessful ones) were made by small coastal schooners carrying little if any cargo of military value. Indeed, a majority of the trips by these vessels were along intercoastal waterways between Confederate ports, merely redistributing freight from one part of the South to another, and could scarcely be termed "running" the blockade. From June through August 1861, for example, of 178 ships entering or clearing five major southern ports, only eighteen were involved in foreign trade. Confederate diplomats cited all this intra-southern trade as blockade running in an attempt to persuade Britain to declare the blockade an illegal "paper blockade"; the Union navy included captured vessels of this type in its statistics to pad the list of captures. Of the blockade running that really counted—fast steamers running between the South and foreign ports—there were about 1,000 successful trips out of 1,300 attempts. Stephen R. Wise, "Lifeline of the Confederacy: Blockade Running During the American Civil War," Ph.D. dissertation, University of South Carolina, 1983, pp. 44, 46, 139, 516.
more than twenty thousand vessels had cleared into or out of southern ports during the four prewar years. The blockade runners were built for speed, not capacity, and when pursued they sometimes jettisoned part of their cargo. The blockade reduced the South's seaborne trade to less than a third of normal. And of course the Confederacy's needs for all kinds of supplies were much greater than the peacetime norm. As for cotton exports, 1861 must be disregarded because the South voluntarily embargoed cotton in an attempt to influence British foreign policy (see below). After the end of this embargo in 1862 the half-million bales shipped through the blockade during the last three years of war compared rather poorly with the ten million exported in the last three antebellum years. As far as the greater dollar volume of Charleston's wartime trade is concerned, there were two reasons for this: Charleston was one of the principal ports for blockade runners because they were shut out of the other ports; and inflation so eroded the Confederate dollar that by March 1863 it required ten such dollars to buy what one had bought two years earlier. Indeed, the blockade was one of the causes of the ruinous inflation that reduced the Confederate dollar to one percent of its original value by the end of the war.
To maintain that the blockade "won the war" for the North, as naval historians are wont to do, goes entirely too far.12 But it did play an important role in Union victory. Although naval personnel constituted only 5 percent of the Union armed forces, their contribution to the outcome of the war was much larger.
The question of the blockade's effectiveness became a critical foreign policy issue during the war's first year. The international law governing blockades was part of the Declaration of Paris, acceded to by European powers (but not the U. S.) in 1856 after the Crimean War: "Blockades, in order to be binding, must be effective; that is to say, maintained by
12. Howard P. Nash, Jr., A Naval History of the Civil War (New York, 1972), 300. On the other hand, the conclusion of a recent study that "the blockade did not represent a major factor in the Confederacy's economic exhaustion" and did not have a "decisive effect" on the outcome of the war may go too far in the opposite direction. It depends on one's definition of "major" and "decisive." The impact of the blockade was certainly significant, though of course it did not alone win the war. Whether the war could have been won without it must remain moot. Richard E. Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones, and William N. Still, Jr., Why the South Lost the Civil War (Athens, Ga., 1986), 56, 63.
forces strong enough to prevent access." Southern diplomats insisted that the ease of running the blockade in 1861 proved its ineffectiveness; therefore no nation need respect it. This had been the traditional American position toward British blockades, especially during the Napoleonic wars when the United States defied the British and traded with both sides. But now the shoe was on the other foot. A major goal of Confederate diplomacy in 1861 was to persuade Britain to declare the blockade illegal as a prelude to intervention by the royal navy to protect British trade with the South.
Cotton was the principal weapon of southern foreign policy. Britain imported three-quarters of its cotton from the American South. The textile industry dominated the British economy. "What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years?" asked James Hammond of South Carolina in his famous King Cotton speech of 1858. "England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her, save the South." The inevitability of British intervention to obtain cotton became an article of faith in the South during 1861. A Charleston merchant told the London Times correspondent a few days after the surrender of Fort Sumter that "if those miserable Yankees try to blockade us, and keep you from our cotton," he said, "you'll just send their ships to the bottom and acknowledge us. That will be before autumn, I think." In July 1861 Vice President Alexander Stephens expressed certainty that "in some way or other [the blockade will] be raised, or there will be revolution in Europe. . . . Our cotton is . . . the tremendous lever by which we can work our destiny."13
To ply this lever, southerners decided to embargo cotton exports. "The cards are in our hands," exulted the Charleston Mercury, "and we intend to play them out to the bankruptcy of every cotton factory in Great Britain and France or the acknowledgment of our independence." The Memphis Argus instructed planters to "keep every bale of cotton on the plantation. Don't send a thread to New Orleans or Memphis till England and France have recognized the Confederacy—not one thread."14 Although the Confederate government never officially sanctioned the embargo, so powerful was public opinion that it virtually enforced itself.
13. Selections from the Letters and Speeches of the Hon. James H. Hammond of South Carolina (New York, 1866), 316–17; William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South, ed. Fletcher Pratt (New York, 1954), 69; Virgil Carrington Jones, The Civil War at Sea: The Blockaders (New York, 1960), 183.
14. Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy, 24–25.
Most of the 1860 crop had been shipped before the war began. The shipping season for 1861 would normally have begun in September, but despite the looseness of the blockade little cotton went out. In the spring of 1862 southerners planted about half their usual cotton acreage and devoted the rest of the land to food production. British imports of cotton from the South in 1862 amounted to about 3 percent of the 1860 level.
King Cotton diplomacy seemed promising at first. British and French officials exchanged worried views about the probable impact of a cotton famine. Textile magnates in Lancashire and Lyons talked of shutdowns. "England must break the Blockade, or Her Millions will starve," declared a newspaper speaking for textile workers in September 1861. In October, Prime Minister Viscount Palmerston and Foreign Minister Lord Russell agreed that "the cotton question may become serious by the end of the year. . . . We cannot allow some millions of our people to perish to please the Northern States." British and French diplomats discussed the possibility of joint action to lift the blockade.15
But in the end several factors prevented such action. The first was Russell's and Palmerston's desire to avoid involvement in the war. "For God's sake, let us if possible keep out of it," said Russell in May 1861, while Palmerston quoted the aphorism: "They who in quarrels interpose, will often get a bloody nose." Even without Secretary of State Seward's bellicose warnings against intervention—which the British regarded as insolent blustering—Britain recognized that any action against the blockade could lead to a conflict with the United States more harmful to England's interests than the temporary loss of southern cotton. Our "true policy," Palmerston told Russell on October 18, was "to go on as we have begun, and to keep quite clear of the conflict."16 Napoleon III of France leaned toward intervention, but was unwilling to take any action without British cooperation.
If Britain took umbrage at Seward's "bullying," many Englishmen resented even more the Confederacy's attempt at economic blackmail. If southerners "thought they could extort our cooperation by the agency of king cotton," declared the Times, they had better think again. To intervene on behalf of the South "because they keep cotton from us,"
15. Brian Jenkins, Britain and the War for the Union, 2 vols. (Montreal, 1974–80), I, 166, 170; Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy, 73.
16. Norman B. Ferris, Desperate Diplomacy: William H. Seward's Foreign Policy, 1861 (Knoxville, 1976), 39, 36; Jenkins, Britain and the War for the Union, I, 172.
said Lord Russell in September 1861, "would be ignominious beyond measure. . . . No English Parliament could do so base a thing."17
Because of British (and French) sensitivity on this issue, southern diplomats could not admit the existence of a cotton embargo. But this trapped them in a paradox, for how could they proclaim the blockade ineffective if no cotton was reaching Europe? In reply to a question on this matter by the French foreign minister in February 1862, the Confederate commissioner to Paris conceded that "although a very large proportion of the vessels that attempted to run the blockade . . . had succeeded in passing, the risk of capture was sufficiently great to deter those who had not a very adventurous spirit from attempting it." Fatal admission! Eight days later Foreign Minister Russell announced Britain's position on the blockade: "The fact that various ships may have successfully escaped through it . . . will not of itself prevent the blockade from being an effective one by international law" so long as it was enforced by a number of ships "sufficient really to prevent access to [a port] or to create an evident danger of entering or leaving it." By February the northern blockade certainly met this criterion. Another influence working against British acceptance of southern arguments about paper blockades was a desire not to create a precedent that would boomerang against British security in a future war. As the crown's solicitor general put it: Britain must resist "new fangled notions and interpretations of international law which might make it impossible for us effectively at some future day to institute any blockade, and so destroy our naval authority."18
Southern expectations of foreign intervention to break the blockade were betrayed by a double irony: first, the "success" of the cotton embargo seemed only to prove the success of the blockade; and second, the huge cotton exports of 1857–60, instead of proving the potency of King Cotton, resulted in toppling his throne. Even working overtime, British mills had not been able to turn all of this cotton into cloth. Surplus stocks of raw cotton as well as of finished cloth piled up in Lancashire warehouses. The South's embargo thus turned out to be a blessing in disguise for textile manufacturers in 1861. Although the mills went on
17. Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy, 22; Jenkins, Britain and the War for the Union, I, 170.
18. Nevins, War, I, 289; D. P. Crook, The North, the South, and the Powers 1861–1865 (New York, 1974), 177 (italics added), 178.
short time during the winter of 1861–62, the real reason for this was not the shortage of cotton but the satiated market for cloth. Inventories of raw cotton in Britain and France were higher in December 1861 than any previous December. The cotton famine from which the South expected so much did not really take hold until the summer of 1862. By then the Confederacy had scuttled its embargo and was trying desperately to export cotton through the tightening blockade to pay for imported supplies. By then, too, the stimulus of high prices had brought about an increase of cotton acreage in Egypt and India, which supplied most of Europe's cotton imports for the next three years.
The worst time of unemployment in the British textile industry occurred from the summer of 1862 to the spring of 1863. But the impact of this did not measure up to southern hopes or British fears. Even before the war, textiles had been losing their dominant role in the British economy. The war further stimulated growth in the iron, shipbuilding, armaments, and other industries. This offset much of the decline in textiles. The manufacture of woolen uniforms and blankets for American armies absorbed some of the slack in cotton manufacturing. A flourishing trade in war matériel with the North as well as blockade running to the South helped convince British merchants of the virtues of neutrality. Crop failures in western Europe from 1860 through 1862 increased British dependence on American grain and flour. During the first two years of the Civil War the Union states supplied nearly half of British grain imports, compared with less than a quarter before the war. Yankees exulted that King Corn was more powerful than King Cotton.19 And because Confederate commerce raiders drove much of the U. S. merchant marine from the seas, most of this expanded trade with the North was carried by British ships—another economic shot in the arm that helped discourage British intervention in the war.
By the second year of the conflict, Britain was willing to tolerate extraordinary northern extensions of the blockade. In April 1862, Union warships began seizing British merchant vessels plying between England and Nassau or Bermuda, on the grounds that their cargoes were destined ultimately for the Confederacy. The first ship so captured was the Bermuda, which was confiscated by a U. S. prize court. The navy bought her and put her to work as a blockade ship. This added insult to the injury that had already provoked a jingoistic response in Britain. But American diplomats cited British precedents for such seizures. During
19. Crook, The North, the South, and the Powers, 268–72.
the Napoleonic wars the royal navy had seized American ships carrying cargoes to a neutral port with the intention of re-exporting them to France. British courts had established the doctrine of "continuous voyage" to justify confiscation of contraband destined ultimately for an enemy port even if the voyage was broken by landing at a neutral port. When this chicken came home to roost in 1862, Whitehall could hardly repudiate its own precedent.
In 1863 a northern court extended the doctrine of continuous voyage beyond any precedent in the Peterhoff case. In February a Union warship captured the British vessel Peterhoff in the Caribbean, where she was on her way to Matamoros, Mexico, with a cargo of military supplies. The Union navy had good reason to suspect that the ultimate destination of this cargo was the Confederacy. Located across the Rio Grande from Texas, Matamoros had become the entrepôt for trade with the South exchanging cotton for contraband. The prize court upheld the navy's extension of "continuous voyage" to include re-export of contraband across land frontiers as well as from neutral ports. This time a large portion of the British public railed against Yankee "overbearing and domineering insolence." But the Foreign Office merely recorded the precedent, which Britain cited a half-century later to justify seizure of American ships carrying contraband to neutral Holland intended for overland trans-shipment to Germany.20
Next to obtaining British intervention against the blockade, the main goal of Confederate foreign policy was to secure diplomatic recognition of the South's nationhood. In the quest for recognition, the Confederate State Department sent to Europe a three-man commission headed by William L. Yancey. As a notorious fire-eater and an advocate of reopening the African slave trade, Yancey was not the best choice to win friends in antislavery Britain. Nevertheless, soon after the southerners arrived in London the British government announced an action that misled Americans on both sides of the Potomac to anticipate imminent diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy.
Lincoln had proclaimed the rebels to be insurrectionists. Under international law this would deny the Confederacy status as a belligerent
20. Quotation from Jenkins, Britain and the War for the Union, II, 262. For a study of the maritime legal issues involved here, see Stuart L. Bernath, Squall Across the Atlantic: American Civil War Prize Cases and Diplomacy (Berkeley, 1970).
power. But the North's declaration of a blockade constituted an act of war affecting neutral powers. On May 13 Britain therefore declared her neutrality in a proclamation issued by the Queen. This would seem to have been unexceptionable—except that it automatically recognized the Confederacy as a belligerent power. Other European nations followed the British lead. Status as a belligerent gave Confederates the right under international law to contract loans and purchase arms in neutral nations, and to commission cruisers on the high seas with the power of search and seizure. Northerners protested this British action with hot words; Charles Sumner later called it "the most hateful act of English history since Charles 2nd." But northern protests rested on weak legal grounds, for the blockade was a virtual recognition of southern belligerency. Moreover, in European eyes the Confederacy with its national constitution, its army, its effective control of 750,000 square miles of territory and a population of nine million people, was a belligerent power in practice no matter what it was in northern theory. As Lord Russell put it: "The question of belligerent rights is one, not of principle, but of fact."21
Northern bitterness stemmed in part from the context and timing of British action. The proclamation of neutrality came just after two "unofficial" conferences between Lord Russell and the Confederate envoys. And it preceded by one day the arrival in London of Charles Francis Adams, the new United States minister. The recognition of belligerency thus appeared to present Adams with a fait accompli to soften him up for the next step—diplomatic recognition of southern nationhood. As Seward viewed it, Russell's meetings with Yancey and his colleagues were "liable to be construed as recognition." The South did so construe them; and the Richmond Whig considered the proclamation of neutrality "a long and firm [step] in exactly the direction which the people of the Southern States expected."22
All spring Seward had been growing more agitated by British policy. When he learned of Russell's meetings with the rebel commissioners, he exploded in anger. "God damn them, I'll give them hell," he told Sumner. On May 21 Seward sent an undiplomatic dispatch to Adams instructing him to break off relations if the British government had any
21. Sumner quoted in Norman Graebner, "Seward's Diplomacy," unpublished ms., p. 6; Russell quoted in Robert H. Jones, Disrupted Decades: The Civil War and Reconstruction Years (New York, 1973), 363.
22. Jenkins, Britain and the War for the Union, I, 104, 109.
more dealings with southern envoys. If Britain officially recognized the Confederacy, "we from that hour, shall cease to be friends and become once more, as we have twice before been forced to be, enemies of Great Britain."23
Lincoln had tried with only partial success to soften Seward's language. The president did compel Seward to allow Adams discretion to present the substance of this dispatch verbally rather than handing it intact to Lord Russell. After reading Seward's bellicose words, Adams decided that in this case discretion was indeed the better part of valor. Adams had been a superb choice for the London legation. His grandfather and father had preceded him there; Charles had spent much of his youth in the St. Petersburg and London legations. His reserve and self-restraint struck an empathic chord among Englishmen, who were offended by the braggadocio they attributed to American national character. Adams and Lord Russell took each other's measure at their first meeting, and liked what they saw. Adams concealed Seward's iron fist in a velvet glove. Equally urbane, Russell assured the American minister that Britain had no present intention of granting diplomatic recognition to the Confederacy. The foreign secretary conceded that he had twice met with the southern commissioners, but "had no expectation of seeing them any more."24
Nor did he. It took some time for this message to sink into the minds of the southern envoys, who continued to send optimistic reports to Richmond. In September 1861, however, Yancey grew restless and he resigned. At the same time the Confederate government decided to replace the commissioners with ministers plenipotentiary in major European capitals. Richmond sent James Mason of Virginia to London and John Slidell of Louisiana to Paris.
By so doing the South unwittingly set in motion a series of events that almost brought Anglo-American relations to a rupture. The departure of Mason and Slidell from Charleston by blockade runner was scarcely a secret. The U. S. navy was embarrassed by its failure to intercept their ship before it reached Havana, where the diplomats transferred to the British steamer Trent. Captain Charles Wilkes decided to redeem the navy's reputation. A forty-year veteran now commanding
23. David Donald, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man (New York, 1970), 21; Jenkins, Britain and the War for the Union, I, 104.
24. Ephraim D. Adams, Great Britain and the American Civil War, 2 vols. (New York, 1925), I, 106.
the thirteen-gun sloop U. S. S. San Jacinto, Wilkes was a headstrong, temperamental man who fancied himself an expert on maritime law. Diplomatic dispatches could be seized as contraband of war; Wilkes decided to capture Mason and Slidell as the "embodiment of despatches."25 This novel interpretation of international law was never tested, for instead of capturing the Trent as a prize after stopping her on the high seas on November 8, Wilkes arrested Mason and Slidell and let the ship go on.
The northern public greeted Wilkes's act with applause; "the people," reported a journalist, "are glad to see John Bull taken by the horns." The House of Representatives passed a resolution lauding Wilkes. But after the first flush of jubilation, second thoughts began to arise. Few expected Britain to take this lying down. The risk of war sent the American stock market into a dive. Government bonds found no buyers. News from Britain confirmed fears of an ugly confrontation. The British expressed outrage at Wilkes's "impressment" of Mason and Slidell. The Union Jack had been flouted. The jingo press clamored for war. Prime Minister Palmerston told his cabinet: "You may stand for this but damned if I will."26 The cabinet voted to send Washington an ultimatum demanding an apology and release of the Confederate diplomats. Britain ordered troops to Canada and strengthened the western Atlantic fleet. War seemed imminent.
Although the Anglophobe press in America professed to welcome this prospect, cooler heads recognized the wisdom of Lincoln's reported words: "One war at a time." The Union army's capacity to carry on even that one war was threatened by an aspect of the Trent crisis unknown to the public and rarely mentioned by historians. In 1861, British India was the Union's source of saltpeter, the principal ingredient of gunpowder. The war had drawn down saltpeter stockpiles to the danger point. In the fall of 1861 Seward sent a member of the du Pont company to England on a secret mission to buy all available supplies of saltpeter there and on the way from India. The agent did so, and was loading five ships with 2,300 tons of the mineral when news of the Trent reached London. The government clamped an embargo on all shipments to the United States until the crisis was resolved. No settlement, no saltpeter.27
25. Wilkes's official report, Senate Exec. Docs., 37 Cong., 2 Sess., III, 123.
26. Norman B. Ferris, The Trent Affair: A Diplomatic Crisis (Knoxville, 1977), 29; Nevins, War, I, 388.
27. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., "Du Pont, Dahlgren, and the Civil War Nitre Shortage," in Military Analysis of the Civil War (New York, 1977), 201–2.
This issue among others was very much on Lincoln's and Seward's minds during the tense weeks of December 1861. The problem was how to defuse the crisis without the humiliation of bowing to an ultimatum. Seward recognized that Wilkes had violated international law by failing to bring the Trent into port for adjudication before a prize court. In an uncharacteristic mood of moderation, Seward expressed a willingness to yield Mason and Slidell on the grounds that Wilkes had acted without instructions. Diplomatic hints had come from London that this face-saving compromise would be acceptable to the British. In a crucial Christmas day meeting, Lincoln and his cabinet concluded that they had no choice but to let Mason and Slidell go. Most of the press had reached the same conclusion, so release would not peril the administration's public support. Mason and Slidell resumed their interrupted trip to Europe, where they never again came so close to winning foreign intervention as they had done by being captured in November 1861. Their release punctured the war bubble. Du Pont's saltpeter left port and was soon turned into gunpowder for the Union army.
The afterglow of this settlement left Anglo-American relations in better shape than before the crisis. "The first effect of the release of Messrs. Mason and Slidell has been extraordinary," wrote young Henry Adams from the American legation in London, where he served as secretary to his father. "The current which ran against us with such extreme violence six weeks ago now seems to be going with equal fury in our favor."28 This new current was strengthened by reports of the northern victories along the Atlantic coast—and even more by news of remarkable Union military successes in the West.
28. Worthington C. Ford, ed., A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861–1865, 2 vols. (Boston, 1920), I, 99.