Blockade Runners of the Confederacy
350
Blockade Runners of the Confederacy
350eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
A readable, exciting chronicle of the men and ships that ran federal naval blockades during the Civil War
Within four weeks of the fall of Fort Sumter, President Abraham Lincoln had declared a blockade of over four thousand miles of Confederate coastline, from Cape Henry in Virginia to the Mexican border. In response, professional runners, lured by both profits and patriotism, built faster, sleeker, low-profile ships and piloted them through the ever-thickening Northern cordon. The tonnage they imported, including items ranging from straight pins to marine engines, sustained the South throughout the conflict. This exciting chronicle of the men and ships that ran federal naval blockades during the Civil War also provides an overall assessment of the blockades conception, effectiveness, and impact on the Southern populace.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817390501 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 11/22/2015 |
| Series: | Fire Ant Books |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 350 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Blockade Runners of the Confederacy
By Hamilton Cochran
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2005 The University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-9050-1
CHAPTER 1
The Blockade Begins
On April 19, 1861, five days after the evacuation of Fort Sumter, President Lincoln proclaimed a blockade of the six Southern states which had seceded up to that time and which constituted the Confederate States of America: South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi and Texas. The proclamation declared them to be in a state of insurrection, and stated that in order to protect the "combination of persons, public peace and the lives and property of quiet and orderly citizens pursuing their lawful occupations ... the President deemed it advisable to set on foot a blockade of the ports within the States aforesaid." For this purpose, "a competent force will be posted so as to prevent the entrance and exit of the vessels from the ports aforesaid.
"If, therefore, with a view to violate such blockades any vessel shall attempt to leave any of said ports, the vessel will be duly warned ... and if the same vessel shall again attempt to enter or leave the blockaded port, she will be captured and sent to the nearest commercial port, for such proceedings against her and her cargo as may be deemed advisable."
Eight days later, the President issued another decree, extending the blockade to include North Carolina and Virginia. This made the blockade of the South complete — from Cape Henry to the Mexican border, four thousand miles of coast line.
At once a wave of protest surged northward from these two states. What right had the Federal government, they asked, to declare that their coasts and ports were to be blockaded by men-of-war when neither state had seceded? No answer came from Washington. There was a great deal going on at the capital just then. It is more than likely that this act of the President's was uppermost in the minds of the many legislators of Virginia and North Carolina when they severed their connections with the Union within the next month.
Elsewhere in the South, the first reaction to President Lincoln's announcement was anger. It was unjust and unlawful, they declared, and motivated as much by a desire to create hardships for Southern people as to prevent foreign commerce. But after Southern newspaper editors pointed out that it was virtually impossible to enforce such a blockade and that the whole thing was an empty threat, the anger of most Southerners turned to disdain and raucous mirth.
A man from Charleston, writing to a friend in England, in May 1861, remarked, "You have heard, no doubt, Old Abe has blockaded our port. A nice blockade indeed! On the second day, a British ship, the A and A ran the gantlet with a snug freight of $30,000. Today two vessels passed safely in, both British, I understand. A captain told me that one of them can carry more cotton than the A and A and that she is engaged at five cents a pound, which will give a freight of $35,000 to $40,000. Don't you wish you had a hundred ships for one voyage? You might become your own insurer with impunity."
Eastward, across the Atlantic, the reaction to the blockade was one of surprise and bewilderment. In spite of the bombardment of Fort Sumter, the people of England and the Continent still believed that a peaceful settlement would be found. Scarcely thirty days before the first gun was fired, official word from Washington stated that "the President entertains a full confidence in the speedy restoration of the harmony and the unity of the government." Again, on April 10, another dispatch said that "the President neither looks for nor apprehends any actual and permanent dismemberment of the American Union. ... He is not disposed to reject a cardinal dogma of the South, namely, that the Federal government cannot reduce the seceding States to obedience by conquest, even though he were disposed to question that proposition. But, in fact, the President willingly accepts it as true."
When news of the proclamation of a blockade reached Europe her statesmen were puzzled by the very use of the word. It was a novelty, they said, to see a nation blockade its own ports, since blockade is a recognized agency of war only between independent nations! Among themselves, they whispered that someone in Washington was either ignorant or stupid, or both.
In the light of subsequent events, most historians agree that the person to whom those terms applied most pointedly was William H. Seward, Secretary of State. Gideon Welles, the bewhiskered and indefatigable Secretary of the Navy, blamed Seward in no uncertain terms. He charged that Seward had placed the United States government in a most embarrassing position in the eyes of the whole world. Welles knew, as anyone with a rudimentary understanding of international law knew, that a nation at war closes its insurrectionary ports, but only blockades the ports of an enemy nation. Welles realized that Seward's blunder was tantamount to recognition of the Confederate States as a belligerent. As a belligerent, the South was entitled to certain established rights under international law. By the same token, foreign nations, who wished to continue trading with Southern ports, were also entitled to their legal rights.
United States Senator Charles Sumner summed up the feelings of many members of Congress when he said in a speech in the Senate, some years later, "Had President Lincoln proclaimed a closing of the rebel ports [instead of a blockade] there could have been no concession [of belligerency] ... the whole case of England is made to stand on the use of the word 'blockade'. It is this word which, with magical might, opened the gates to all those bountiful supplies by which hostile expeditions were equipped against the United States."
It is not the intention of this book to argue the pros and cons of the blockade as related to international law and politics. Rather it is the "bountiful supplies" and the gallant little steamers and their skippers who brought these cargoes safely through the blockade into Southern ports that form the substance of this volume.
If Secretary Seward was as careless and ignorant as Welles and Sumner and others declared him to be, he also might not have been aware of another vital principle of international law. It states, in essence, that a blockade, to be recognized by foreign powers, "must be effective." This was the law laid down by the Treaty of Paris. Since the United States government was a party to that treaty, it was up to Washington to make it a blockade in fact as well as in word. To issue a proclamation declaring that the entire coast line of the South was to be blockaded was one thing; to enforce that blockade was quite another. As Secretary of the Navy, it was up to Gideon Welles to carry out the provisions of Lincoln's decree. It was a task that only a man of extraordinary patience, determination and singleness of purpose could be willing to undertake. Welles was such a man.
He was well aware of the tremendous problems involved. In the first place, the distance from Cape Henry to the Mexican border was greater than from New York to Liverpool. There were many inlets and harbors along this great stretch, but few really good ports. In 1861 this was especially true, for only a handful of the coastal cities of the South had satisfactory connections with the interior, by railroad or by navigable rivers for any distance. In studying maps of the South, Welles and his naval aides counted ten ports of utmost importance which would have to be blockaded at once. These were Norfolk; Beaufort, New Bern and Wilmington in North Carolina; Charleston; Savannah; Pensacola; Mobile; New Orleans and Galveston. Of secondary importance were Key West and St. Augustine. If the Federal government could clamp an economic stranglehold on the South by rendering these ports useless to the Confederacy, it would contribute greatly to the over-all strategy of the war.
A less resolute man than Welles might have thrown up his hands at the seemingly hopeless task of creating the vast, properly manned fleet that was so necessary for the job. Welles recognized this, yet he did not falter for one moment. In his annual report for the year 1861 he described the situation: "With so few vessels in commission on our coast, and our crews in distant seas, the department was very indifferently prepared to meet the exigencies that were arising. Every movement was closely watched by the disaffected and threatened to precipitate measures that the country seemed anxious to avoid. Demoralization prevailed among the officers, many of whom, occupying the most responsible positions, betrayed symptoms of that infidelity that has dishonored the service."
These words were written in heat, anger and disillusionment at the alarming number of officers who resigned from the service during the first spring of the war. After the fourth of March, 1861, 259 officers of the Navy resigned their commissions or were dismissed from the service. Many others, who belonged to the states which had already seceded, had previously resigned.
Welles took quite a different view from that of Southern naval men regarding their separation from the service. One of their spokesmen, Captain John Wilkinson, who became one of the most intrepid blockade runners of the Confederacy, wrote that those who resigned their commissions in order to render aid to the South felt this act absolved them from any further obligation to the Federal government; that they had become private citizens and could go their ways without suffering the stigma of ingratitude, disloyalty or treason.
Unfortunately for Welles, the few naval vessels in commission at the time seemed to have been placed in positions at home and abroad so as to be of minimum usefulness to the Secretary in this crisis. As of March 4, the home squadron was made up of twelve vessels. Of these, only four were in Northern ports. Of these four, two were small steamers, the third a sailing store-ship. The fourth had returned from a cruise only a month before and was not in any shape to put to sea. Several of the U.S. war vessels in Southern ports were in charge of officers suspected of Southern sympathies and for a time it was thought they would deliver their ships into the hands of Confederate representatives. Luckily for Welles, he was able to order the ships home without losing any to his enemies.
U.S. men-of-war on foreign stations were as follows: the sailing frigates Constellation and Portsmouth, twenty-two guns each; the store-ship Relief; the armed steamers Mohican, Mystic, Sumter and San Jacinto. These seven vessels were all stationed on the coast of Africa. In addition, there was the steam frigate Niagara, twenty guns, en route home to Boston from Japan. Other U.S. men-of-war were scattered about the Mediterranean, along the coast of South America and in the East Indies. All together, the naval register of that year showed a total force of only ninety vessels. In addition there were some old sailing vessels that might have been put into commission. However, those in service had been found so inadequate in comparison with steamships, that they were laid up as soon as additional steam vessels could be found. The steam frigates Wabash, Minnesota, Colorado and Roanoke, forty guns each, were hastily refitted in Northern yards and rushed South as a gesture of enforcing the blockade. For months the blockade existed mostly on paper as far as its effectiveness was concerned. Naval personnel of all ranks and ratings was variously estimated at five thousand to seven thousand men — proportionately as inadequate as the number of ships.
Another major setback suffered by the Navy Department and the Northern cause was the loss of the Norfolk Navy Yard to the Confederates on April 20, 1861. Norfolk was in Virginia; and Virginia was on the point of seceding. The city seethed with excitement. Southern sentiment was strong. Many Northern members of Congress tried to persuade Welles to fire most of the Democratic jobholders at the Norfolk Navy Yard and put reliable Republicans in their places. But he refused, fearing perhaps that this might add fuel to the already blazing Southern fire. What troubled him also was the officer personnel at the Yard. A number of high-ranking officers, including Matthew Fontaine Maury, a Virginian, Captain G. A. Magruder, of the Bureau of Ordnance and Hydrography, and Captain Franklin Buchanan, were believed to be waiting only for the secession of Virginia before tendering their resignations from the service. Certain other officers of high rank were old and infirm and considered unreliable in an emergency. In spite of precautionary measures set in motion by Welles and the Commandant of Norfolk Navy Yard, aged Commodore Charles S. McCauley, systematic sabotage began under the direction of energetic young officers of Southern sympathies. They blocked the Commodore's attempt to get the splendid steam frigate Merrimac out of the yard and to a safer berth by sinking several hulks in the channel. Rather than let the vessel fall into Confederate hands, McCauley scuttled her at the dock. Norfolk mobs ranged the streets shouting, looting and drinking to the fall of Fort Sumter. They yelled repeatedly that Confederate troops were on their way to capture the Yard.
At this time Welles dispatched Commodore Paulding, who was the Department's senior officer, to Norfolk, to give McCauley a hand. After a quick appraisal of the situation he concluded that the Yard was doomed. So he lost no time in blowing up the warehouses, boat sheds, the dry dock and miscellaneous buildings, dumped all naval guns into the river and left the blazing place to the Confederates.
In no way deterred by this serious loss, Welles plunged ahead to carry out the great task that lay ahead. "I had been told by the President," he wrote in his diary, "... that I must take such means as might seem to me necessary in the emergency to maintain the national authority, and that he would share with me or take upon himself the responsibility of such orders as I in my discretion, should issue. When, therefore, the Cabinet officers ... were assembled ... I stated the necessity of chartering or purchasing without delay vessels for the naval service — to close the rebel ports, and assert national supremacy. All concurred in my proposition. Orders were, therefore, instanter written to the commandants of the Navy yards at New York, Philadelphia and Boston, to charter or purchase forthwith, twenty steamers, capable of sustaining an armament for naval purposes."
Although Welles issued his orders "instanter," they were not carried out nearly so fast as he wished. The whole area around Washington was in a state of turmoil. The capital city was separated from the Northern states and without mail or telegraph communication. Dissident elements were making hostile demonstrations in the principal streets and the mayor could not, or would not, control them. Federal troops which had been sent to the capital (many of them undisciplined and unorganized) with few competent officers, were delayed and in some cases stopped before they could reach Washington. It was to Paymaster Horatio Bridge, of the Bureau of Provisions and Clothing, that Welles assigned the task of carrying important instructions to the commandants of the Northern navy yards. Conditions were so uncertain and dangerous that Bridge had to take a roundabout route. He had to go by way of Wheeling, West Virginia, via the Ohio Railroad in order to skirt the state of Maryland, which had not yet decided whether to remain with the North or to back the South.
Meanwhile Welles took over a number of river steamers, armed them with small-caliber guns, sent crews aboard and set them to patrolling the Potomac River. It was even considered advisable to move the Naval Academy from Annapolis, since the place was seething with secessionist sentiment. Welles sent a messenger to Captain S. F. Du Pont at Philadelphia with instructions to charter and arm a vessel and send it immediately to Annapolis. One of its main objectives was to keep communications open by water with Washington. Du Pont responded promptly, and a week later contact between the nation's capital and the Northern states had been re-established. Midshipmen from the Academy whose sympathies lay with the South had already resigned and were on their way home. The loyal midshipmen were bundled aboard the historic frigate Constitution, which set sail for Newport, Rhode Island.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Blockade Runners of the Confederacy by Hamilton Cochran. Copyright © 2005 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction to the 2005 Edition Robert M. Browning Jr.,1. The Blockade Begins,
2. Du Pont Plays Hide and Seek,
3. Rich Cargoes,
4. Tom Taylor, Supercargo,
5. Runners of the Gantlet,
6. Ladies in Danger,
7. Beleaguered Cities,
8. White Sails in the Gulf,
9. Captain Maffitt, Prince of Blockade Runners,
10. Pursuits, Escapes and Captures,
11. The Two Battles of Fort Fisher,
Bibliography,
Acknowledgments,
Index,