Blockade runners of the American Civil War

• 1. Introduction

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  Blockade runners of the American Civil War were among the most audacious vessels ever to work American waters. On the night of the 5th of December 1861, the first Confederate blockade runner from America reached Nassau carrying 144 bales of cotton, slipping past a Union Navy that was still scrambling to patrol thousands of miles of Southern coastline. That single voyage was the opening act of a shadow war fought not with cannon fire but with speed, stealth, and smoke. How did a collection of lightweight steamers, mostly built in Scottish and English shipyards, come to stretch the Civil War by as much as two years? And what happened to the Southern economy when that supply line finally broke?

• 2. The Anaconda Tightens

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  General Winfield Scott was one of the few men in Washington who believed, from the start, that the Civil War would be a long fight. His response was a naval strategy known as the Anaconda Plan, designed to squeeze the Confederacy into submission by sealing off its coastline along the Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico, and the lower Mississippi River. That coastline stretched some 3,500 miles, threaded with rivers, bays, and inlets, and during the first couple of years of the war the blockade proved largely ineffectual because of that sheer scale.

  Wilmington, North Carolina, for example, was not brought under blockade until the 14th of July 1861, fully three months after Lincoln's April 19 proclamation. Critics were not subtle about the gaps. Thaddeus Stevens called it a great blunder and an absurdity, arguing that the United States was blockading itself and, in doing so, was effectively recognizing the Confederacy as a belligerent power.

  Lincoln's proclamation went further than geography. It threatened to treat crews operating under a Confederate letter of marque as pirates, subject to prosecution, which typically called for the death penalty. Confederate President Jefferson Davis countered with threats of retaliation. Britain, for its part, declared it would not abide by United States prohibitions inside Nassau and its territorial waters, a position that would shape the entire blockade-running trade for years to come.

  As Federal squadrons grew more capable and began setting up roving patrols just outside British territorial waters in the Caribbean, amateur operators fell away. The trade consolidated around professional sea captains using specially built steamers, vessels that were painted dark gray to vanish against the night sea and could switch from normal coal to smokeless anthracite as they approached a harbor.

• 3. Britain's Hidden Hand

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  When the war broke out on the 12th of April 1861, the Confederate naval fleet consisted of only about 35 ships, of which 21 were steam-driven. The Confederacy had no manufacturing capacity for the arms it needed. Britain did. And Britain's textile industry depended heavily on cotton from the American South, which made the relationship one of mutual desperation.

  The Charleston-based firm John Fraser & Company, established in 1835, became the commercial backbone of Confederate overseas supply. By 1860 its Liverpool affiliate, Fraser, Trenholm and Company, operated five seagoing vessels including the Kate, the Cecil, and the Herald, running regular routes between Liverpool, New York, and Charleston. When the southern states seceded, Fraser, Trenholm shifted almost entirely to Confederate business. Its senior partner, George Alfred Trenholm, would later become Confederate Secretary of the Treasury.

  In 1862, a Confederate embargo on cotton pushed more than 75 percent of British textile workers into unemployment or shortened hours. That crisis forced Britain to seek cotton from Egypt and India instead. The Confederacy eventually lifted the embargo and began selling cotton at reduced prices to regain British trading partners, then in late 1863 passed a law requiring blockade runners to reserve one-third of their cargo space for cotton shipments.

  The London Armoury Company became the chief arms supplier to the Confederacy throughout the war. By February 1863, it had shipped more than 70,000 rifles south through the blockade. Arms procured in England were typically shipped first to Nassau in larger British vessels, then transferred to lighter, faster blockade runners for the final run into Southern ports.

• 4. The Men Who Ran It

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  Major Josiah Gorgas, a West Point graduate of 1841, had spent years before the war moving through nearly every United States arsenal in the country. When he sided with the Confederacy and became head of the Confederate Ordnance Bureau, he understood exactly what the South lacked. His response was to turn blockade runners into the Confederacy's industrial supply chain.

  Gorgas worked closely with Charles Prioleau, who ran Trenholm's Liverpool office. During the summer of 1861, he stockpiled supplies and arranged the first major cargo run aboard a 1,200-ton iron-hulled steamer called the Bermuda. For procurement on the ground in England, he relied on Captain Caleb Huse, a West Point graduate recently commissioned in the Confederate army.

  Huse arrived in Liverpool on the 10th of May 1861, after stopping in Portland, Maine, and meeting in New York with James Welsman of Trenholm Brothers to collect travel funds. He found the rifle market already saturated with orders and eventually turned to S. Isaac, Campbell & Company to fill the initial purchase. His first shipment did not reach the Confederacy until later that summer. Huse remained in Europe throughout the entire war, arranging credit when Confederate funds ran short and representing both the War Department and the Ordnance Bureau.

  James Dunwoody Bulloch, half-brother of Confederate Navy officer Irvine Bulloch, served as the Confederacy's chief foreign agent in Britain. Inside two months of the attack on Fort Sumter, Bulloch was established in Liverpool. He arranged for the construction and purchase of the Florida, the Alabama, and the Shenandoah. In 1863 he contracted with the Laird shipyard for two ironclad rams. The Union's minister to Britain, Charles F. Adams, threatened that if the rams escaped, the United States would consider it an act of war. British authorities ultimately seized both vessels, and from that point on kept a close watch on Bulloch, pushing Confederate naval ambitions toward France. Bulloch then commissioned a shipbuilder in France to construct the Stonewall.

  On the 11th of April 1862, Confederate Secretary of War George W. Randolph appointed John Newland Maffitt as acting agent in Nassau. Maffitt's authority was sweeping: he was authorized to take entire control of all vessels loaded with arms and munitions for the Confederate States, and to select ports of entry and replace officers and crews as needed.

• 5. Ships Built for Vanishing

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  The vessels themselves were a class apart. Side-wheel steamers, long and narrow, with a shallow draft, were built expressly for speed rather than cargo capacity. Many emerged from Glasgow shipyards. A few were painted white to obscure their silhouette against the daytime horizon; most were dark gray for night running. When approaching a coastline, captains would switch from coal that produced heavy black smoke to a smokeless anthracite that left almost no trace against the sky. Some ships used cotton soaked in turpentine as fuel for a burst of intense heat and speed.

  The SS Fingal, an iron merchant screw-steamer of 462 tons built by J & G Thomson at Govan, Scotland, in 1861, was the first vessel to run the blockade from Britain. Commanded by James D. Bulloch, it was the last blockade runner to enter Savannah in November 1861, carrying a large cargo of Enfield rifles, cannon, and military supplies. After two failed attempts to break back out through the blockade, the Fingal was converted into the ironclad CSS Atlanta.

  Among the more storied vessels was the Syren, a privately owned iron-hulled sidewheel steamer built at Greenwich, Kent, in 1863. Owned by the Charleston Importing and Exporting Company, she made her first run on the 5th of November 1863, carrying supplies from Nassau to Wilmington. She completed a record 33 runs through the blockade. Her career ended on the 18th of February 1865, when she was captured in Charleston harbor at the Ashley River, along with the steamers Celt, Deer, and Lady Davis.

  The CSS Kate, a 165-foot wooden sidewheel steamer of 477 tons built in New York and purchased by John Fraser & Co., made 20 successful runs before running aground at Cape Fear on the 18th of November 1862. The CSS Robert E. Lee, a Scottish-built iron-hulled paddle-steamer commanded by Lieutenant Richard H. Gayle, was captured on the 9th of November 1863, off the coast of North Carolina. The Scottish Chief, owned and captained by Tampa, Florida mayor James McKay, made several runs carrying Florida cattle and cotton from Tampa to Spanish Cuba before being burned at its moorings on the Hillsborough River during the Battle of Fort Brooke.

• 6. Wilmington and the Final Gate

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  Wilmington, North Carolina, served as the central depot for blockade runners throughout most of the Civil War. The city's position, and the massive fortifications protecting the Cape Fear River entrance at Fort Fisher, made it the last viable artery into the Confederacy. Between October 1864 and January 1865, that single port received 8,632,000 pounds of meat, 1,507,000 pounds of lead, 1,933,000 pounds of saltpeter, 546,000 pairs of shoes, 316,000 pairs of blankets, half a million pounds of coffee, 69,000 rifles, and 43 cannon.

  On the 23rd of December 1864, the largest Union fleet ever assembled in the Atlantic attacked Fort Fisher. The fleet numbered 125 men-of-war and transports. While that force was blockading the harbor, an incoming blockade runner passed through the entire fleet and took refuge upriver. Rear Admiral Porter, commanding the eastern flotilla, wrote to the war department that the new class of blockade runners were very fast, and sometimes came in and played around Union vessels. They were built, he wrote, entirely for speed.

  The last blockade runner to enter Wilmington's port arrived on the 5th of January 1865. Fort Fisher was attacked a second time on January 13; after a two-day siege, Union Army and Navy forces captured it on January 15. When Wilmington fell in February 1865, the Confederacy's major supply line was severed. By the end of the war, the Union had captured more than 1,100 blockade runners and destroyed or run aground another 355, while reducing Confederate cotton exports by 95 percent from pre-war levels. The Importing and Exporting Company of Georgia, founded in 1863 by Wall Street banker Gazaway Bugg Lamar, was among the many private ventures left without a trade to run.