Union blockade

• 1. Introduction

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  The Union blockade, proclaimed by President Abraham Lincoln on the 19th of April 1861, set out to strangle the Confederate economy by sealing off its coastline from the world. The task was staggering: 3,500 miles of Confederate shore, 180 possible ports of entry, and a Union Navy that, at the moment of the proclamation, had exactly three ships suitable for blockade duty. How does a nation enforce a chokehold that size? And what happens to a country - and a continent - when it does?

  By the time the war ended, the Union had commissioned around 500 ships. They destroyed or captured roughly 1,500 blockade runners. Cotton exports from the South fell by 95 percent. And historians have estimated that the supplies that did slip through lengthened the war by as much as two years, costing roughly 400,000 additional American lives. The blockade was one of the defining strategic choices of the Civil War, and its effects rippled far beyond the American coast.

• 2. Building the Fleet

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  At the time Lincoln issued his proclamation, the United States Navy had 42 ships in active service and another 48 laid up awaiting crews. Half were sailing ships. Some were technologically outdated. Most were patrolling distant oceans. One was stationed on Lake Erie and could not be moved to open water. Another had gone missing off Hawaii. The Navy Department, under Secretary Gideon Welles, had an enormous problem.

  Welles moved fast. Warships abroad were recalled. A large shipbuilding program was launched. Civilian merchant and passenger vessels were purchased for naval service. Captured blockade runners were folded directly into the fleet. By the end of 1861, nearly 80 steamers and 60 sailing ships had been added, and the total number of blockading vessels had reached 160. Another 52 warships were under construction. By November 1862, there were 282 steamers and 102 sailing ships operating together. By war's end, the Union Navy had grown to 671 ships, making it the largest navy in the world.

  The human side of that expansion was equally dramatic. By the end of 1861, the Navy had grown to 24,000 officers and enlisted men, more than 15,000 above its antebellum strength. Four squadrons were deployed: two along the Atlantic coast, two in the Gulf of Mexico. The Blockade Strategy Board, a joint military-navy commission, planned which major Southern ports to seize first as forward operating bases. The capture of Port Royal in South Carolina in November 1861 gave the Union an open ocean port with repair and maintenance facilities already in working condition, and it became the early hub for expanding the blockade south along the Atlantic seaboard.

• 3. Blockade Running as Business

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  Five out of every six attempts to run the blockade succeeded, at least in the early years. That ratio made blockade running one of the more profitable ventures of the war, drawing in private British investors who collectively spent perhaps fifty million pounds, equivalent to roughly four billion dollars in modern terms, on purpose-built runners.

  Ordinary cargo ships were too slow and too visible to survive the Navy's patrols. The runners that thrived were small, low-profile British-built steamships with shallow drafts and high speed. Their paddle-wheels, burning smokeless anthracite coal, could push them to 17 knots. Because the South lacked enough experienced sailors, most of these vessels were built, commanded, and crewed by officers and sailors of the British Merchant Marine. A Royal Navy officer on leave might earn several thousand dollars in gold per round trip; ordinary seamen took home several hundred. A typical runner could generate profit equal to roughly one million U.S. dollars in 1981 values from a single voyage.

  The runners worked out of Bermuda, the Bahamas, and Havana, staging goods brought in by ordinary cargo ships, then making the run to Confederate ports 500 to 700 miles away. Outbound they carried cotton, turpentine, and tobacco. Inbound they brought rifles, medicine, brandy, coffee, and lingerie. They charged between $300 and $1,000 per ton of inbound cargo. Two round trips a month could generate around $250,000 in revenue.

  The tactics at sea were careful and deliberate. Runners preferred moonless nights or the hours before moonrise. As they neared the coast, all lights went out and smoking was forbidden. Union warships did the same, leaving only a faint light on the commander's vessel. If a Union ship spotted a runner, it fired signal rockets in the direction of the fleeing vessel's course. The runners answered by firing their own rockets in random directions to scatter the pursuing fleet.

  The ship Banshee, operating out of Nassau and Bermuda, stands as a compact illustration of the trade's logic. She was captured on her seventh run into Wilmington, North Carolina, and seized by the U.S. Navy as a blockading vessel. But by that point she had already returned 700 percent profit to her English owners. They promptly built Banshee No. 2 and sent her into the same trade.

• 4. Prize Money and Boredom

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  More than 50,000 men volunteered for blockade duty, which was widely considered the most boring assignment in the war. The appeal was not the work. It was the money.

  Capturing a blockade runner meant splitting the proceeds from the auction of the ship and its cargo among the crew. When the Union ship Eolus seized the runner Hope off Wilmington, North Carolina, in late 1864, the captain walked away with $13,000. The chief engineer received $6,700. Ordinary seamen each took home more than $1,000. Even the cabin boy earned $533, compared to the standard infantry pay of $13 per month. The auction value of a prize varied wildly: the small vessel Alligator sold for only $50, while bagging the Memphis brought in $510,000, roughly what 40 civilian workers could earn over a lifetime. Over four years, a total of $25 million in prize money was awarded across the blockading fleet. One sailor, Benjamin Jackson of the West Gulf Blockading Squadron, earned $900 in a single year.

• 5. What Got Through

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  The blockade's most significant failure was not cotton - it was arms. Throughout the war, at least 600,000 weapons were smuggled into the Confederacy by blockade runners, the majority of them British Pattern 1853 Enfield rifles. Some 330,000 of those arms entered through Gulf ports alone. Historians have estimated those shipments prolonged the fighting by two years.

  As the war went on, the Confederate government in Richmond, Virginia, grew uncomfortable with what was coming through the private runners. Profiteering in luxury goods while soldiers went without drew open contempt from Confederate supporters. The government eventually regulated the traffic, requiring that half of all inbound cargo consist of munitions. Richmond even purchased and operated some runners on its own account to guarantee that vital war goods reached Confederate forces. By 1864, General Lee's soldiers were eating imported meat.

  The Union, for its part, chose not to treat the British sailors who crewed these ships as enemies. Not wanting to provoke Britain into a confrontation, Union naval commanders applied the principles of international law: captured British sailors were released, while Confederate crew members went to prison camps. The runners themselves carried no weapons, since the weight of cannon would have slowed them down. Blockade running was therefore, by the standards of Civil War combat, a relatively bloodless enterprise on both sides.

  In May 1865, the CSS Lark became the last Confederate vessel to successfully evade the Union blockade, slipping out of Galveston, Texas, bound for Havana.

• 6. The Confederate Economy Unravels

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  Cotton exports from the South fell by 95 percent during the blockade years, from 10 million bales in the three years before the war to just 500,000 bales over the entire blockade period. That collapse in hard currency earnings set off a chain of damage that reached into nearly every corner of Southern life.

  Shortages of bread led to riots in Richmond and other Confederate cities. The disruption of coastal shipping forced the South to rely on its railroad system, which was never robust enough to compensate. Lee's army, at the far end of the supply chain, was almost always short of provisions as the war entered its later years.

  After the Union seized control of the Mississippi River in the summer of 1863, it became impossible to move horses, cattle, and pigs from Texas and Arkansas to the eastern Confederacy. The South produced enough food in aggregate to feed its population, but it could not move surpluses to where they were needed.

  Salt, a detail easy to overlook, became a crisis in itself. Before the war, ships returning from delivering cotton to Northern ports were often ballasted with salt from a prehistoric dry lake near Syracuse, New York. That supply vanished with the blockade. Salt was essential for curing meat, and its absence compounded the difficulty of feeding Confederate forces. Union forces moved systematically to close down any Southern effort to produce it locally, destroying facilities at Avery Island, Louisiana in 1863, at a site outside Port St. Joe, Florida in 1862, at Darien, Georgia, and at Saltville, Virginia, which fell in December 1864.

  A less discussed but significant consequence was the near-collapse of the interstate slave trade. Shipping routes, inland waterways, and railroads that had moved cotton also moved enslaved people. The autobiography of H. C. Bruce described what this meant in practice, recalling the ruin of one trader: "From 1862 to the close of the war, slave property in the state of Missouri was almost a dead weight to the owner; he could not sell because there were no buyers. The business of the Negro trader was at an end, due to the want of a market."

• 7. Cotton, Egypt, and the World

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  Senator James Henry Hammond stood on the floor of the U.S. Senate on the 4th of March 1858 and declared: "You dare not make war upon cotton. No power on earth dares make war upon it. Cotton is king." The South took that conviction seriously. In a short-lived act of economic confidence, the Southern cotton industry refused to export cotton for a single day, imagining the resulting outcry would demonstrate its leverage over the world market.

  The response was silence. Britain had warehouses full of cotton reserves, and when the blockade settled in, British textile manufacturers began looking elsewhere. On the eve of the war, the United States had supplied roughly five-sixths of all cotton imported into Great Britain, or about 1,115,890,608 pounds of a total import of 1,390,938,752 pounds in 1860 alone. Nearly 80 percent of the cotton used in British textile mills had come from the South. When that supply was cut, the price of cotton rose 150 percent by the summer of 1861. The resulting unemployment in cotton manufacturing districts in Britain and France became known as the Lancashire Cotton Famine.

  But the blockade also created a winner: Egypt. In 1861, Egypt exported 600,000 cantars of cotton, one cantar being equivalent to 100 pounds. By 1863, that figure had risen to 1.3 million cantars. Nearly 93 percent of Egypt's tax revenue came from cotton during this period. Every landowner in the Nile river valley turned to cotton cultivation. The wealth that flowed into Egypt reshaped the physical landscape of Cairo and Alexandria, razing large portions of their medieval cores to build modern districts. The boom attracted foreign businessmen in large numbers, with Greeks forming the largest single group.

  The land that produced this wealth was owned primarily by a small elite of Turkish, Albanian, and Circassian origin, known in Egypt as the Turco-Circassian elite, or the pasha class. The fellaheen, Egypt's peasantry, were pressed to grow cotton rather than food, triggering inflation as food production shrank. When the blockade ended in 1865 and American cotton began returning to world markets, Egypt's windfall collapsed, contributing to the country's bankruptcy in 1876.

• 8. Constitutionality and Strategic Legacy

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  In 1863, the U.S. Supreme Court heard the Prize Cases, a direct legal challenge to whether Lincoln had the constitutional authority to declare a blockade without a formal declaration of war. The government's case was argued by Richard Henry Dana Jr., the U.S. Attorney who had also written Two Years Before the Mast. The Court found the blockade constitutional.

  After the war, former Confederate Navy officer Raphael Semmes raised a different objection. He argued that proclaiming a blockade had amounted to a de facto recognition of the Confederate States of America as an independent nation, since under international law, countries blockade the ports of foreign nations but close their own. By framing the action as a blockade rather than a port closure, Lincoln had, in Semmes's view, granted the Confederacy an implicit legitimacy it could then use to seek loans and buy arms from neutral nations as a recognized belligerent.

  The Union had calculated this risk and accepted it. To search neutral British merchant ships suspected of trading with the Confederacy, the U.S. needed the rights that came with a formal blockade under international law. A port closure would not have provided those rights. Britain's proclamation of neutrality on the 13th of May 1861, followed by Spain's on the 17th of June and Brazil's on the 1st of August, reflected the legal status the blockade had created.

  By the numbers, the blockade's record was uneven. It never fully stopped war material from reaching the Confederacy. But it did reduce cotton exports by 95 percent, collapse the Southern currency, deny the Confederate army a functioning supply chain, and cut off the salt trade that kept soldiers fed. When Fort Fisher fell in January 1865, closing the last major Confederate port on the Atlantic coast, Richmond was evacuated within weeks and General Lee surrendered shortly after. Most economists who have studied the Civil War give the blockade a prominent role in the Union's eventual victory.