Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (52 page)

The Federal ships had the guns and the spotlights, but Maffitt had the advantage of speed and surprise, and together Maffitt and the
Cecile
slithered away into the night. The next afternoon, another U.S. Navy warship appeared over the horizon and set off after the
Cecile
. This ship was fast and gained on the Confederate ship. While he prayed for the coming of darkness, Maffitt had his chief engineer feed coal dust into the engines. The coal dust sent up a sooty cloud of smoke from the
Cecile
’s funnel, trailing behind the steamer in a fat black plume. Once the smokescreen was thick enough to conceal him, Maffitt switched back to clean-burning anthracite coal and changed course, leaving his befuddled Federal pursuer chasing the smoke. The next day, Maffitt and the
Cecile
were in Nassau.

Lying only 570 miles from Wilmington, Nassau was the chief port of call in the British-held Bahamas. There, agents, brokers, importers, and exporters flocked from England and the Confederacy with weapons and supplies to be run through the blockade. There, too, Southern cotton could be transshipped to British steamers to be ferried to England or France to pay for the Confederacy’s purchases and feed Europe’s cotton-hungry textile mills. In the heyday of blockade-running in 1863, a blockade-runner would clear Nassau every other day, on average. St. George in Bermuda, the Spanish-held port of Havana, and the Danish island of St. Thomas all contributed their share of low-slung, quick-driving steamers to pierce the Federal blockade. Meanwhile, Federal navy vessels could only hover impotently off the limits of British territorial waters in the Bahamas or Bermuda, or off the Spanish or Danish Caribbean islands, while the Confederate agents negotiated for the weapons the Confederacy would use against the Federal armies.

Once his ship had been emptied of its cotton cargo, Maffitt was ready to take on military freight from John Fraser & Company’s agents for the return run to Wilmington. In this case, he would carry 900 pounds of gunpowder, purchased in England through the partner firm Fraser, Trenholm & Company. As Maffitt realized, it was a cargo that required only one well-placed shell from a Federal blockader “to blow our vessel and all hands to Tophet.” Maffitt, however, was unworried. Under cover of night, the
Cecile
glided out of Nassau. At daybreak, three Federal ships were waiting for her, and sent several shells screaming through her rigging. Nevertheless, the
Cecile
’s superior speed soon left them far behind. Sixty miles from Wilmington, Maffitt slackened speed to take his bearings on the coastline he knew so well, and with a final burst of the
Cecile
’s engine power, he boldly stormed through the blockade line outside Wilmington at 16 knots, with Federal shells dropping around him. Nothing touched
the
Cecile
, and the ship crossed the bar at Wilmington with her precious cargo, which would soon be heading for Albert Sidney Johnston’s waiting soldiers in the west.
¹

The
Cecile
was only one of 286 blockade-runners that cleared the port of Wilmington during the Civil War. Taken together, ships such as the
Cecile
brought out 400,000 bales of cotton, which the Confederate government and private Southern entrepreneurs parlayed into loans, purchases, and acquisitions that helped to keep the Southern war effort running long after Southern sources of supply had been depleted. These same blockade-runners brought 400,000 rifles into the Confederacy, along with 2.25 million pounds of ingredients for gunpowder and 3 million pounds of lead for bullets, in addition to clothing, blankets, shoes, and medicines. The blockade-runners also bound Great Britain and the markets of Europe into a tight web of finance and diplomatic intrigue with the Confederacy, and kept the threat of European intervention in the war hanging like a sword over the head of the Union.
²

Lieutenant Maffitt continued to run the
Cecile
into Nassau and Wilmington for the next three months. In May, Maffitt was posted to a twin-screw steamer that he used to raid and burn Yankee commercial shipping. He was never caught by the U.S. Navy.

The
Cecile
ran aground on the Abaco reef in the Bahamas on June 17, 1862, and was abandoned.

Five days after the surrender of Fort Sumter, President Lincoln took his first directly hostile step against the Confederacy by proclaiming a blockade of all Confederate ports. “Whereas an insurrection against the Government of the United States has broken out in the States of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas,” Lincoln declared, it was now “advisable to set on foot a blockade.” Any ships—and this included ships under a foreign flag, not just ships registered as Confederate vessels—attempting to penetrate the blockade “will be captured and sent to the nearest convenient port, for such proceedings against her and her cargo as prize, as may be deemed advisable.”
³
In the strict sense, Lincoln announced the measure only as a military decision. Nevertheless, the blockade immediately embroiled both the Union and the Confederacy in an ongoing battle of international diplomacy that lasted for the length of the war and for years beyond.

This diplomatic tangle persisted for the Union because, whether Lincoln had clearly recognized it or not in 1861, imposing a blockade posed three thorny and potentially disastrous foreign policy problems for the blockaders. In the first case, a
naval blockade of the South might anger the South’s major trading partners. Fully a quarter of the British workforce was in some way connected to the cotton-textile manufacturing trade, and as much as half of all British exports were some form of finished cotton goods. Any attempt to disrupt the transatlantic flow of cotton might easily invite Britain to conclude that its national interests were at stake, and that might provoke the British to either break the blockade by force (at the least) or (at worst) actively intervene in the course of the war to secure Southern independence and bring the war and the blockade to an end.

For their part, the Confederates were fully aware of the value of the cotton export trade, and they expected that the loss of cotton would compel Britain, and perhaps France, to intervene before a few months had passed. Henry L. Benning of Georgia confidently declared, “We have an article which England must have.”

To deprive England of cotton would be the same as to deprive 4,000,000 of her subjects of the means of subsistence, and to throw them out to work anarchy and revolution. This she would never consent to. … She has ships enough to destroy the entire navy which the North would have, and to enter the harbor of New York and Boston, and with the improved artillery of the day destroy these cities in a few hours.
⁴

A week and a half after Lincoln’s blockade proclamation, the English newspaper correspondent William Howard Russell noticed an advertisement in a Charleston merchant’s office for direct sailings between Charleston and Europe, and when Russell wondered whether that might be a little premature due to the blockade, he was quickly told that cotton would solve that problem in a short while.

“Why, I expect, sir,” replied the merchant, “that if those miserable Yankees try to blockade us, and keep you from our cotton, you’ll just send their ships to the bottom and acknowledge us. That will be before autumn, I think.” It was in vain I assured him he would be disappointed. “Look out there,” he said, pointing to the wharf, on which were piled some cotton bales; “there’s the key will open all our ports, and put us into John Bull’s strong box as well.”
⁵

Southerners were also convinced that it was worth Britain’s while to remember that the South, which had always needed to import British manufactured goods as badly as Britain needed to import Southern cotton, would continue to be an important market for the sale of British exports. The Confederate states, freed from the federal government’s high import tariffs, would be in an even better position to buy British goods than if they had still been in the Union. The logic of commerce alone would seem to dictate that any attempt by the Federal navy to stopper
the Confederacy’s ports would sooner or later invite some kind of unpleasant action from the vastly superior British navy, and to help that conclusion along, the Confederacy sent its first set of commissioners to Europe in the summer of 1861 to appeal to France and Britain for formal diplomatic recognition and military aid.

Entirely apart from the realpolitik of cotton, the status of blockades in international law was a highly technical and tricky affair that posed problem of its own. Lincoln insisted from the beginning of the war that the Southern states had no constitutional right to secede from the Union, and when the Confederates insisted that their republic was a legitimate and independent nation and the civil war a conflict of two belligerent nations, Lincoln would reply that it was really only an insurrection against Federal authority. This involved more than simple bandying about. For the British in particular, with their outsize naval power, it was possible for a blockade to cut off an enemy nation’s inflow of supplies, serve as an early-warning tripwire in the event of an attempted invasion, and act as a net to apprehend an enemy nation’s privateers before they could escape onto the world’s oceans and damage British commerce—all at once. The more complex blockades became, the more urgent the need to define how they operated, since the seizure of ships and cargoes attempting to penetrate the blockade included the shipping of neutrals whose antagonism the British might not want to inflame.

The first serious attempt at defining the operations of blockades—the Declaration of Paris—bound its adherents to four rules. Privateering must be abolished—in other words, letters of marque and reprisal (government licenses to private shipping to prey on the commerce of an enemy nation) must end. The ships and cargoes of neutral-nation owners must be protected from confiscation if stopped by a blockade (provided the cargoes were not actual contraband of war). The cargoes of neutral-nation owners must be protected from confiscation even if they were being shipped in vessels owned by the blockaders’ enemy (although no such protection was extended to the ships or the cargoes actually owned by that enemy). And blockades, to be legal, must be effective, not mere token or “paper” blockades. The Declaration of Paris offered no actual definition of what an
effective
blockade would look like, but the presumption was that everyone would know it when they saw it.

The first point operated very much to the favor of Great Britain, since it removed a threat that British commerce around the world dreaded; the second and third bought the adherence of the other major European powers, since it guarded their seaborne commerce from arbitrary seizure by British warships. However, the United States declined to endorse the Declaration of Paris. The secretary of state at the time, William Marcy, was happy to agree to the second and third points, but the United States had always looked to fall back on privateering as a way to augment its naval forces in the event of war, without having to pay for the privateers’ upkeep in time of peace; the absence of any working definition of an
effective
blockade provided another annoyance that Marcy objected to. Marcy proposed an
amendment that would have exempted even the private property of belligerents from seizure by a blockade. But the British government would not agree to Marcy’s amendment, and there the matter rested until the outbreak of the Civil War.
⁶

The customary alternative to blockade in the case of insurrections was a declaration of closure of ports (since any sovereign nation has the prerogative of closing its ports to foreign shipping). Closure of ports assumed that the insurrection was a localized and small-scale affair; ships of foreign nations might defy the closure and trade in those ports, but they were served notice that, at the end of the insurrection, ships that ignored the closure would be assessed for duties otherwise owed to the original government. It did not actually prevent outside supplies from reaching the ports and hands of rebels, and the most that the Federal navy could have done under those terms was stop a ship trying to enter a closed port, register a warning on the ship’s log, and then again stop the ship when it made a second attempt to enter. This left Lincoln with the problem of defining and imposing a blockade upon an insurrection—which was a contradiction in terms of international law.
⁷

At the same time, though, Lincoln carefully avoided any use of terms suggesting that the Confederacy was a legitimate sovereign nation. Never would he use the term “Confederate States,” and he would describe them only as a “combination” that federal authority found “too powerful to suppress” by normal police action. He would
act
by blockade, as though the Confederacy were a sovereign nation, but he would
talk
insurrection, as if the Confederacy didn’t exist. In the eyes of the European powers, however, a blockade was a blockade, and in that case, other nations had one of three options open to them. They could agree to the pretense that the Confederacy was only an insurrection and forbid their own shipping to have any contact with rebel-held ports. They could agree that the Confederacy was not exactly a sovereign nation, but they could also point to the fact that it was a large-scale affair with a functioning government of its own, conducting what amounted in fact to a civil war. Under those circumstances, they might declare neutrality and concede belligerent rights to the Confederates. Conceding belligerent rights recognized that the conflict had moved from the realm of a mere uprising, to be suppressed as a police action, to a full-scale war, to be conducted by the international laws of war; this, in turn, would allow Confederate agents, emissaries, and suppliers to operate on foreign shores within certain limited spheres of action. Or they could go all the way up to formal diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy. Recognition might then trigger a
Confederate appeal, as a nation to other nations, for allies, for international mediation, or for foreign intervention.