Terrible Swift Sword (52 page)

Halifax far to the north—but Nassau was
the busiest of all. Here the blockade-runners got their cargoes, which came
over from England in complete security, and here they delivered the cotton
which the outside world wanted so much; and no merchant had ever imagined
anything like the profits that could be made here. Freight charges on
Confederate imports could run to fifty pounds sterling per ton, sometimes to
eighty or a hundred pounds, and a cargo of five hundred bales of cotton could
earn fifty pounds for each bale. A ship that made two round trips between
Nassau and the mainland paid for herself and showed a profit besides, and if
she made more than two her owners grew rich. Sailors got the unheard-of wage of
$100 a round trip, plus a $50 bonus, and there were desertions from the
warships of the West Indies squadron as a result. A ship captain could earn
$5000 for a round trip, and in addition he could carry a certain amount of
freight on his own account, which was like owning a gold mine. One skipper
bought a thousand pairs of corset stays in Liverpool for the equivalent of
twenty-seven cents apiece, and sold them in Wilmington, North Carolina, for
three dollars each. He also discovered that tooth brushes (of which a huge
number could be carried in an ordinary carpet bag) could be sold in the
Confederacy for seven times their cost.
¹

The business started rather slowly.
During most of the first year of the war, cautious British shippers refused to
run the blockade with anything but their oldest, least valuable vessels;
wheezy, leaky steamers, and ordinary sailing craft—"unseaworthy slugs
which we could well afford to lose," as one supercargo recalled. The
blockade was very loose during 1861, and hardly ten per cent of the
blockade-runners were caught; it was partially effective then only because fear
of capture kept many ships in port and because the Confederate government was
opposed to the cotton exports which were the only substantial means of paying
for imports.
²
But by 1862 the United States Navy had learned its
trade and had put many new cruisers on patrol, so that getting through called
for faster ships; also, the cotton embargo was relaxed, and the fantastic
profits that could be made were beginning to be clear to one and all. So
British yards began to build ships especially designed for
blockade-running—long, narrow, rakish vessels of shallow draft and low
freeboard, painted gray to reduce visibility at night (one captain even made
his crew wear white uniforms, believing that it was too easy for Yankee
lookouts to see a man in dark clothing), burning anthracite coal which made
little or no smoke, with short pole masts, and smokestacks that could be
telescoped down to stubs. Some of these vessels were jerry-built, and racked
themselves to pieces in short order, but most of them were sturdy enough to do
their work, and although a good many were caught or driven ashore a great many
more got through. They had little trouble with the dangerous offshore shoals
and sandbars; the war had put scores of licensed coastal pilots out of work,
and these men, lured by Southern patriotism and high wages, could take the
blockade-runners in through channels the Federal cruisers dared not attempt.
³

The number of harbors
open to the inbound blockade-runners was limited. The Federal thrust which
sealed off the North Carolina sounds closed a whole series of ports that could
have been used, the occupation of Port Royal in South Carolina was even more
effective, and in the spring of 1862 Savannah was virtually blocked when the
Northerners bombarded and captured Fort Pulaski, at the mouth of the Savannah
River. But Charleston remained, closely guarded though it was, and most
important of all there was Wilmington.

Wilmington was on the Cape Fear River,
the hardest river on all the coast to close. The river came slanting down to
the sea behind a long sandy peninsula which was cut here and there by little
inlets, some of them deep enough for a shoal-draft steamer. The principal
entrance, protected by a dangerous shoal, was guarded by Fort Fisher, a work
so strong that the Federals never tried to take it until the war was nearly
over, and there were batteries to guard all of the little inlets. The
blockading squadron had to patrol a sieve forty miles long, and the
Confederates had signal stations all along the coast to tell blockade-runners where
the patrol was weakest. Traffic here could be cut down but it could never be
stopped, and so many blockade-runners went in and out that some Northerners
believed that the blockade-running captains had made a deal with officers of
the United States Navy. Secretary Welles never took any stock in these rumors,
but the mere fact that they were in circulation showed how porous the blockade
really was at the mouth of the Cape Fear River.
⁴
Like Nassau,
Wilmington became a gold-rush town, a swaggering staggering little seaport
that had suddenly become one of the busiest and most important places in all
the Confederacy.

Staid and respectable before the war,
Wilmington now was wide open. Speculators were drawn from all over the Confederacy
by the weekly auctions of luxury goods, and there was a substantial influx of
the kind of rogues who always appear in a boom town. The captain of one of the
blockade-runners said that a breakdown in law enforcement made it unsafe to go
about the streets at night; murders and robberies were common, and in daytime
there were bloody fights between sailors from the merchant ships (whose
pockets were full of money) and soldiers stationed in Wilmington. Agents and
employees of the importing companies lived high, spending money so freely that
food prices in the local markets went beyond the reach of ordinary citizens;
most people who were not connected with the import-export business left town if
they could, spurred on by the fact that in the summer of 1862 yellow fever
broke out, due partly (it was supposed) to the non-enforcement of ordinary
quarantine regulations. Convalescent soldiers from the Richmond hospitals who
paused in Wilmington en route to their homes enjoyed the stopover very much.
With all of the money that was floating around, the ladies' committee that had
been organized to provide meals for soldiers on sick leave was better financed
than any other committee in the Confederacy, and it had an infinite range of
delicacies to choose from when it did its marketing. The soldiers who got meals
at the long tables in the railroad station ate very well. On a marshy flat
across the river from the city, steam cotton presses had been put up, and there
the outward-bound steamers got their cargoes. The wharves where this was done were
heavily guarded, to prevent the escape of men who were trying to dodge
conscription, and vessels loaded with cotton were obliged to fumigate their
cargoes before they left the river, to smoke out possible stowaways.
⁵

. . . War is not just armies, and battles,
and clever campaigns laid out on the map and then ratified in blood. It is a
resort to force, to be sure, which is to say that men have temporarily
abandoned the effort to exert a reasoned control over events; but it creates
forces of its own as it goes along and then itself becomes subject to them, and
goes where they drive it. From the moment of its beginning war contains,
cruelly invisible, the shape of its unimaginable end product, much as a block
of marble contains a statue before the chisel ever touches it. What was
happening in Nassau and Wilmington and other places like them was a partial
gauge of the forces that were now at work.

These forces were at work elsewhere—in
Virginia and in Tennessee, along the Mississippi and in New Orleans: at almost
every place where the fevered bodies of the estranged sections touched. They
involved cotton, and gold, and the whole list of goods and services with which
the Northern and Southern people had supplied each other before they went to
war. They showed themselves first in easy money and the corruption that easy
money brings, and good patriots in both sections denounced the base cupidity of
profiteers. But what the profiteers were doing reflected not so much human baseness
as the peculiar stresses generated by the effort to conduct a civil war
according to the rules and standards conventionally applied to war with a
foreign enemy.

There is, for instance, the age-old rule that
one does not trade with the enemy in wartime.

One
does not: but the two nations which had made this war were not foreign enemies,
they were simply the estranged halves of an economic whole. They depended on
each other, and the fact that they were making war did not end that interdependence
in any degree. It simply compelled them to struggle against one of the most
profound economic forces in American life—the necessity for an exchange of
essential goods between the Northern and the Southern states. This force was
too strong for them. The exchange had to go on. Even as they tried to build an
impassable wall between themselves they were compelled to cut holes in it.

This
became apparent in the summer of 1862—the strange summer when so many of the
hidden compulsions of the war began to display themselves. Federal troops by
now occupied a good deal of secessionist territory—part of Louisiana, various
Carolina seaports, western Tennessee and a fringe of northern Mississippi, not
to mention a certain amount of Virginia: this, plus such important commercial
centers as New Orleans, Nashville, and Memphis. In these cities the intense
Northern desire for cotton, sugar, rice, and tobacco suddenly encountered the
even more intense Southern desire for everything from munitions to shoes, from
corn and bacon to medicine and salt. Canny traders began to make deals, because
unbelievable profits were involved; and governments began to wink at those
deals, even to encourage them, because it seemed that they had to if they were
to carry on the war, even though the deals gave direct aid and comfort to the
enemy.

The Federal
government outlawed trade with the Confederacy, but it believed that commerce
followed the flag, which meant that traders followed the army. (Sometimes,
being ardent men, they got slightly ahead of it.) The traders were accompanied
by Treasury Department agents, who enforced intricate regulations governing the
purchase, sale, and transportation of commodities in occupied areas, and who
were empowered to seize and offer for public sale all cotton acquired by the
army. Most business was done under Treasury permits, and Secretary Chase—who
drew up the regulations, appointed the agents, and issued the permits—explained
his general policy thus: "It is my wish to have just as much cotton,
rice, sugar and tobacco brought out of the insurrectionary states as possible
without . . . increasing the resources of the Rebels and thus prolonging the
war." This ideal was lofty but unattainable, because it was humanly
impossible to buy anything in or near an "insurrectionary state"
without increasing the resources of secession; the impulses set in motion by
circulating money can hardly be checked, and anyway one bale of cotton looks
much like another. A busy Treasury agent remarked that he could not possibly
"investigate the morals" back of any shipment of cotton, or concern
himself very much with where the cotton had been, how it got away from there,
or who had originally raised, owned and shipped it.
⁶
It goes without
saying that these agents, who had power of life or death over business deals,
came under great temptation. Some of them proved incorruptible, and some did
not.

So the occupied cities began to revive.
Nashville came first. Trade was dead when Buell's men arrived, in February;
there was no cotton, and although there was a great hunger for Northern goods
the Northern traders would not take Confederate money, and Tennessee bank
notes were badly depreciated. But the traders went scouting around, baled
cotton began to appear, United States currency started to circulate, and in two
months some 3600 bales of cotton had gone north, at an average price of $100 a
bale. (That price would go ever so much higher in another year; even so, it
represented about two and one half times the prevailing price at the beginning
of the war.) Confidence in the Tennessee bank notes revived, the market for
Northern products became brisk, and it was estimated that before the summer
ended Nashville would send out at least 18,000 bales.

It was the same in Memphis, only more
so. This city was occupied on June 6, and Yankee merchants lost no time. Within
a fortnight steamboats were unloading flour, coffee, pork, and salt along the
levees; it was said that more than two hundred traders were in town, and
Memphis merchants who wanted to do business either took the oath of allegiance
or bribed a Treasury agent. More than 8000 bales of cotton had been sold by the
first week in July, and before July ended the planters who had cotton to sell
were refusing to take even United States currency, demanding payment in gold or
silver. This infuriated U.S. Grant, who commanded in western Tennessee, and
who uttered formal denunciation of "speculators whose love of gain is
greater than their love of country." He remarked that U.S. paper money was
legal tender all over the North and decreed that anyone who, owning cotton, refused
to sell it for anything but specie would be arrested and forcibly dispossessed
of his bales. The same thing, he added, would happen to any trader who paid out
gold or silver. Grant's subordinate, bristly red-haired Sherman, who was in
command at Memphis, complained that gold paid for cotton went immediately to
Nassau to buy guns and ammunition, and cried: "We cannot carry on war and
trade with a people at the same time."
⁷