Blockade Running
21 DECEMBER 1863
BLOCKADE RUNNING
The effect of Lincoln’s naval blockade of the Confederacy was starting to tell by the end of 1861, as cotton and tobacco began piling up on southern wharves. Unable to move their major exports, the agrarian Southern economy increasingly lacked a means to barter for manufactured goods. Adventuresome captains, willing to risk their ships in running the Union blockade, became a main source of imported goods. These captains have since been romanticized as gentleman rogues, though in truth, most acted solely for profit.
Blockade running concentrated in Wilmington, Charleston, Mobile, and Galveston. With time, it became as much a science as a fortune-dependent endeavor. European merchants would ship goods to “depot” ports in Havana, Bermuda, St. Thomas, Nassau, or Halifax, where cargoes were exchanged for cotton and transferred to smaller, often specialty-built, shallow-draft runners that could skirt just seaward of the breakers. Deep-water Union blockaders could not pursue that closely to shore. At the height of the practice in 1864, British-built steamers, capable of 14-18 knots, with a draft under 11 feet, were favored. These cast a low silhouette, with short masts and minimal rigging. In the first recorded use of naval camouflage, most were painted light gray for nighttime invisibility. Northern anthracite coal was most desired, burning with minimal smoke, though it was hard for Southern captains to obtain. Runners would wait beyond the coast by day, timing their run to arrive on the flood tide of a moonless night. Though the South desperately needed war matériel, the profit motive that drove the blockade runners was reflected in their cargoes–often dominated by such luxuries as silks, crystal, and French wines. The Confederate Navy formally commissioned some runners, but most captains were private citizens, drawn by huge profit margins. Indeed, even a few Yankee dollars found their way into blockade running enterprises. But as the Union blockade stiffened, the 9:1 odds against capture in 1861 dropped to 2:1 by 1864.
Despite these odds, more than a few runners made over twenty successful transits of the blockade. The occasional runner, such as CSS COLONEL LAMB, was never captured. She escaped to England after the war and was sold into the merchant trade. One might think running success provided a great opportunity for the badly starved Confederate war machine. But profit proved a stronger motive. On this date the Charleston Mercury printed the bill of goods for sale from an unnamed arrival: French woven corsets for $25 each; linen cambric handkerchiefs, $35/dozen; fancy flannel shirts, $230/dozen; brown cotton drawers, $130/dozen; and brown cotton shirts, $135/dozen.
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CAPT James Bloom, Ret.
Anderson, Bern. By Sea and by River: The Naval History of the Civil War. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1962, pp. 215-32.
Carse, Robert. Blockade: The Civil War at Sea. New York, NY: Rinehart & Co., 1958, p. 254-55, 263.
Fowler, William M., Jr. Under Two Flags: The American Navy in the Civil War. New York, NY: Avon Books, 1990, pp. 247-48.
Silverstone, Paul H. Warships of the Civil War Navies. Annapolis, MD: USNI Press, 1989, 222-23.
ADDITIONAL NOTES: It is difficult to calculate the overall efficiency of the Union blockade from existing records, as arrivals were not centrally catalogued. And certainly, the odds of success decreased as the war progressed. Yet the general circumstances probably favored the daring, with estimates of the overall blockade running success rate across the entire war being slightly greater than 50%.
CSS COLONEL LAMB remembers William Lamb, a Virginia businessman, politician, and Confederate officer who commanded the garrison at Fort Fisher from 1862-65, protecting access to Wilmington, North Carolina.
Margaret Mitchell immortalized the blockade runners with her character Capt. Rhett Butler in the novel Gone with the Wind. Though actual blockade runners may not all have been so dashingly charming, Rhett Butler is nevertheless accurately portrayed as being generally admired by the Southern aristocracy, despite his self-serving motivations.