Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

beam of light across the Cecile. There was no need for stealth now. Maffitt roared for full speed as the guns of the blockade ships leapt to life, throwing shells over the Cecile and striking her a glancing blow that knocked several bales of cotton into the sea.

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.

THE WATCHERS OVERSEAS

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