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

the Southern commerce raiders. Together with some twenty smaller cruisers, the Confederate commerce raiders accounted for the destruction of at least 261 U.S.-registered ships. After the war, the United States demanded that the British government pay reparations as a way of taking responsibility for the raiders its shipyards had built, and in 1872 the British settled the so-called Alabama Claims for $15.5 million. But that figure cannot begin to account for the millions expended in chasing the raiders down (Welles had to devote the attentions of seventy-seven warships and twenty-three other chartered vessels to chasing the raiders), for the trade that was frightened off the seas by the Confederate raiders, or for the 715 other American vessels that were transferred (either for safety or for the opportunity to evade Federal prohibitions on trade with the Confederacy) to other flags. The American merchant marine, which before 1861 held first place in the Atlantic carrying trade with 2.4 million tons of shipping under the Stars and Stripes, was toppled from its preeminence, falling to 1.3 million tons by 1870, and to this day it has never recovered from the blows dealt it by the Alabama and the Civil War.60

For all the destruction wrought by the commerce raiders, the one thing they failed to do was force any lightening in the pressure the Federal blockade was gradually twisting around the Confederacy. That meant that, in the end, the most effective way of dealing with the Federal blockade was to evade it. At the beginning of the war, the creation of a special blockade-running flotilla was beyond the power of the Confederacy, which had all it could do to build its few ironclads and buy its handful of commerce raiders. Instead, the Confederate government designated the Charleston firm of John Fraser & Co. (and its Liverpool branch, Fraser, Trenholm & Co.) as its European financial agents and left blockade-running up to the entrepreneurial ingenuity of the company. Fraser, Trenholm & Co. assumed all the risks of hiring their own ships and their own crews to run the blockade with Southern cotton or European weapons, but were also able to make immense profits.

The example of Fraser, Trenholm & Co. soon showed other British and Southern entrepreneurs how quickly a path to wartime fortunes could be blazed, and a series of private import-export firms based either in England or in Nassau sprang up to run cotton, weapons, supplies, and costly consumer goods in and out of Southern ports. The Importing and Exporting Company of South Carolina was created by a consortium of Charleston businessmen and run by William C. Bee and Charles T. Mitchel, who bought up two blockade-runners, the Cecile and the Edwin, in April 1862 to make the company’s first dash through the blockade. The Cecile made a successful round-trip from Charleston to Nassau and back, but the Edwin ran aground outside Charleston harbor on its way back from Nassau and had to be abandoned. Nevertheless, the venture was a smashing success for the company. The Charleston cotton that the two vessels dropped in Nassau netted the company $18,000, while the goods that were brought back were either sold to the Confederate government or auctioned off to the public for $90,000. The company had no trouble recovering its expenses (or the stockholders’ investment), and the endeavor paid Bee and Mitchell a handsome commission of $5,000. On its next voyage, the Cecile brought 2,000 Enfield rifles through the blockade, along with a rich cargo of private goods that netted the company another $100,000.61

One reason why private entrepreneurs were willing to risk their necks and their ships in this way is that at first there was comparatively little neck to risk in running the blockade. In 1861, the Union navy still had only a few ships on blockade duty, and not many of them had much idea of what they were doing; as a result, at least nine out of ten blockade-runners made it through. “So loose… is the blockade,” boasted Robert Warneford,

that running pays uncommonly well on the average. The capital employed in the trade, already enormous—there never being less than contraband of war to the value of two millions sterling at Nassau alone, ready for shipment—is rapidly increasing, and our seamen like the business immensely. The excitement inseparable from such enterprises,—the high wages paid,—an instinctive contempt and dislike of the bragging Yankees—attract them to, and retain them in the service; and there appears to be little doubt that, should the suicidal war continue many months longer, a new and formidable brotherhood of the coast will have been created, who will practically nullify the blockade.62

By the end of 1862, the only major ports still open to blockade-runners were Mobile, Charleston, and Wilmington, and Federal sailors (with visions of prize money dancing through their heads) had become more skilled at ship catching. Of course, as the risks went up, so did the costs, and in the interests of maintaining their profit margins, the entrepreneurs turned to the design and construction of ships specially designed for fooling Federal navy observers: the vessels were long, lean, and rakish, and burned smokeless coal. The longer and leaner the ships, however, the less capable they were of carrying heavy war matériel as cargo, and since the entrepreneurs mistrusted the Confederate government’s procurement policies anyway, the hulls of the purpose-built blockade-runners filled up with luxury goods that commanded fairyprincess prices on the consumer markets but did little or nothing to support the Confederate war effort. “It did not pay merchants to ship heavy goods, the charge for freight per ton at Nassau being $80 to $100 in gold,” wrote one blockade-runner, and so “a great portion of the cargo generally consisted of light goods, such as silks, laces, linens, quinine, etc., on which immense profits were made.”63 Eventually this compelled the Confederate government to begin operating its own line of blockade-runners, and in 1864 the Confederate Congress imposed a series of new regulations that forbade the import of high-cost luxuries and