THE BLOCKADE--THE CONQUEST OF THE COAST AND THE NEGLECT TO FOLLOW UP
THE ADVANTAGE THUS GAINED
As soon as the fact was recognized that war existed between the
Northern and the Southern states it was quite a matter of course and of
common sense that the Federal Government should endeavor to shut in the
Confederates by a blockade that should cut them off from all commerce
with the outer world.
The South was almost exclusively an agricultural country. It had scanty
means of supplying itself with any of those articles of manufacture
which enable communities to live and to carry on war. It was sadly
deficient not only in capacity to create arms, ammunition, and other
fighting equipments, but also in factories capable of turning out
clothing, shoes, medicines, and the like either for military or for
non-military use.
For all these things the Confederates depended upon importation, and
the obvious policy of the Federal Government was to prevent such
importation.
If that could have been completely done, the war must of necessity have
come to an early and merciful end. And there is no doubt that it might
have been done during the first years of the struggle if practical
common sense had been reinforced by executive ability commensurate
with the demands of the occasion. As a matter of fact this was never
completely accomplished until the war was in its last throes. To the
very end the Confederate soldiers were clad in English-made cloth, shod
with English-tanned leather, and largely fed upon Cincinnati bacon and
corned beef which had been shipped to Nassau in the Bahamas and thence
carried into Confederate ports by the daring of the English captains
and the English crews of English-built and English-owned blockade
running steamers. Very naturally the Federal Government understood and
appreciated all these conditions, and very naturally it sought to take
advantage of them by blockading Southern ports and thus preventing or
at least embarrassing those importations upon which the South must
mainly depend for its powder, its bullets, its clothing, its shoes, its
arms and its provisions.
Accordingly, one of the earliest acts of the Administration was the
proclamation of a blockade of the Southern ports. This was issued as
early as the nineteenth of April, 1861, two days after the Virginia
Convention adopted an ordinance of secession and thus made war a
certainty.
There is this peculiarity about the international law of blockade,
that the ships of no nation are under obligation to respect a blockade
until it shall be made effective. That is to say, until the nation
proclaiming the blockade can put a sufficient naval force at the mouth
of each blockaded harbor to prevent the entry of ships, no foreign
shipmasters are bound to respect the proclamation of blockade, and
their blockade-running ships are not subject to seizure in the attempt
to pass the paper barriers erected.
At the first, of course, the blockade of Southern ports was technical
rather than real. A foreign ship running in or out was not legally
subject to seizure or destruction because the blockade was manifestly
ineffective. But by impressing ferry-boats and every other craft that
could carry guns into the naval service, the Federal Government was
able presently to make its blockade so far effective that those ships
which essayed to "run" it did so at risk of capture and with the
certainty that capture must mean the confiscation of both ship and
cargo.
But so profitable was this commerce that the merchants and shipmasters
engaged in it were ready to take all the risks involved, for the sake
of its enormous pecuniary returns. It was a matter of easy reckoning
that a single cargo carried either way and successfully delivered,
would pay for the loss of the ship and cargo on the return voyage, and
leave a rich margin of profit besides.
Moreover a close blockade was simply impossible. Not one ship in a
dozen that attempted to pass out or in, was in actual fact captured
or driven ashore. The number of ships engaged in blockade running was
steadily reduced by the increasing dangers encountered, but the traffic
continued, with no effective interruption, until near the end of the
war, the chief effect of the blockade being to increase the profits
of the English shipowners and shipmasters who engaged in the perilous
commerce and enormously to enhance the market value of goods of every
kind at the South.
An ounce of quinine that cost $2.80 in Nassau was worth $1,100 or
$1,200 in Charleston, while the Confederate money received for the
quinine would buy cotton at ten cents a pound which had a value at the
very least of half a dollar a pound in gold at Nassau. On such terms
the human instinct of gain made it certain that the blockade, however
legally effective it might be made, would be broken through by daring
shipmasters so long as the war should last and precisely that is what
in fact happened.
But in aid of the blockade, and in aid of the general policy of
shutting the South in and compelling it to rely exclusively upon its
own inadequate resources, the Federal Government promptly dispatched
forces to the South, to capture the seacoast fortifications there and
to make of the coast a Federal instead of a Confederate possession and
stronghold. On the twenty-ninth of August, 1861, an expedition under
command of General B. F. Butler, captured the forts at Cape Hatteras.
On the seventh and eighth of November another expedition reduced the
works at Port Royal and Hilton Head in South Carolina, thus making of
the coast strongholds important strategic positions for the Northern
arms. Later the whole coast, except the great harbor, was conquered.
It must always be a matter of astonishment to the historian that
greater use was not made of the advantages thus gained at the beginning
of the war. It is true that the geography of the Carolinian coast
country specially lent itself to the defense of that region by small
forces arrayed against greatly superior numbers. It is true, for
example, that at Pocotatigo, on the twenty-second of October, 1862,
two batteries of artillery and a company or two of dismounted cavalry
numbering in all only 350 men, being reinforced late in the day by
about four hundred more, succeeded in repelling the all-day assault of
not less than three thousand and ended by driving the Federal force
back to its ships. This was due in part to the peculiarly defensive
nature of the ground and in part to the certainty that the Federal
forces could not remain over night at Pocotatigo without finding nearly
every man among them stricken with that dire disease, "country fever,"
before morning.
But all day long at Pocotatigo the Federals had the Charleston and
Savannah railroad on their left less than a mile away and with
absolutely no obstacle whatsoever between them and its possession.
Beyond the railroad line lay the high, healthful pine lands. In brief
there was no reason whatever, aside from mere blundering, why they
should not then and there have seized upon the Charleston and Savannah
railroad, made themselves masters of the entire coast, and proceeded
to the easy conquest or isolation of Charleston on the one hand and
Savannah on the other.
This particular matter is here mentioned only because it serves to
illustrate a larger truth. From the time when the Port Royal and the
Hilton Head forts were captured there was never an hour when a capable
and resolute general in command of 5,000 men--and 50,000 might easily
have been sent to him--could not have made himself master of the main
line of Southern communication, master of Charleston, master of
Savannah and practically master of South Carolina and its neighboring
states. An enterprising officer engaged in accomplishing this would, of
course, have been reinforced to any desirable extent, and a campaign
inland at that point and at that time would have promised results of
the utmost consequence.
Here was another of the errors that served to prolong through four
years a war that ought to have been brought to an end during its
first campaign, and the needless and senseless prolongation of which
inflicted almost incredible loss and suffering upon the South and
subjected the North to financial burdens and human sacrifices of the
most stupendous character.
The blockade was early made "effective" in that degree which
international law requires--so effective that shipmasters trying to
pass through it had no conceivable right of redress if their ships were
captured, or blown to pieces, or run ashore by the blockading squadron.
It was never, even unto the end, made so effective as to prevent
British merchantmen from trafficking at uncertain intervals between
Nassau and the Southern ports. It did not and could not put an end to
the importation of the necessaries of war into Southern ports; but it
made such importation so enormously expensive, even if measured by the
cotton exports on which the trade was based, as greatly to cripple
the Confederacy in its finances. The price of goods imported at such
hazard and with such difficulty was made great enough to cover the easy
contingency of capture upon the outward as well as upon the inward
voyage.
He who would understand the events of that period must constantly bear
in mind that during the first year or nearly that, of its duration
this war of ours was conducted mainly by incapacity on both sides, by
martinet captains and incapables in civil office who had been suddenly
thrust into positions vastly too great for their abilities.