Running the Blockade-Thomas E. Taylor

on the whole we may safely conclude that a commercial blockade is certainly no easier than it was in the sixties many indications from the following pages show how difficult it is to maintain the blockade even of half a dozen ports if you are unable to intercept the regular runners at their points of departure this a force without undisputed mastery of the sea could never effect to a sufficient extent The lesson, then, that the following pages most clearly teach us is, that the danger of the British Isles being blockaded by any conceivable combination of hostile powers, so as to reduce her even approximately near starvation, may be dismissed as outside the region of practical strategy.

And in the next place they show us the vast importance of maintaining in our Navy an adequate force of vessels of a type calculated to render a commercial blockade really effective.

What Mr. Taylor was able to do with one little steamer to prolong Lee's resistance is a lesson to be remembered besides Dundonald's operations on the coast of Spain.

Such are a few of the considerations which Mr. Taylor's book suggests.

Different men will draw different lessons from the facts it presents, but its value as the work of a man of unequaled experience in the working of a great blockade will be admitted by all.

and whatever weight may be attached to the author's conclusions from his practical experience, the little work will amply justify its existence if it in any way stimulates interest in the practical side of a subject which naval writers seem inclined to leave too much in the hands of international lawyers.

JULIAN CORBETT MAY, 1896 END OF INTRODUCTION CHAPTER I.

HOW I BEGAN FEELING IN LIVERPOOL DECLARATION OF BLOCKADE ITS IMMEDIATE RESULT EFFECT ON TRADE IN LIVERPOOL THE THEORY OF BLOCKADES ATTITUDE OF THE FEDERAL STATES SEABOARD OF THE SUCCEEDING STATES THE FEDERAL NAVY ENERGY OF THE NORTHERN STATES additions to the federal fleet, position of the southerners at sea, want of building yards and material, commerce destroyers, the Merrimack and the Monitor, the Alabama and her consorts, attitude of Great Britain, a royal proclamation, preparation for blockade running, amateurish efforts, daring attempts, the Trent affair, launched as a blockade runner at the outbreak of the great american civil war i was serving as assistant to a firm of liverpool merchants trading chiefly with india and the united states there was little in my life at the outset to foretell the full taste of danger excitement and venture which it was my fortune so early to enjoy i had nothing to hope for beyond the usual life of office routine and a dim chance of a partnership abroad in the future young as i was my interest in the coming struggle was deeply aroused from the position i occupied its significance was brought home to me with the absorbing interest of a factor in my career my own fortunes and those of my nearest friends seemed at their outset to be bound up in a piece of history that promised to leave its mark upon the world nowhere indeed out of america was the succession of the southern states more keenly watched or canvassed than in liverpool offices and upon the exchange of the city which american trade had begotten and nursed and the particular aspect of the impending war was most calculated to fill the imagination of youngsters like myself who were awakening with the dreams of boyhood to the excitements of real life It will be remembered that as soon as war was seen to be inevitable, President Lincoln sanctioned the heroic measure of attempting to choke secession by closing every orifice through which supplies could be drawn.

And in the middle of April 1861, rebellion was turned into civil war by his declaring the whole of the southern ports in a state of blockade.

one of the immediate results of this act of president lincoln was the prompt acknowledgment of the south as belligerents by england and france yet the federal states persisted in maintaining that the confederates were rebels and that whosoever ventured to recognize them as belligerents must be regarded as friends of rebels and no friends of the north They ignored the fact that their interference with neutral trade by this declaration of blockade was a virtual concession of belligerency to the South.

A declaration of blockade presupposes a state of war and not mere rebellion.

And the claim by the Federals of a right to seize neutral vessels attempting to break a blockade was one which can be exercised only by a belligerent.

Exercised by anyone else, it is mere piracy.

the effect of the news on the liverpool exchange it is needless to describe by the scratch of a foreign pen a blow that was without precedent was struck in the chief trade of the port so prodigious indeed was this first act of war that for some time there was a doubt whether the neutral powers would recognise it only five years before the powers assembled at paris to wind up the russian war had by solemn agreement declared as the final and universal law of nations that blockades to be binding must be effective that is to say that all the ports declared to be blockaded must be actually invested or at least so closely watched by a cruising squadron that no ship can attempt to leave or enter without manifest danger of capture Now, as the seaboard of the seceding states extended from the River Potomac in Virginia, above Cape Hatteras, down to the Rio Grande, the southern frontier of Texas, the coastline which the federal government had to watch effectively was some 3,000 miles in length.

It was studded, moreover, at wide intervals with ten or a dozen ports of first-rate importance.

total fleet of the united states when the war broke out consisted of less than one hundred and fifty vessels of which fully one-third were quite unserviceable about forty had crews the rest were out of commission and of these ten or eleven of the best were lying at the norfolk navy yard and fell into the hands of the confederates from these figures it will be seen therefore how impossible it was at first to maintain the blockade which the northerners had declared and how ineffectual it must be seeing the length of coast-line to be watched with their usual energy however the northerners set to work to increase their fleet within very few weeks over one hundred and fifty vessels had been purchased and equipped for sea and more than fifty ironclads and gunboats laid down and rapidly pushed forward toward completion in addition to these a large number of river craft were requisitioned and protected by bullet-proof iron for service on the rivers but even with these vigorous measures the blockade was anything but effective during the first eighteen months or two years of the war but the northerners steadily and by almost superhuman efforts increased their fleet and at the beginning of eighteen sixty five had so far succeeded that they possessed a fleet of nearly seven hundred vessels of which some one hundred and fifty were employed upon the blockade of wilmington and charleston alone and patrolling their adjacent waters it can easily be imagined therefore that attempting to get in and out of those ports in the latter months of eighteen sixty four and the early ones of eighteen sixty five was a very different business from the condition of affairs which existed earlier in the war When the above ports fell into the hands of the northerners, the blockade, considering the nature of the coast-line and the types of vessels employed as blockaders and runners, was to all intents and purposes as effective as could be expected.

For the blockading fleet consisted of almost every description of craft, from the old-fashioned sixty-gun frigate to the modern ironsides and monitors, supplemented by dozens of merchant steamers converted into gunboats.

not very formidable perhaps as warships but still dangerous to blockade runners especially when fast the southerners on the other hand were practically without any navy with the exception of a few old wooden vessels which they seized at norfolk navy yard at the outbreak of the war and as they were almost entirely devoid of engineering works material or skilled labor they could do but little to compete with the north upon the ocean Their naval efforts were chiefly in the direction of supplying themselves from outside sources with commerce destroyers, such as the Alabama, Florida, Shenandoah, Georgia, etc.

Though from the wretched and scanty material which they possessed they succeeded in building two or three formidable ironclads.

But their engines and armament were defective and their crews unskilled.

Notwithstanding these drawbacks, however, the Merrimack, one of the old wooden steamers which they had seized at Norfolk, and which they had converted into an ironclad by covering the hull with railway iron, fought a gallant fight in Hampton Roads with the celebrated Monitor, after having destroyed on the previous day the Congress and Cumberland, two large northern warships.

Another ironclad was also improvised by the southerners at Mobile.

She was called the Tennessee, and was altogether a more formidable craft than the Merrimack, both as regards armament and size, but like the Merrimack was terribly defective in engine power.

When Farragut attacked Mobile, she did considerable damage to his fleet, and for a time engaged it single-handedly, but at last was forced to haul down her flag.

the confederates also built another small ironclad at wilmington on the same lines as the merrimac and tennessee but unfortunately she ran aground on her passage down the river in order to attack the blockaders outside and became a total wreck In addition to the ships I have mentioned, they possessed the Sumter, Rappahannock, Tallahassee, steamers, and several sailing vessels.