v1.1.1 / chapter 15 of 93 / 01 sep 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* In mid-spring 1862, the war still seemed to be going the Union's way. The blockade was becoming more effective, and was reinforced by a successful Federal coastal operation against Fort Pulaski in Georgia. It wasn't airtight by any means. Blockade runners still managed to sneak through, and the Confederacy continued its attempts to weaken the blockade by distracting the US Navy with commerce raiding. British involvement with blockade running and construction of rebel commerce raiders led to international intrigues and tensions.
The Confederacy, attempting to cope with the setbacks in the West and threats of further setbacks along all fronts, passed a conscription act that was met by loud public protests. In the meantime, the social changes let loose by the war took another step forward, with the abolition of slavery in the district of Columbia.
* While the Federals continued their drive down the Mississippi, they also improved their grip on the main seaports of the Confederacy. In early December 1861, after the seizure of Port Royal Sound, Brigadier General Thomas Sherman had sent his chief engineer, Captain Quincy A. Gillmore, a few miles down the Atlantic coast to see what could be done to plug up another one of the South's outlets, the city of Savannah, Georgia.
Savannah itself wasn't a concern, since it was well inland, up the Savannah River. The real problem was Fort Pulaski, a formidable-looking pentagon-shaped brick installation, equipped with 48 guns, that controlled the mouth of the river. If the Federals captured the fort, the river would be closed to blockade runners. The Federals occupied nearby Big Tybee island and began to make arrangements for the fort's destruction. They found they had bitten off a lot to chew on, since Big Tybee was little more than a few patches of high ground, surrounded by mud and marsh. Dragging giant mortars and other siege weapons across the island to where they could be dug in and aimed at Fort Pulaski took hundreds of men. All the work was all done methodically and quietly. The men worked at night, talking no louder than a whisper, with their movements directed by whistle. Once the big guns were in place, they were carefully camouflaged.
On 10 April 1862, the Federals opened fire on the fort, with devastating effect. While the mortar shells were mostly ineffective and the big smoothbore siege guns weren't much better, the fort's brickwork was no match for rifled artillery, which punched holes through it easily. During the night, Confederate counterfire, which had been feeble to begin with, faded out. The next morning the Federals ramped up their fire again. At noon, the walls falling around him, the Confederate commander surrendered.
The rebels had been confident that the fort would stand, and its fall came as a nasty shock. Yet another port had been sealed off by the Yankees. This left only two Southern cities as major Atlantic-coast outlets for the Confederacy: Charleston, South Carolina, and in particular Wilmington, North Carolina.
Wilmington was on the Cape Fear river, which angled down to the ocean behind a sandy peninsula that was riddled with inlets through which a blockade-runner could slip. The Confederates had set up a system of spotters to tell the captains of the vessels when (literally) the coast was clear of Federal blockaders, so the blockade runners could make a run for the open sea. At the end of the peninsula was Fort Fisher, a seemingly much cruder fortification than Fort Pulaski. Fort Fisher was simply an extended series of earthworks, or more accurately sandworks, that hardly looked like a real fort at all. Appearances were deceiving in a way the complete opposite of how they had been at Fort Pulaski: Fort Fisher was well laid-out and ingeniously designed, and could stand almost any bombardment the Federals could throw at it. For the moment the Yankees didn't even try.
As a result of these two factors, Wilmington became a boomtown. With the Confederacy increasingly starved of manufactured goods it could not realistically hope to make for itself, even a small cargo that slipped through the blockade was worth a fortune. Wilmington became a wealthy and wild place, unsafe on the streets at night, but soldiers on sick leave who passed through the place on their way home found the local women's committees provided them with luxuries unheard-of elsewhere in the Confederacy. The blockade runners brought more than luxuries. That previous fall, the blockade runner FINGAL had steamed into Wilmington carrying 13,000 Enfield rifles, a million cartridges, two million percussion caps, 400 barrels of powder, miscellaneous artillery and other weapons, plus a large quantity of British-spun Confederate uniforms.
Blockade running hadn't been an earnest business in the first year of the war. In those days, British skippers only ran the blockade with their most worthless tubs, vessels they could afford to lose, and even then only about one in ten were lost. But by 1862, the US Navy had obtained enough ships and experience to give the blockade teeth, and as discussed previously the merchantmen gave way to custom-built blockade runners, built in British yards for speed and stealth -- though necessarily at the expense of payload. They were long, narrow, shallow-draft ships with low freeboard and smokestacks that could be telescoped down almost to the deck. The most advanced had steel hulls, provided by the new Bessemer smelting process that allowed steel to be produced in volume; they were lighter for their size than any vessel built by the Union, where the Bessemer process hadn't caught on yet. The blockade runners were painted gray for concealment and burned hard coal that made little smoke. They had romantic names: FOX, LYNX, DREAM, BANSHEE, STONEWALL JACKSON, STAG, LADY DAVIS.
Even though the race between blockader and blockade runner had become much more competitive, the Federals were still gaining: in 1862, they caught one blockade runner in eight. The profits were so fantastic that skippers still found the odds very attractive. Two runs to Nassau in the Bahamas, the most convenient neutral port in which to trade a cargo of scarce cotton for precious weapons and luxury goods, paid off the cost of the vessel, and any further runs yielded incredible profits. A captain could make $5,000 in hard currency on a single trip, a fortune for the time, and could carry a small amount of cargo for his own use, usually small specialty goods that could be sold for an insane markup. A seaman could make $100 with a $50 bonus, money he had no hope of seeing on a regular merchantman. With sailors loaded with gold and out on the town after a successful run, Nassau was an even wilder place than Wilmington.
The US Navy had its hands full with the blockade runners. Other ports were seized; that month, Apalachicola, Florida, and the seacoast towns of Pass Christian and Biloxi, Mississippi, were occupied without a fight. The blockade runners still continued to leak through, but the pressure applied by the blockade squadrons that made running the blockade so very profitable was by that same logic proving its worth: whatever goods the Confederacy bought, they were bought at grossly inflated prices, and with scarce hard currency.
* Blockade running was promoted in Britain by James Bulloch of the Confederate Navy. Bulloch had arrived in Britain in June of 1861 to act as a maritime purchasing agent for the South, working through a business firm named Fraser, Trenholm & Company. He had thought his mission a well-kept secret, only to be shocked when he soon read an account of it in THE NEW YORK TIMES.
There was a well-tuned Union spy network in Europe, keeping a close eye on the likes of Bulloch. The network was directed by the United States Ambassador to Belgium, Henry Shelton Sanford. Sanford spent little time in diplomatic activities and a good deal of time running around Europe, building and maintaining his spy network. He was rude, energetic, and efficient, and managed to regularly send lists of blockade runners to US Navy, detailing their cargoes and schedules.
Sanford regarded Bulloch as "the most dangerous man" the Confederacy had in England, and hired a private detective agency to keep Bulloch and his associates under close surveillance. If Bulloch was surprised to find out how formidable the opposition was, he was equal to it. It was he who had masterminded the voyage of the FINGAL, and in fact he had been effectively been its captain. Even though the American embassy knew that Bulloch had purchased the FINGAL and Ambassador Charles Francis Adams had officially protested such an activity going on under the supposedly neutral British flag, the blockade runner had sailed and managed to deliver an immensely valuable cargo of war materials to the Confederacy.
* Blockade runners were not Bulloch's only concern. While the privateers had been generally driven out of business, the Confederacy's experiment in commerce raiding, Raphael Semmes' SUMTER, had produced results. After escaping to sea from New Orleans in late June 1861, the SUMTER had spent two months cruising in the Caribbean and along the South American coast. Semmes then steamed to the North Atlantic, where he raised hell with Yankee merchantmen without opposition from the US Navy, which was too busy enforcing the blockade to search for a small needle of a ship in the huge haystack of the ocean.
After many months at sea and in bad repair, the SUMTER put in at Gibraltar on 19 January 1862 to load coal, only to find that no one would sell him any. The American consul at Gibraltar, Horatio J. Sprague, had pulled strings to ensure the Confederate raider stayed where it was. In a short time, the US Navy warship TUSCARORA arrived, quickly followed by the warships INO and KEARSARGE. The Federal warships took up stations to intercept and sink the SUMTER if she tried to leave port. Semmes conceded defeat, dismissed his crew, and took commercial passage with most of his officers to London, leaving behind a caretaker crew for the SUMTER. The ship was purchased for use as a blockade runner by a Liverpool merchant in December 1862, and foundered off Normandy not long after.
The cruise of the SUMTER had been a great success. With a minimal resources, the Confederacy had inflicted severe damage on the Union. In six months at sea, the SUMTER had captured 18 ships and sunk seven of them. Two of the others had been released on ransom bond, an odd arrangement in which the shippers were to pay off the Confederacy after the South won the war; two were recaptured; and seven were confiscated by Cuban authorities, to then be returned to their owners.
Encouraged by the example of the SUMTER, in the summer of 1861 Bulloch had secretly contracted a British shipyard for the construction of a trim, fast steamer. The cover story was that the ship was to be named the ORETO and was for the Italian government, but Ambassador Sanford was wise to the deal almost from the start. In July, he wrote Secretary of State Seward that the ORETO was being built for the Confederacy, and could "do us an infinite deal of mischief" if it escaped to the open seas.
The TRENT affair had badly strained Anglo-American relations, but had quickly blown over. However, the construction in British shipyards of the ORETO, and by that time, another ship known simply as #290, remained a source of tension between the two nations. When the American consul in Liverpool, Thomas H. Dudley, reported to Charles Francis Adams that the ORETO's engines had been paid for by the Confederate front company of Fraser, Trenholm & Company, Adams sent a formal protest to the British Foreign Office. The protest went nowhere. Adams encountered only bureaucrats who were "discourteous in their indifference and insolent in their disregard of the truth."
By this time, the British government was leaning towards recognition of the Confederacy and had no desire to antagonize the South. Besides, the Southerners were paying the British in gold and silver. Under pressure by Adams and Dudley, the Foreign Minister, Lord Russell, sent customs officers to inspect the ORETO, who then reported that the vessel "had no warlike stores of any kind on board." They conveniently disregarded such details as the gun ports cut into the ship's sides, but Bulloch had also been very careful to see that nothing incriminating was on board.
On 22 March 1862, Bulloch invited a group of guests, including a few women, to board the ORETO for its trial run. The ship left port with a British flag and British captain, cruised around the harbor, put its passengers ashore on small boats, and then headed out to sea. The ORETO arrived in the Bahamas in late April, took on ammunition and four 7 inch (18 centimeter) rifled guns, raised the rebel flag, and put to sea again, this time as the Confederate States Navy commerce raider FLORIDA. With the FLORIDA on the high seas, Bulloch intensified his work on the #290.
* The conscription act that Jefferson Davis had proposed in March was passed by the Confederate Congress on 16 April 1862, though the upper age limit was lowered from 45 to 35. A supplementary law was passed on 21 April that gave a list of exemptions -- government officials, railroad workers, clergymen, schoolteachers, apothecaries, and so on. The exemptions led to an abrupt appearance of new schools around the South, as well as threadbare apothecary shops. The law also permitted a draftee to hire a "substitute" from the pool of those not otherwise liable to the draft, which led to resentment among the poor that the rich could dodge military service, making the struggle a "rich man's war and a poor man's fight." It also led to the emergence of substitutes who repeatedly sold themselves and then deserted to sell themselves again.
Southerners were not enthusiastic about the act; the protests were loud and angry. Die-hard states-rights Governor Joseph E. Brown of Georgia declared that no "act of the Government of the United States prior to the secession of Georgia struck a blow at constitutional liberty so fell as has been struck by the conscription act."
The conscription act was a cause for Southerners to complain, and it wasn't the only one. There was the seemingly unceasing string of Yankee victories against the Confederacy, and the gradually constricting effects of the blockade. Butter was 75 cents a pound, coffee was $1.50, tea was $10. Cotton had fallen to 5 cents a pound. Salt was hard to come by after the loss of western Virginia. People were starting to complain about profiteering, with expatriate Marylanders and Jewish merchants being played up as villains.
Price inflation was cutting into the Confederate government's efforts to finance the war: the bias against tariffs meant they were low and the blockade was cutting deeply into imports in the first place, efforts to levy taxes were badly hobbled by the obstacles of State's Rights, and so the government had resorted to selling bonds. Nobody wanted to buy if the rate of interest was lower than the rate of inflation. The government was trying to compensate by printing paper money, a process that would go completely out of control. In truth, the economy of the South was beginning to fall apart.
There was also the fact that if Lincoln had overestimated the strength of Union sentiment in the South, it wasn't nonexistent, either. Graffiti had been appearing: "God Bless The Stars & Stripes!" "Rally Round The Old Flag!" One morning a black coffin appeared near the Executive Mansion; a hangman's noose was coiled up on the lid.
In a nation established by rebels, the highest authorities were the natural target of suspicion and hostility. If Jefferson Davis did not have the tact to deflect much of the abuse, he at least was tough-minded enough to absorb a great deal of it. However, he appeared "thin and haggard" to observers, and surprisingly told his wife: "I wish I could learn just to let people alone who snap at me -- in forebearance and charity to turn away as well from the cats as the snakes." It was a credit to Davis's intelligence that he recognized his own inflexibility. Unfortunately that was what he was, and he couldn't change it.
* On the same day that the Confederate Congress passed into law a measure pressing men into service, President Lincoln signed a bill into law releasing men from it. On 16 April, slavery was outlawed in the District of Columbia. Their owners were to be duly compensated, and eventually the US government paid for about 3,000 slaves, including, it is said, a payment to a free black who had bought his wife out of slavery and asked the government for compensation.
It was something of a small-scale experiment in Lincoln's concept for compensated emancipation, and a successful one, or so it seemed. The prospects of compensated emancipation working on a larger scale were unlikely, but the bill did have a far-reaching implication. The Federal government had demonstrated the will and unchallenged legal capability to abolish slavery in territory over which it had direct jurisdiction.
Exactly how far this capability would be exercised was still an open question. A few weeks later, on 9 May 1862, General David Hunter, then in charge of Union forces occupying islands off the South Carolina and Georgia coasts, took it into his head to declare the abolition of slaves in his theoretical domain of authority -- which included the states of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida,
Fremont had tried a similar stunt in the summer of 1861 and been caught up short. When Lincoln found out about the declaration -- from the newspapers, Hunter having not bothered to inform his superiors of his decision -- the President promptly countermanded it and informed Hunter of his displeasure. However, Lincoln also dropped hints that Hunter's notion might become a "necessity" in time, though if it did, that would be a decision "I reserve to myself."
