Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction
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Over the next two years, Semmes sailed his beautiful ship, with her 144-man crew, two big pivot guns, and eight 32-pounders, across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, never calling at a Confederate port, always replenishing her supplies from captured Yankee ships or from stores purchased by Confederate agents in Cape Town, Singapore, and the French port of Cherbourg. “She was built for speed rather than for battle,” wrote her executive officer. “Her lines were symmetrical and fine; her material of the best.” By the time Semmes brought the Alabama into Cherbourg for a badly needed refitting in June of 1864, he had sunk or captured 64 Union merchantmen worth more than $6.5 million, and had even sunk a Federal blockade ship, the Hatteras—all this at an original building cost of £47,500. While anchored in Cherbourg harbor, however, the Alabama was trapped by the Federal steam sloop Kearsarge, and when Semmes and the Alabama attempted to fight their way free, the Kearsarge’s two 11-inch pivot guns sent the Alabama to the bottom. “The Alabama settled stern foremost, launching her bows high in the air” and staying “graceful even in her death-struggle.” Semmes was rescued by an English yacht and managed to make his way back to the Confederacy in October, 1864, where he was promoted to rear admiral in 1865 and, ironically, given river-defense duty below Richmond.59
The Alabama and Florida were only the most successful of 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 forced private shippers to yield half their cargo space to government use.64
Neither private ventures nor government regulations were ever able to deliver to the South the kind of triumph over the blockade that the Confederacy needed. In terms of simple numbers, the successes of the blockade-runners appear impressive: over the course of the war, some 300 blockade-running steamers made approximately 1,300 attempts to run the blockade and made it through unscathed more than 1,000 times; even in 1865 103 of the 153 attempts to penetrate the blockade were successful.65 But the real success of the blockade has to be measured not in terms of how many cleverly designed blockade-runners squeezed through it but by how many ordinary ships from around the world never tried it at all. By comparison with the South’s prewar import-export trade, the blockade-runners amounted to little more than a trickle. The South exported fifty times as much cotton in 1860 as it was able to pass through the blockade during all four years of the war; nearly five times as many ships called at Southern ports in 1860 as made it through during the four years of blockade.66
; The blockade was a lethal drain on the South simply by the fact of its existence, irrespective of how many blockade-runners wriggled out of the hands of Federal sailors. It drove the costs of goods within the Confederacy to astronomical levels, wrecked the Confederate currency, and demoralized its people. Although by itself the blockade may not exactly have won the war for the Union, there it is no question that it seriously constricted the South’s ability to make war, much less to win it.
SUPPLYING THE WAR
American society and government before 1861 were utterly unprepared for the organizational demands placed upon it by a major war. As late as 1830, the entire Federal bureaucracy in Washington consisted of exactly 352 people, and in 1861 the total number of government employees (including non-Washingtonians such as postmasters and customs officers) numbered less than 40,000. The entire army Quartermaster’s Department civilian workforce in Washington embraced thirteen clerks. Up until 1854, the city of Philadelphia was still governed as a collection of twenty-seven separate colonial-era municipalities; it pumped its city water through wooden pipes until 1848, and pigs were still scavenging in the city streets in the 1860s. Backyard trenches served as toilets for much of New York City, and garbage and wastewater ended up in street gutters, where it bred cholera, typhus, and other contagious diseases. Louisiana did not possess a single macadamized road before 1861.67
The Civil War thus threw into the laps of the Richmond and Washington governments an immense and hitherto inconceivable problem in management. “Let the people know that we are desperately in want of men, desperately in want of arms, desperately in want of money, desperately in want of clothing, desperately in want of medicines and food for our sick,” Frederick Law Olmsted complained to a Northern official in 1861. It seemed to Olmsted that it ought to be possible for the North, with its resources, to “be relieved of our difficulties as a suffocating man is relieved by opening a window.” But in many cases the windows Olmsted needed to open did not even yet exist in American society, and a whole new apparatus for government and administration would have to be created to put those windows in place. “We have more of the brute force of persistent obstinacy in Northern blood than the South has,” Olmsted wrote hopefully, “if we can only get it in play.”68
The ultimate means for getting a Federal supply system in play was the secretary of war, Edwin McMasters Stanton. “He was in no sense an imposing person, either in looks or manner,” wrote John Pope, who briefly led the short-lived Army of Virginia in 1862. “He was below the medium stature, stout and clumsy,” with a “shaggy, belligerent sort of look, which, to say the least, was not encouraging to the man in search of favors.” A former attorney general (in the closing months of the Buchanan administration), Stanton possessed an immense, coarse black beard threaded with white, rude and dictatorial manners, and “a perpetually irritable look in his stern little eyes.”69 His appointment as secretary of war on January 20, 1862, to replace Simon Cameron, came as a surprise, and to no one more than Stanton. Not only was he a lifelong Democrat, but in 1855 he had personally snubbed Lincoln as “that giraffe” and that “creature from Illinois” when both were retained as counsel in a patent case involving the McCormick Reaper Company.70 Stanton was a solid Union man, however, and heartily anti-slavery. The fact that he was a Democrat could actually have been considered an advantage to Lincoln in trying to garner increased Democratic support for the war. And he had what few of the Republicans had: extensive experience in the inner workings of national government.
Whatever Lincoln’s reasons were, time soon justified them, for Lincoln could not have chosen a better foreman to run his wartime workshop. Within a week of assuming office, Stanton wrote to Charles A. Dana that as soon as he could “get the machinery of the office working, the rats cleared out, and the rat holes stopped we shall move.” Move is precisely what Stanton did. He became the “black terrier” of the cabinet. He drove himself and his staff of undersecretaries with maniacal fury and animation, auditing government contracts, reviewing and digesting military data for Lincoln’s use, intimidating army contractors, barking orders, and banging on his stand-up writing desk to make his point. He also took it as his duty to keep the Union army’s generals in line with administration policy. Where they did not, they found Stanton an implacable and unforgiving enemy, and sooner or later he had them sacked; where they did, they found themselves promoted. It was Stanton more than anyone else who would help bring Ulysses Simpson Grant to the command of all the Union armies in 1864; it was also Stanton who helped destroy George Brinton McClellan. “This army has to fight or run away,” Stanton growled to Dana, and Stanton took it upon himself to ensure that “while men are striving nobly in the West, the champagne and oysters on the Potomac must be stopped.”71
Determined to sweep up the entire War Department as his private fiefdom, Stanton began welding the various parts of the Department together into a unified and coherent machine. His first move in that direction was to have McClellan deposed as general in chief of the Federal armies in March 1862 and replaced in July with Henry Wager Halleck. In the process, Stanton sharply redefined the job of general in chief, so Halleck spent the rest of the war as little more than the means of transmitting Stanton’s policy directives down to commanders out in the field. To be fair to Halleck, there really was a need, in a civilian-run republic, for a reliable and competent organizer who could serve as that kind of liaison between the civilian leadership at the War Department and the military at the front, and Halleck performed the job superbly throughout the war. “Halleck was not thought to be a great man in the field,” wrote Dana, who joined the War Department as one of Stanton’s assistant secretaries of war, “but he was nevertheless a man of military ability, and by reason of his great accomplishments in the technics of armies and of war was almost invaluable as an adviser to the civilian Lincoln and Stanton.”72
In addition to the general in chief, Stanton next brought securely under his dictate the heads of the three most important War Department supply bureaus: the quartermaster general, Montgomery C. Meigs; the commissary general, Joseph P. Taylor; and the truculent chief of ordnance, James Wolfe Ripley. None of these men was more important to Stanton than Meigs, a forty-six-year-old Georgian who had only been promoted to brigadier general in 1861. The quartermaster-general was responsible for supplying the Federal armies with all of their basic hardware, including uniforms, tents, ambulance wagons, supply wagons, mules, cavalry and transport horses, and the forage to feed them—everything from hospitals to tent pins. And supplying the immense variety of the army’s goods was only half the challenge. The sheer volume of what was required of each of these items staggered belief. Already in September 1861, the Army of the Potomac needed 20,000 cavalry horses and a further 20,000 transportation horses just to do its daily business. On the peninsula, the Army of the Potomac needed 14,000 horses and mules (along with 26 wagons for every 1,000 men) to haul baggage and supplies. By the middle of 1862 that requisition had swollen to 1,500 horses weekly in six depots across the North, and by 1864 the demand had risen to 500 horses a day, with the government shelling out $170 per horse. Outfitting a new regiment with uniforms cost $20,000 per regiment (Brooks Brothers won a contract for 12,000 uniforms for New York state volunteers in 1861 at the discount price of $19.50 per uniform), and the uniforms could easily be worn out after three months of campaigning. Shoes were by far the worst problem, since the army could scarcely move without them, and when it did move, it consumed them at a rate of 25,000 pairs weekly.73
Since so much of this had to be done virtually at once, and by officers and clerks who had never before in their lives administered anything like it, the opportunities for mistake and oversight were legion. Individual states muddied the picture by launching their own procurement initiatives—Pennsylvania’s quartermaster general, R. C. Hale, set up a shop to cut and sew uniforms in Philadelphia, Illinois created a state arsenal, Massachusetts governor John Andrew sent a state agent to England to purchase 19,00
0 rifles—and Meigs had to struggle to wrench control from their hands in order to guarantee some semblance of standardization.74
At the same time, Meigs shied away from committing the government to the actual manufacture and production of its own supplies. Meigs was strictly a retailer; the actual production of the army’s goods remained in the hands of private civilian contractors. It also went without saying that, under these circumstances, the opportunities for fraud, kickbacks, and corruption were great. Nevertheless, Montgomery Meigs proved to be both tireless and incorruptible as quartermaster general. He reorganized the Quartermaster’s Department into nine division (for animals, clothing, transportation, forage, barracks, hospitals, wagons, inspection, and finance) and expanded the workforce in his office to 591 by the end of the war, with 130,000 other employees in depots across the North. At the same time, his expenditures rose over the course of the war from $40,631,000 in 1861–62 to $226,199,000 in 1864–65, and by the end of the war his department was spending nearly half a billion dollars a year. Despite the gargantuan size and frantic demands of his department, a congressional audit could not find so much as one penny unaccounted for in any major contract authorized by Meigs.75