The American Civil War

by John Keegan

  Alabama was the most successful of the Confederacy’s twelve commerce raiders. Collectively they inflicted about twenty million dollars of damage on Union shipping and permanently altered the balance in world trade to Britain’s advantage. So high did insurance costs rise on U.S.-flagged ships that traders generally, and American exporters in particular, took to shipping cargos in non-U.S. bottoms, progressively reducing the size of the U.S. merchant fleet, until, from having been larger than and a vigorous competitor with Britain’s, it ceased to be an important part of world commerce carrying. It never recovered from the damage done by the Confederacy’s raiders.

  The commerce-raiding campaign was a Confederate success, as was its blockade-running. The losses, however, made the effort too costly to be really worth the candle. The Confederacy’s personnel, from Secretary Mallory to Semmes, were men of ability; to Mallory is due the credit of inaugurating ironclad warfare in world naval affairs. The base of the effort, however, was too small to have offered the Confederacy any prospect of success in offsetting the strategic balance.

  The enormous length of the American coastline, the extent of its territorial waters, and the importance of seaborne trade to the American economy would have led to a pre-war appreciation that naval combat would play a crucial role in any war between North and South. So it did, to an extent. That extent, however, was limited, for simple reasons. The North was vulnerable to attack at sea, but the South’s naval power was too small to do the necessary damage. The South was also vulnerable but succeeded in evading the North’s much greater power by resort to irregular methods of sea warfare, commerce-raiding and blockade-running.

  For such a small service with a short history, the United States Navy had already acquired a formidable reputation by 1861. Although it had only forty-two warships in commission, the fleet had won victories far from home in its seventy years’ existence. Its frigates had triumphed in several notable single-ship actions against the Royal Navy during the War of 1812, and it had operated as far away as the Mediterranean in the campaign against the North African beys at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Its seamen were of outstanding quality and its officers equal in competence to those of the Royal Navy. Long ago its ships had been at the forefront of the builder’s craft. At the outbreak of conflict, however, the survivors were all antiquated. None had been launched later than 1822. Some dated from the eighteenth century. Almost all were sailing vessels, armed with broadside-firing cannon. The South’s raising and rebuilding of the USS Merrimack as the armoured warship CSS Virginia revealed starkly how outdated all were. Only the almost miraculous appearance of the USS Monitor averted the Union fleet’s complete destruction when the two ironclads met in Hampton Roads on March 9, 1862.

  Riverine warfare, particularly on the Mississippi and its tributaries, was dominated by the North, which controlled and built the largest number of armed river craft. On the high seas, however, it was the South that was most active, because of its recourse to blockade-running and commerce-raiding, with fast ships built or bought abroad. Though it did not rescue the South from shortage, blockade-running was essential to its war economy. There were several thousand blockade-runners active during the war, of which 1,500 were captured by the several hundred U.S. Navy ships searching for them. Still, five out of six blockade-runners got through; it was very much in their captains’ and crews’ interests to take the risks, since the return on a successful voyage was enormous, several hundred dollars even for ordinary seamen. On the outward voyage the blockade runners shipped cotton, on the inward military supplies but also luxury goods, usually the private property of the captain. The danger of interception chiefly arose near the home port, of which the number open dwindled as the war drew out. The U.S. Navy became very skilled at setting traps for the runners, its task considerably eased because destinations were so predictable. The blockade-runners, with the assistance of shore parties, also became successful at avoiding interception. They made use of bad weather and the hours of darkness to run close inshore, where the removal of navigation markers and lights put their pursuers at risk.

  As the blockade heightened, the South turned to active measures. At the outset the Richmond government had issued letters of marque, in effect licences to sail as pirates, to private shipowners. Twenty-four privateers sailed under the Confederate flag. Privateering, however, died out when the European powers closed their ports to them and their prizes. The privateering had the effect, however, of driving up maritime insurance rates to exorbitant levels and forcing U.S. shipowners to reflag their vessels under non-American flags. As privateering lost effectiveness, the Southern government, at the behest of Secretary Mallory, a pre-war chairman of the U.S. Senate’s naval affairs committee, began to commission official commerce-raiders. The first was the CSS Sumter, commanded by Raphael Semmes. Beginning in June 1861, he captured six Northern merchantmen, which he took into ports in Cuba. His campaign, however, was frustrated by the Spanish colonial government, which returned the prizes to their crews. He was also hampered by Spanish restrictions on his freedom to refuel. He transferred to the coast of South America, where he was intercepted by the USS Powhatan, under Captain David Porter, and forced to flee across the Atlantic as far as Gibraltar. There he was blockaded by a Union squadron and obliged to abandon his command. He made his own escape to the South, having captured eighteen ships during his cruise in Sumter.

  Other Confederate commerce-raiders were the CSS Florida, which captured thirty-five prizes but was eventually cornered in Brazilian waters in 1864 and towed to Hampton Roads. The circumstances of her capture were so clearly illegal that the Federal government agreed to return her to a Brazilian port, but she was, again illegally, disabled by a U.S. ship before she could depart. The CSS Georgia cruised in the Atlantic in 1863, reaching as far as Morocco, where she fought a ship-to-shore battle with Moors. She had captured nine prizes and was eventually decommissioned in Cherbourg. The CSS Nashville cruised off Britain during 1862, taking no prizes before being sunk by the USS Montauk in 1863. The CSS Tallahassee captured forty Atlantic prizes before taking refuge in Liverpool in April 1865 and being sold. The CSS Shenandoah had an adventurous career, sailing round the Horn to Australia in 1864, where she recruited many Australians. In early 1865 she made captures among the whaling fleet in the Bering Straits, off Siberia, but on hearing of the war’s end she sailed for England and hauled down the Confederate colours on November 6, 1865. She had taken thirty-eight prizes. The CSS Chickamauga cruised in the Atlantic in late 1864, taking seven prizes, but was deserted by many of her crew in Bermuda and forced to return to Wilmington, North Carolina, where she was burnt to escape capture in February 1865.

  The commerce-raiders destroyed about 5 percent of the American merchant fleet and, though small in number, severely disrupted the Union’s seaborne commerce, with permanent effect. Because of reflagging and the sale of American merchantmen to foreign owners, the U.S. merchant marine, a potential rival to that of Britain, never recovered its place in world trade after 1865. The South’s naval effort was remarkable. Yet the real naval achievement of the Civil War was the North’s. By effectively closing down the South’s maritime commerce, it not only denied the Confederacy the possibility both of resupplying and of funding its war effort, but it also denied Richmond the diplomatic recognition it craved.

  The crux of the North’s naval dominance was its imposition of blockade. Blockade had legal as well as military substance. To be recognised as having force in international law, blockade had to be effective. Mere declaration of blockade did not invest it with legality. It had to be demonstrated as working. The blockading squadrons of the U.S. Navy, therefore, had to actually be capable of closing the South’s ports of entry. As the South had over 3,500 miles of coastline and hundreds of harbours large and small, the task of imposing effective blockade was considerable. Most of the South’s harbours could, however, be ignored, since they were too small or deficient in lines of communication inland to be useful to blo
ckade runners. In all there were only ten Southern ports sufficiently deepwater or with adequate facilities to count: New Orleans; Mobile, Alabama; Pensacola and Fernandina, Florida; Savannah, Georgia; Charleston, South Carolina; Wilmington and New Bern, North Carolina; and Norfolk, Virginia. Most of these places were taken early on, New Bern and Fernandina in March 1862, and Savannah was closed by the capture of its approaches in April. New Orleans was also taken in April 1862. Pensacola was abandoned, because the Federal fort guarding its entrance refused to surrender, in May 1862. By mid-1862 the only Atlantic ports left to the South were Charleston, Wilmington, and Norfolk. Norfolk, closely watched by the Northern fleet operating in Chesapeake Bay, was too well blockaded to be useful as a port of entry. Charleston was invaded from landward in 1865; eventually only Wilmington survived as a port of entrance and exit.

  The Confederate naval effort was remarkable not for what it achieved but for what it attempted, with revolutionary naval means that permanently altered the nature of war at sea, not only with ironclads but also with “torpedoes,” as mines were then called, and submarines. The Confederacy’s first submarine was an experimental model, the Pioneer, built at New Orleans in February 1862. It was abandoned and sunk in Lake Pontchartrain the following month. The development team, including its leader, Horace Lawson Hunley, then transferred their work to Mobile, Alabama, where they built the American Diver. It was ready to make an attack on the Union blockading fleet by January 1863, but proved to be too slow for practical use, and after its failure, it sank in a storm in the mouth of Mobile Bay and was not recovered.

  Very soon after its loss, Hunley began work on its replacement, which was to be known by his name. Earlier experiments with steam and electromagnetic propulsion were abandoned and it was built with a hand-cranked propeller shaft, turned by its seven-man crew. It was submerged by admitting water to its two ballast tanks.

  Hunley was ready for trials in July 1863 and sunk a coal barge in Mobile harbour. It was then sent by rail to Charleston, South Carolina, where it twice sank while undergoing trials in the harbour, drowning five of its crew in the first instance and the whole crew in the second, including its inventor. In each case it was raised and volunteers found to continue work. On the night of February 17, 1863, it attacked the twelve-gun USS Housatonic, five miles off Charleston, and sank her, by a spar torpedo rammed into her hull. The Hunley, perhaps herself damaged in the attack, sank afterwards, again drowning her crew. The wreck of the Hunley was discovered by divers in 1979 and raised on August 8, 2000. Postmortem examination of the crew’s remains later revealed that four of the eight were American-born, four of European origin. They were buried, with military honours, in the Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, on April 17, 2004, in the presence of a crowd of 35,000 to 50,000, in what was described as “the last Confederate Funeral.” Hunley was to be remembered as the first submarine to commit an act of war in naval history. The Confederate navy was an insignificant strategic asset but one of the most innovative ever to have been organised.

  Americans were the pioneers of submarine warfare, having constructed and operated an experimental submarine during the War of Independence. It was an understandable initiative by a people who were in rebellion against the world’s foremost naval power and were unable to challenge the vast British surface fleet. It was also understandable that the Confederacy, lacking any hope of confronting the Union navy on equal terms, should have resumed the submarine experiment.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Black Soldiers

  LINCOLN’S ambiguous declaration that the Civil War was “in some way about slavery” concealed a great deal more than it revealed. The most passionate anti-secessionists in the North were abolitionists; by no means all Northerners, however, were abolitionists, and few were emancipationist. Many regarded slavery, as long as it was confined to the Southern states, as an efficient and convenient means of controlling an alien population. The free blacks of the Northern states were not a welcome element. Some states indeed had enacted anti-black electoral laws, and a social prejudice against blacks was common and widespread, particularly among the poor, who competed with blacks for employment at the bottom of the economic heap. Segregation, in education and church membership, was the rule rather than the exception; few blacks enjoyed the right to vote, and extension of the franchise was not a cause espoused by many abolitionists; even equality before the law and free access to the courts was a step too far for many whites. Yet it was obvious to many in the North that abolition of slavery logically entailed emancipation. What to do with several million emancipated slaves was a problem to which few had an answer or seemed to want to find one. There was a widespread belief that liberated blacks would prefer to remain in the South, because of their familiarity with its environment and particularly its climate. Those not persuaded by such wishful thinking, though not only they, supported the idea of colonisation, that liberated blacks might be persuaded, or if not then coerced, to migrate to Central America and the Caribbean or to return to West Africa, where the territory of Liberia had been set up for the settlement of American freedmen and the British colony of Sierra Leone for British ex-slaves. As Frederick Douglass, the leading black spokesman for the cause of emancipation, harshly pointed out, however, there was little point in abolition if its end result was deportation of its beneficiaries.

  Yet there was a practical solution to the problem, which recommended itself for other than social reasons in wartime conditions. And that was to enlist free blacks, including Southern runaways—or contrabands, as they were known—into the army, to fight the Confederacy at the front. Once the idea of black enlistment became current, the advantages seemed obvious. Enlisting blacks would not only add to the North’s operational numbers but also deprive the South of their labour. At the same time it would enhance the North’s reputation abroad, particularly in Britain, the country the North most wished to influence and one where opinion was most sensitive to the idea of emancipation. Britain had led the way in the suppression of the international slave trade, through the work of the Royal Navy’s anti-slavery patrols, and Victorian Britons cherished their anti-slavery credentials. The South’s persistence in the slave system was the principal obstacle to its diplomatic recognition by London in 1861-63. Thus there were both practical and political arguments for emancipation from the middle of the Civil War onwards.

  There remained, nevertheless, strong objections to it. Beside racial prejudice, which in various degrees of intensity and for different motivations was almost universal in the North, there were also practical considerations. What was to be done with four million ex-slaves if they were to leave the plantations? How would they be employed, accommodated, and provided for? Enlistment would mop up a considerable number—eventually between 180,000 and 200,000 blacks served in the Union armies, two-thirds of them ex-slaves—in circumstances that promised control of their behaviour and freedom of movement. There were, however, all sorts of difficulties over their admission to the ranks. Frederick Douglass might argue that black freedom, unless fought for, was not worth having. Many white soldiers held that they were fighting a white man’s war and that the enlistment of blacks would compromise the terms of the struggle. In the last resort, however, the difficulty came down simply to widespread Northern disbelief in the black soldier’s combat value. Would the blacks fight? Or would they run away and leave the white soldiers in the lurch? Today, when black soldiers have won a sterling reputation as battlers in the modern republic’s most bitterly contested wars, such a question seems not worth pondering. Indeed, the American black community’s loss of enthusiasm for enlistment during the Iraq conflict sent waves of alarm through the Defense Department, so heavily had the U.S. Army and Marine Corps come to depend on black recruitment to the combat formations, particularly the infantry, to guarantee essential numbers. In the mid-nineteenth century, however, Africans had not yet won the formidable military reputation they have subsequently attained. The Zulu kingdom was still scarcely known outside
southern Africa. The French army, though it recruited from the same regions as the slave contingents had been drawn, did not use its black regiments outside West Africa. The British West India Regiment, though its membership was ethnically identical to the slave population of the South, was employed only as a colonial police force. So it was understandable that the white American should ask about black recruits, “Will they fight?,” since few had done so in American experience. Black participants, on both sides, in the Revolutionary War, or the War of Independence as the English call it, had figured as individuals, not as members of formed black units. There were no black units in the antebellum army, while public policy in the antebellum South was to ensure that its black inhabitants were kept in a state of abject passivity.