Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

by Allen C. Guelzo

  The Federals did not sustain a great defeat, however. On the same day that Russell yielded to Palmerston’s suggestion about recognizing Southern independence, Lee and McClellan fought each other to a bloody standstill at Antietam. When Lee retreated afterwards, Palmerston decided to shelve his proposal. And there the matter rested, for whatever abstract or emotional sympathies the British might feel for the Confederacy, none of them was so burning that Palmerston would commit his government to backing a loser. Nor is there any substantial evidence that the British government had gotten to the point of calculating what force it would take to get the North to the peace table. Russell and Palmerston talked of mediation only if it could be jointly arranged with the French and the Russians. Despite the effect of the cotton blockade in 1862, British textile merchants soon found new sources of cotton in Egypt, Brazil, and India, and the British economy gradually recovered, thus removing a major agitation for intervention.33

  Also, as Palmerston acknowledged, any form of intervention could very likely mean a war at sea. While the British navy was undoubtedly the most powerful in the world at that time, the American navy had grown by leaps and bounds since 1861, and since the United States was not a signatory of the Declaration of Paris, it could unleash a cloud of privateers, which, as the example of the Florida and the Alabama demonstrated, could easily create serious trouble for British commerce, sending insurance rates as well as losses in ships and cargoes beyond acceptable limits. In the event of armed intervention, the British army would be compelled to operate from the Canadian border, and to do so under the disadvantage of having to supply it across three thousand miles of Atlantic Ocean.

  Even if the military situation had not been enough to give the British pause, there was the business of President Lincoln’s preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, issued a week after Antietam in September 1862. At first emancipation actually looked as though it might drive the British even more quickly toward mediation, since Palmerston and Russell read the Proclamation as an incitement to John Brown–style slave rebellion. Such incitement, they were sure, would result in a race war that would not only disrupt the transatlantic cotton flow beyond repair but also set an uncomfortable example for Britain’s colonial subjects about the possibilities of non-Europeans rising in revolt against white European rulers. (The British had only just endured such a conflict in the Sepoy Rebellion in India in 1857–58, and prospect of an American slave rebellion reviving the specter of the racial antagonisms that generated violence in India was not reassuring to British minds.)34

  However, Lincoln’s decision to make even partial abolition of slavery a stated aim of the war operated in exactly the other direction on the British public’s view of intervention. No matter what opinion an English aristocrat had of Southern planters, or what opinion English merchants or workingmen had of cotton, few Englishmen wanted to set themselves up as the enemies of a war against slavery, which had been abolished in the British empire in 1833. From the moment Lincoln announced the Proclamation, wrote Richard Cobden to Charles Sumner, “our old anti-slavery feeling began to arouse itself, and it has been gathering strength ever since.” Cobden, who originally lacked confidence in Lincoln, now came decisively down from the fence himself and embraced the Union for “the lofty motive of humanity that has induced them to risk the longer continuance of the war rather than allow the degrading institution of slavery to continue.” Once the Proclamation was in place, John Bright (Cobden’s great partner in the promotion of the Manchester School) jubilantly demanded to know “who they are who speak eagerly in favour of England becoming the ally and friend of this great conspiracy against human nature.” Who, he asked, are the men in England “eager to admit into the family of nations a State … more odious and more blasphemous than was theretofore dreamed of in Christian or in Pagan, in civilized or in savage times”?35

  One week after the preliminary Proclamation was issued, a meeting staged by pro-Confederate British sympathizers at Staleybridge, outside Manchester, was broken up by a pro-Union workers’ group; in Manchester, a New Year’s Day workers’ meeting forwarded to Abraham Lincoln a series of resolutions that affirmed that “since we have discerned… that the victory of the free north, in the war which has so sorely distressed us as well as afflicted you, will strike off the fetters of the slave, you have attracted our warm and earnest sympathy.” On January 29, 1863, a pro-Union meeting at Exeter Hall in London drew overflow crowds that spilled out into the streets and snarled traffic. Great as the suffering of the unemployed mill workers was, they saw in the Emancipation Proclamation an unambiguous blow against oppression and tyranny of every kind. “The distress in Lancashire is & has been very great,” admitted one of Charles Grandison Finney’s correspondents in March 1863, but all the same, “I would be very sorry & so I am persuaded would the bulk of our Lancashire people to see you patch up a peace with the South upon the basis of protection of slavery.”

  We are Sure the mass of our people [are] Sympathetic with the Northern interest, especially since the Emancipation Policy has been adopted. I cannot tell you how glad I felt & how I shouted Hurrah for Lincoln when news reached here that he had confirmed that Proclamation on the 1st Jan[uar]y. … The reason why many of our people did not sooner sympathize with the North was a feeling that they were not fighting for the destruction of slavery but merely for the Union with or without slavery.36

  So when Gladstone unwisely attempted to raise the subject of Confederate recognition in Cabinet, Palmerston quashed the motion and Russell turned to rap Gladstone sharply on the knuckles for going “beyond the latitude which all speakers must be allowed when you say that Jefferson Davis had made a nation.”37 On October 9, 1863, Russell stepped in and seized two powerful ironclad warships that Bulloch had contracted for at Laird Brothers and appropriated them for the British navy as HMS Wivern and HMS Scorpion.

  The Confederacy still had hopes for the French. Napoleon III was less moved by the Emancipation Proclamation than Palmerston was, and he continued to make hopeful noises about European support and recognition for the Confederacy. The negotiation of the Erlanger loan in March 1863, and the emperor’s private approval of a plan by Bulloch to build two ironclads and two wooden steam cruisers in France, gave further encouragement to Confederate agents to hope that Napoleon III might yet act on his own. But Napoleon was unwilling to act for the Confederacy without British support, and that support never had much hope of materializing after September 1862, if it had ever had any. On November 10, 1862, Napoleon proposed to Palmerston that Britain, France, and Russia impose a cease-fire in America, along with a lifting of the blockade. What he had in mind was “an armistice of six months, with the Southern ports open to the commerce of the world,” the emperor explained to John Slidell—and added, with a wink and a nod, that “hostilities would probably never be resumed.” Palmerston’s cabinet rejected the proposal. In June 1863, the emperor met with two pro-Confederate members of Parliament and made more veiled suggestions about cooperative intervention to end the war—but Parliament refused to listen. And with that, the emperor’s interest in American affairs wandered. By 1867 he had even abandoned his luckless puppets in Mexico. In January 1864 the French government withdrew permission for the construction of Bulloch’s ships, and only a phony sale of one of the ironclads to Denmark allowed Bulloch to salvage at least one of his prizes. By the time the ship (named CSS Stonewall) could be repurchased from the Danes, fitted for service, and sailed to the West Indies, the war was over.38

  By the end of 1863, the once-bright confidence of the Confederacy that Europe would be forced by economic necessity to step in and guarantee Southern independence lay in the dust. John L. Peyton, North Carolina’s state agent in Paris, warned his home-state governor, Zebulon Baird Vance, that “the people of the South” must “realize that they have no friends among the crown heads of Europe—that they must rely upon themselves for deliverance from the hated thralldom of the Yankee Union.”39 In August 1863 the Confederate governm
ent recalled Mason from London, effectively conceding the hopelessness of winning over British opinion; in October Jefferson Davis and the Confederate Cabinet concurred in expelling all British consuls from Southern ports on the grounds that the consuls had been obstructing Southern military draft laws.

  Much of the credit in frustrating Confederate foreign policy lies with the American minister to Britain, Charles Francis Adams. The perfect statesman, Adams not only tirelessly represented the Union cause to the British government and the British people but also financed an active network of spies and agents who relentlessly exposed Confederate violations of the British neutrality laws and hobbled Confederate efforts to raise money and buy arms. Even the Confederate propagandist de Leon had to admit that Adams “played well his part, and by his singular moderation of language and action… sustained his own dignity and that of the people he represented… and won reluctant admiration from many who loved not the cause or the Government he sustained.”40 William L. Dayton, the American minister to France (who died in harness in 1864), was equally active in pushing the French to stay within their own neutrality laws, and Dayton’s shrewd exposures of the shakiness of Confederate finance critically depressed the value of the Confederate bond sale by the Erlangers. The two rocks on which Confederate hopes for foreign intervention unavoidably foundered were the fatal timing of its military defeats in 1862, and the moral capital Lincoln earned for the Union with the Emancipation Proclamation. After Antietam, and after Emancipation, the Confederacy was simply no longer believable.

  THE WAR AT SEA

  Lincoln’s decision to impose a naval blockade of the Confederacy broadened, at one stroke, the scope of the American Civil War to take in the seven seas as well as the Confederate heartland. By the same token, the Confederacy could ill afford to stand by and allow the Federal navy to put its hands around the Confederacy’s neck and wring it. So between the Federal navy’s determination to choke the Confederates inside their own harbors and the Confederacy’s desperation to find some way of forcing the Federal navy to loosen its grip, the Civil War spread outward from land to sea, and from there around the world.

  In 1861, the U.S. Navy carried 1,500 officers and about 7,500 sailors on its active list; the cream of the fleet were the six big 5,000-ton steam frigates, Niagara, Roanoke, Colorado, Merrimack, Minnesota, and Wabash, launched in 1855 and carrying batteries of up to forty 9-inch, 10-inch, and 11-inch smoothbore cannon (and with room for some specialty armament as well, such as the Minnesota’s 150-pound Parrott rifle and the Niagara’s twelve 12-inch shell guns). Following the steam frigates were the twelve steam sloops of 1857 and 1858, the biggest of which—Hartford, Brooklyn, and Richmond—displaced 2,500 tons and carried sixteen to twenty 9-inch guns.41

  None of these ships, however, had been designed for blockade duty. As it was, the outbreak of the war found all of the frigates in various navy yards undergoing all sorts of refitting and overhaul. One of them, the Merrimack, suffered from chronic engine trouble and was in dry dock for machinery repairs at Gosport Navy Yard at Norfolk when Virginia passed its secession ordinance. Despite the entreaties of Benjamin Isherwood, an army engineer sent expressly to Norfolk to get the Merrimack out of danger, the commandant of the yard ordered the steam frigate burned and scuttled to prevent it from falling into the hands of the Rebels. As with the ships, there was also some question about the reliability of the navy’s officers. Although only 237 of the navy’s officer corps resigned and went South at the beginning of the war, Federal admiral Samuel F. Du Pont was keenly aware of the fact that “not a single officer” in his South Atlantic Blockading Squadron in 1862 had “voted for Lincoln.” At the same time, Du Pont was also aware that “there is not a proslavery man among them,” and the officers who had some chance ashore to see the remains of the slave system for themselves experienced great awakenings. The aristocratic Du Pont, whose home was in the border slave state of Delaware, confessed that he had “been a sturdy conservative on this question, defended it over the world, argued for it as patriarchal in its tendencies… that the condition of the slaves was far in advance of the race in Africa.” Nevertheless, he was horrified by the conditions he found on the coastal plantations. Having seen “the institution ‘de pres,’” Du Pont wrote feelingly to a friend in Philadelphia, “may God forgive me for the words I have uttered in its defense as intertwined in our Constitution.”42

  In terms of both ships and personnel, the federal government clearly was going to have to find ways to improvise a navy, as much for the blockade as to maintain the navy’s high-seas profile. That the government did, in fact, manage to improvise such a navy was largely due to Gideon Welles, the secretary of the navy, an ex-Democrat and former naval bureau chief. Welles and his assistant secretary, Gustavus Fox, realized from the beginning that it was much more important to put ships of any size or description outside a Southern port as soon as possible to make the blockade visible than to wait until a specially designed blockading fleet could be built. So Welles chartered one of almost everything that would float, armed them in makeshift fashion, and sent them off to pound a beat outside Southern rivers and harbors. As early as May 11, 1861, Welles had the frigate Niagara stationed outside Charleston harbor. By January 1862 Welles had organized four blockading squadrons, two along the Gulf and two along the Atlantic, to guard the Confederate coastline; and by the end of the war he would have bought, borrowed, deployed, or built over 600 warships, merchantman, steamboats, and ordinary tugs and turned them into a blockading fleet.43

  The principal objective of the blockade was to prevent any shipping, Southern or otherwise, from entering or leaving the Confederacy. That meant, for much of the time, that blockade duty was an incessant string of empty, passive and depressingly boring days, waiting for the possible blockade-runner to appear over the horizon. “Dull! Dull! Dull! is the day,” wrote the surgeon of the Federal blockader Fernandina in his diary. “Nothing to do.” On top of the boredom, sailors had to endure many of the same routine annoyances and bad food that soldiers onshore suffered. The Fernandina’s unhappy surgeon explained that “‘a life on the ocean wave’ is not a very pleasant one unless a person is fond of feasting every day on salt junk and hard tack, reading papers a month after they are published, hearing from home once a month, etc., etc.” Add to the boredom and discomfort the fierce Southern heat, and it quickly became apparent that blockade duty was anything but romantic. One sailor stationed off Wilmington, North Carolina, explained in his diary how adventurous blockade duty really was.

  I told her [his mother] she could get a fair idea of our “adventures” if she would go on the roof of the house, on a hot summer day, and talk to half a dozen hotel hallboys, who are generally far more intelligent and agreeable than the average “acting officer.” Then descend to the attic and drink some tepid water, full of iron rust. Then go on to the roof again and repeat this “adventurous process” at intervals, until she has tired out and go to bed, with every thing shut down tight, so as not to show a light. Adventure! Bah! The blockade is the wrong place for it.44

  Yet for all its discomforts, blockade duty was still preferred over service on the inland rivers or on foreign stations, chiefly because blockade duty offered the prospect of prize money to any ship’s crew that captured a merchantman trying to run the blockade. The USS Magnolia bagged a blockade-runner named Memphis in 1863, and when the Memphis was sold off as a prize, the crew divided up the staggering sum of $510,000. The naval lieutenant in command, who enjoyed the Melville-esque name of William Budd, took home $38,318.55 as his share, and the Magnolia’s ordinary seamen realized $1,350.88 each. When the ninety-day gunboat Kennebec could lap up over $1.5 million in prize money for its 100 officers and crewmen, and when Rear Admiral Samuel Philips Lee could pocket between $110,000 (Lee’s reported figure) and $150,000 (what Gideon Welles believed he had raked in) in prize money over the two years he commanded the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron, blockade duty could suddenly seem appealing after all.45
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  The blockade came to involve more than merely sitting in ambush for Confederate blockade-runners. A surprisingly large proportion of blockade seizures were made by the little Potomac Flotilla, which ran small expeditions up the Potomac and the other Chesapeake Bay rivers to disrupt Confederate coastal trade and the smuggling of medicines and weapons through Confederate lines in Virginia. At the other end of the scale, the navy also aimed to shut down as many major Southern ports as it could. In November 1861 the navy seized Beaufort and the Carolina Sea Islands, and the following January the army and navy together established a foothold on the North Carolina coast. In April 1862 another joint army-navy operation recaptured Fort Pulaski on the Savannah River and closed the Georgia coastline to blockade-running, while the next month Farragut and his steam sloops pushed their way past the Confederacy’s Mississippi River forts and steamed up to New Orleans. Farragut also sealed off Mobile Bay in August 1864, and in January 1865 Wilmington surrendered to yet another joint expedition led by Farragut’s stepbrother, Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter. Only Charleston managed to resist the onslaught of the Federal navy. Throughout the summers of 1863 and 1864, both the army and navy attempted to capture the Charleston harbor defenses and bombard Fort Sumter (now in Confederate hands) into submission. But Sumter, and the rest of Charleston harbor, held out until February 1865, when the approach of a Federal army from Georgia finally forced the Charleston garrison to evacuate the city.

  The Confederates had been aware from the beginning of the war that the blockade represented a noose that would strangle them if they could not first find a way to cut through it. “The blockade is breaking up the whole South,” wrote “Parson” Brownlow, the Unionist Tennessean in the spring of 1862. “It has been remarked in the streets of Knoxville that no such thing as a fine-toothed comb was to be had, and all the little Secession heads were full of squatter sovereigns hunting for their rights in the territories.” So if maintaining the blockade was the item of first importance for the Federal navy, then rendering it ineffective as soon as possible became a top priority for the Confederates.46