Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  Historical opinion leans toward this latter view. While it was true that five out of six runners got through, that is not the crucial statistic. Rather, one must ask how many ships carrying how much freight would have entered southern ports if there had been no blockade. Eight thousand trips were made through the blockade during four years of war,11 but

  9. Rowland, Davis, V, 401, 403; Frank L. Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy: Foreign Relations of the Confederate States of America, 2nd ed. rev. (Chicago, 1959), 229, 230.

  10. Woodward, Chesnut's Civil War, 101, 306; Nevins, War, I, 289; John T. Scharf, History of the Confederate States Navy (New York, 1887), v.

  11. These are estimates offered by Frank Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy, 250–90, based on records of the Confederate State Department and the Union Navy Department. Most of the successful runs (and unsuccessful ones) were made by small coastal schooners carrying little if any cargo of military value. Indeed, a majority of the trips by these vessels were along intercoastal waterways between Confederate ports, merely redistributing freight from one part of the South to another, and could scarcely be termed "running" the blockade. From June through August 1861, for example, of 178 ships entering or clearing five major southern ports, only eighteen were involved in foreign trade. Confederate diplomats cited all this intra-southern trade as blockade running in an attempt to persuade Britain to declare the blockade an illegal "paper blockade"; the Union navy included captured vessels of this type in its statistics to pad the list of captures. Of the blockade running that really counted—fast steamers running between the South and foreign ports—there were about 1,000 successful trips out of 1,300 attempts. Stephen R. Wise, "Lifeline of the Confederacy: Blockade Running During the American Civil War," Ph.D. dissertation, University of South Carolina, 1983, pp. 44, 46, 139, 516.

  more than twenty thousand vessels had cleared into or out of southern ports during the four prewar years. The blockade runners were built for speed, not capacity, and when pursued they sometimes jettisoned part of their cargo. The blockade reduced the South's seaborne trade to less than a third of normal. And of course the Confederacy's needs for all kinds of supplies were much greater than the peacetime norm. As for cotton exports, 1861 must be disregarded because the South voluntarily embargoed cotton in an attempt to influence British foreign policy (see below). After the end of this embargo in 1862 the half-million bales shipped through the blockade during the last three years of war compared rather poorly with the ten million exported in the last three antebellum years. As far as the greater dollar volume of Charleston's wartime trade is concerned, there were two reasons for this: Charleston was one of the principal ports for blockade runners because they were shut out of the other ports; and inflation so eroded the Confederate dollar that by March 1863 it required ten such dollars to buy what one had bought two years earlier. Indeed, the blockade was one of the causes of the ruinous inflation that reduced the Confederate dollar to one percent of its original value by the end of the war.

  To maintain that the blockade "won the war" for the North, as naval historians are wont to do, goes entirely too far.12 But it did play an important role in Union victory. Although naval personnel constituted only 5 percent of the Union armed forces, their contribution to the outcome of the war was much larger.

  III

  The question of the blockade's effectiveness became a critical foreign policy issue during the war's first year. The international law governing blockades was part of the Declaration of Paris, acceded to by European powers (but not the U. S.) in 1856 after the Crimean War: "Blockades, in order to be binding, must be effective; that is to say, maintained by

  12. Howard P. Nash, Jr., A Naval History of the Civil War (New York, 1972), 300. On the other hand, the conclusion of a recent study that "the blockade did not represent a major factor in the Confederacy's economic exhaustion" and did not have a "decisive effect" on the outcome of the war may go too far in the opposite direction. It depends on one's definition of "major" and "decisive." The impact of the blockade was certainly significant, though of course it did not alone win the war. Whether the war could have been won without it must remain moot. Richard E. Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones, and William N. Still, Jr., Why the South Lost the Civil War (Athens, Ga., 1986), 56, 63.

  forces strong enough to prevent access." Southern diplomats insisted that the ease of running the blockade in 1861 proved its ineffectiveness; therefore no nation need respect it. This had been the traditional American position toward British blockades, especially during the Napoleonic wars when the United States defied the British and traded with both sides. But now the shoe was on the other foot. A major goal of Confederate diplomacy in 1861 was to persuade Britain to declare the blockade illegal as a prelude to intervention by the royal navy to protect British trade with the South.

  Cotton was the principal weapon of southern foreign policy. Britain imported three-quarters of its cotton from the American South. The textile industry dominated the British economy. "What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years?" asked James Hammond of South Carolina in his famous King Cotton speech of 1858. "England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her, save the South." The inevitability of British intervention to obtain cotton became an article of faith in the South during 1861. A Charleston merchant told the London Times correspondent a few days after the surrender of Fort Sumter that "if those miserable Yankees try to blockade us, and keep you from our cotton," he said, "you'll just send their ships to the bottom and acknowledge us. That will be before autumn, I think." In July 1861 Vice President Alexander Stephens expressed certainty that "in some way or other [the blockade will] be raised, or there will be revolution in Europe. . . . Our cotton is . . . the tremendous lever by which we can work our destiny."13

  To ply this lever, southerners decided to embargo cotton exports. "The cards are in our hands," exulted the Charleston Mercury, "and we intend to play them out to the bankruptcy of every cotton factory in Great Britain and France or the acknowledgment of our independence." The Memphis Argus instructed planters to "keep every bale of cotton on the plantation. Don't send a thread to New Orleans or Memphis till England and France have recognized the Confederacy—not one thread."14 Although the Confederate government never officially sanctioned the embargo, so powerful was public opinion that it virtually enforced itself.

  13. Selections from the Letters and Speeches of the Hon. James H. Hammond of South Carolina (New York, 1866), 316–17; William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South, ed. Fletcher Pratt (New York, 1954), 69; Virgil Carrington Jones, The Civil War at Sea: The Blockaders (New York, 1960), 183.

  14. Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy, 24–25.

  Most of the 1860 crop had been shipped before the war began. The shipping season for 1861 would normally have begun in September, but despite the looseness of the blockade little cotton went out. In the spring of 1862 southerners planted about half their usual cotton acreage and devoted the rest of the land to food production. British imports of cotton from the South in 1862 amounted to about 3 percent of the 1860 level.

  King Cotton diplomacy seemed promising at first. British and French officials exchanged worried views about the probable impact of a cotton famine. Textile magnates in Lancashire and Lyons talked of shutdowns. "England must break the Blockade, or Her Millions will starve," declared a newspaper speaking for textile workers in September 1861. In October, Prime Minister Viscount Palmerston and Foreign Minister Lord Russell agreed that "the cotton question may become serious by the end of the year. . . . We cannot allow some millions of our people to perish to please the Northern States." British and French diplomats discussed the possibility of joint action to lift the blockade.15

  But in the end several factors prevented such action. The first was Russell's and Palmerston's desire to avoid involvement in the war. "For God's sake, let us if possible keep out of it," said Russell in May 1861, while Palmerston quoted the aphorism: "They who in quarrels int
erpose, will often get a bloody nose." Even without Secretary of State Seward's bellicose warnings against intervention—which the British regarded as insolent blustering—Britain recognized that any action against the blockade could lead to a conflict with the United States more harmful to England's interests than the temporary loss of southern cotton. Our "true policy," Palmerston told Russell on October 18, was "to go on as we have begun, and to keep quite clear of the conflict."16 Napoleon III of France leaned toward intervention, but was unwilling to take any action without British cooperation.

  If Britain took umbrage at Seward's "bullying," many Englishmen resented even more the Confederacy's attempt at economic blackmail. If southerners "thought they could extort our cooperation by the agency of king cotton," declared the Times, they had better think again. To intervene on behalf of the South "because they keep cotton from us,"

  15. Brian Jenkins, Britain and the War for the Union, 2 vols. (Montreal, 1974–80), I, 166, 170; Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy, 73.

  16. Norman B. Ferris, Desperate Diplomacy: William H. Seward's Foreign Policy, 1861 (Knoxville, 1976), 39, 36; Jenkins, Britain and the War for the Union, I, 172.

  said Lord Russell in September 1861, "would be ignominious beyond measure. . . . No English Parliament could do so base a thing."17

  Because of British (and French) sensitivity on this issue, southern diplomats could not admit the existence of a cotton embargo. But this trapped them in a paradox, for how could they proclaim the blockade ineffective if no cotton was reaching Europe? In reply to a question on this matter by the French foreign minister in February 1862, the Confederate commissioner to Paris conceded that "although a very large proportion of the vessels that attempted to run the blockade . . . had succeeded in passing, the risk of capture was sufficiently great to deter those who had not a very adventurous spirit from attempting it." Fatal admission! Eight days later Foreign Minister Russell announced Britain's position on the blockade: "The fact that various ships may have successfully escaped through it . . . will not of itself prevent the blockade from being an effective one by international law" so long as it was enforced by a number of ships "sufficient really to prevent access to [a port] or to create an evident danger of entering or leaving it." By February the northern blockade certainly met this criterion. Another influence working against British acceptance of southern arguments about paper blockades was a desire not to create a precedent that would boomerang against British security in a future war. As the crown's solicitor general put it: Britain must resist "new fangled notions and interpretations of international law which might make it impossible for us effectively at some future day to institute any blockade, and so destroy our naval authority."18

  Southern expectations of foreign intervention to break the blockade were betrayed by a double irony: first, the "success" of the cotton embargo seemed only to prove the success of the blockade; and second, the huge cotton exports of 1857–60, instead of proving the potency of King Cotton, resulted in toppling his throne. Even working overtime, British mills had not been able to turn all of this cotton into cloth. Surplus stocks of raw cotton as well as of finished cloth piled up in Lancashire warehouses. The South's embargo thus turned out to be a blessing in disguise for textile manufacturers in 1861. Although the mills went on

  17. Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy, 22; Jenkins, Britain and the War for the Union, I, 170.

  18. Nevins, War, I, 289; D. P. Crook, The North, the South, and the Powers 1861–1865 (New York, 1974), 177 (italics added), 178.

  short time during the winter of 1861–62, the real reason for this was not the shortage of cotton but the satiated market for cloth. Inventories of raw cotton in Britain and France were higher in December 1861 than any previous December. The cotton famine from which the South expected so much did not really take hold until the summer of 1862. By then the Confederacy had scuttled its embargo and was trying desperately to export cotton through the tightening blockade to pay for imported supplies. By then, too, the stimulus of high prices had brought about an increase of cotton acreage in Egypt and India, which supplied most of Europe's cotton imports for the next three years.

  The worst time of unemployment in the British textile industry occurred from the summer of 1862 to the spring of 1863. But the impact of this did not measure up to southern hopes or British fears. Even before the war, textiles had been losing their dominant role in the British economy. The war further stimulated growth in the iron, shipbuilding, armaments, and other industries. This offset much of the decline in textiles. The manufacture of woolen uniforms and blankets for American armies absorbed some of the slack in cotton manufacturing. A flourishing trade in war matériel with the North as well as blockade running to the South helped convince British merchants of the virtues of neutrality. Crop failures in western Europe from 1860 through 1862 increased British dependence on American grain and flour. During the first two years of the Civil War the Union states supplied nearly half of British grain imports, compared with less than a quarter before the war. Yankees exulted that King Corn was more powerful than King Cotton.19 And because Confederate commerce raiders drove much of the U. S. merchant marine from the seas, most of this expanded trade with the North was carried by British ships—another economic shot in the arm that helped discourage British intervention in the war.

  By the second year of the conflict, Britain was willing to tolerate extraordinary northern extensions of the blockade. In April 1862, Union warships began seizing British merchant vessels plying between England and Nassau or Bermuda, on the grounds that their cargoes were destined ultimately for the Confederacy. The first ship so captured was the Bermuda, which was confiscated by a U. S. prize court. The navy bought her and put her to work as a blockade ship. This added insult to the injury that had already provoked a jingoistic response in Britain. But American diplomats cited British precedents for such seizures. During

  19. Crook, The North, the South, and the Powers, 268–72.

  the Napoleonic wars the royal navy had seized American ships carrying cargoes to a neutral port with the intention of re-exporting them to France. British courts had established the doctrine of "continuous voyage" to justify confiscation of contraband destined ultimately for an enemy port even if the voyage was broken by landing at a neutral port. When this chicken came home to roost in 1862, Whitehall could hardly repudiate its own precedent.

  In 1863 a northern court extended the doctrine of continuous voyage beyond any precedent in the Peterhoff case. In February a Union warship captured the British vessel Peterhoff in the Caribbean, where she was on her way to Matamoros, Mexico, with a cargo of military supplies. The Union navy had good reason to suspect that the ultimate destination of this cargo was the Confederacy. Located across the Rio Grande from Texas, Matamoros had become the entrepôt for trade with the South exchanging cotton for contraband. The prize court upheld the navy's extension of "continuous voyage" to include re-export of contraband across land frontiers as well as from neutral ports. This time a large portion of the British public railed against Yankee "overbearing and domineering insolence." But the Foreign Office merely recorded the precedent, which Britain cited a half-century later to justify seizure of American ships carrying contraband to neutral Holland intended for overland trans-shipment to Germany.20

  IV

  Next to obtaining British intervention against the blockade, the main goal of Confederate foreign policy was to secure diplomatic recognition of the South's nationhood. In the quest for recognition, the Confederate State Department sent to Europe a three-man commission headed by William L. Yancey. As a notorious fire-eater and an advocate of reopening the African slave trade, Yancey was not the best choice to win friends in antislavery Britain. Nevertheless, soon after the southerners arrived in London the British government announced an action that misled Americans on both sides of the Potomac to anticipate imminent diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy.

  Lincoln had proclaimed the rebels to be insurrectionists. Under
international law this would deny the Confederacy status as a belligerent

  20. Quotation from Jenkins, Britain and the War for the Union, II, 262. For a study of the maritime legal issues involved here, see Stuart L. Bernath, Squall Across the Atlantic: American Civil War Prize Cases and Diplomacy (Berkeley, 1970).

  power. But the North's declaration of a blockade constituted an act of war affecting neutral powers. On May 13 Britain therefore declared her neutrality in a proclamation issued by the Queen. This would seem to have been unexceptionable—except that it automatically recognized the Confederacy as a belligerent power. Other European nations followed the British lead. Status as a belligerent gave Confederates the right under international law to contract loans and purchase arms in neutral nations, and to commission cruisers on the high seas with the power of search and seizure. Northerners protested this British action with hot words; Charles Sumner later called it "the most hateful act of English history since Charles 2nd." But northern protests rested on weak legal grounds, for the blockade was a virtual recognition of southern belligerency. Moreover, in European eyes the Confederacy with its national constitution, its army, its effective control of 750,000 square miles of territory and a population of nine million people, was a belligerent power in practice no matter what it was in northern theory. As Lord Russell put it: "The question of belligerent rights is one, not of principle, but of fact."21

  Northern bitterness stemmed in part from the context and timing of British action. The proclamation of neutrality came just after two "unofficial" conferences between Lord Russell and the Confederate envoys. And it preceded by one day the arrival in London of Charles Francis Adams, the new United States minister. The recognition of belligerency thus appeared to present Adams with a fait accompli to soften him up for the next step—diplomatic recognition of southern nationhood. As Seward viewed it, Russell's meetings with Yancey and his colleagues were "liable to be construed as recognition." The South did so construe them; and the Richmond Whig considered the proclamation of neutrality "a long and firm [step] in exactly the direction which the people of the Southern States expected."22