This Great Struggle (13 page)

During the early months of the war, the Union blockade was notably porous. The navy lacked adequate numbers of ships, and many of those it did have were laid up “in ordinary,” moored in harbors in various states of disrepair and in need of much work to be made ready for deployment. Many of those that were ready for sea were deep-draft vessels unsuitable for use in the shallow waters close inshore near the entrances to southern ports. Secretary of the Navy Gideon G. Welles and his staff wrought mightily to acquire the needed vessels to make the blockade effective, purchasing ferry boats and other shallow-draft civilian steamers, fitting them out with a few guns, and manning them with crews of bluejackets from the navy’s rapidly expanding manpower pool. Purpose-built gunboats rapidly began to take shape in shipyards along the northern coast, especially a class of small warship specially designed for blockade duty and nicknamed “Ninety-day Gunboats” from the speed at which they could be constructed.

The blockade eventually became severely damaging to the Confederacy, choking the supply of foreign-made arms and ammunition and other vital war supplies and contributing to the eventual Union victory. Nevertheless, throughout the course of the war, a steady trickle of cargo vessels successfully ran the blockade, especially the sleek, fast steamers designed for blockade-running (at the expense of much reduced carrying capacity) and built in Britain. During the early days of the war, no such purpose-built blockade-runners were available, and none were needed, as ordinary merchant vessels came and went from southern harbors with only a moderate risk of apprehension by the thin cordon of blockaders. Thus, southern planters could have exported virtually the entire cotton crop of 1860—and probably much of that of 1861 as well—with only moderate losses that would have been more than compensated by rising cotton prices in Europe.

They could have—but they did not. Thinking that an abrupt and complete stoppage in the flow of cotton to European textile mills would be the most effective way of shocking the British and French into recognition of the Confederacy and then military intervention on its behalf, vast numbers of southern planters and cotton factors (merchants) held on to their cotton, declining to send it to market and creating what amounted to a Confederacy-wide cotton embargo. Although it was never official Confederate government policy and it was never absolutely effective in preventing all cotton exportation, it did drastically diminish the amount of cotton that left American shores during 1861, and in that it was far more effective than the as-yet-feeble efforts of the U.S. Navy to impose a blockade. In triggering European intervention, however, the Confederacy’s spontaneous citizen-imposed cotton embargo was an utter failure. European warehouses bulged with the accumulated cotton surpluses of the previous few years, including the year in which Senator Hammond had announced that cotton was king. European textile mills were yet to feel the pinch of cotton deprivation, and their governments were content to watch the Americans destroy their own country without European help or expense.

THE PORT ROYAL EXPEDITION AND THE
TRENT
AFFAIR

One of the problems that made blockading difficult for the U.S. Navy on the southern coast was the need of warships to take on coal at frequent intervals. Only a steam-driven warship could be an effective blockader against steam-driven blockade-runners, and to have any chance of catching them, the warship would have to keep its boiler fires going at all times. That entailed frequent trips back to a Union naval base to refill its bunkers with coal, leaving minimal time to cruise or station off a southern port. The problem could be minimized if the Union possessed naval bases near the ports it was blockading. A U.S. Navy commission studied the southern coastline and decided that Port Royal, South Carolina, should be the first target since it could support blockading squadrons off both Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia.

The navy put together a large expedition under Flag Officer Samuel Du Pont, consisting of warships as well as transports carrying thirteen thousand army troops, and dispatched it to the southern coast in late October. After suffering delay and some damage from an autumnal gale off the South Carolina coast, the ships of the fleet arrived off Port Royal one by one during the first few days of November, and on November 7, the same day Grant made his foray against Belmont, Missouri, half a continent away, Du Pont led them into the sound to attack the two Confederate forts defending the harbor. It was an all-navy operation, as the transport carrying the army’s ammunition had been blown far off course and still had not arrived. After several hours of bombardment, the Confederates fled, leaving the harbor and its environs to the Federals. Within a few days the army troops had landed and secured a coastal enclave that included the town of Beaufort, South Carolina, and eventually extended up the coast more than fifty miles almost to Charleston. The victory at Port Royal Sound greatly facilitated blockading southern ports on the Atlantic coast and showed the way for other similar operations around the whole coastline of the Confederacy, a threat the Confederate high command would never really be able to meet effectively.

The acquisition of the Port Royal enclave also brought Union forces suddenly and rather unexpectedly into possession of an enormous slave population. The coastal reaches of South Carolina had some of the highest slave concentrations in the nation, and the question now was what the Union forces would do with them. Following a pattern set by the always cunning lawyer Benjamin Butler during the early days of the war, they classified the African Americans as contraband of war, technically enemy property that has been used in the enemy’s war effort. As such, the slaves were now the property of the U.S. government, which more or less granted them freedom. During the course of the rest of the war, some of the first halting steps toward black freedom would be made at Port Royal, including the enlistment of blacks into the Union army and experiments with settling the former slaves to farm for their own profit on the lands they once had worked as slaves.

Du Pont and his U.S. Navy fleet had won one of the first major Union victories of the war at Port Royal and brought Union victory appreciably closer. The very next day, however, another commander with another unit of the navy brought on what may well have been the Union’s most dangerous crisis of the war. Captain Charles Wilkes commanded the U.S. steam frigate
San Jacinto
, which had been since 1859 cruising off the coast of Africa to help suppress the illegal international slave trade. It was on its way back to the United States to join in the Port Royal expedition, but Wilkes had delayed along the way to search for a reported Confederate commerce-raiding vessel. When
San Jacinto
put in at the port of Cienfuegos, Cuba, for coal, Wilkes learned that Confederate emissaries James M. Mason and John Slidell, bound for Britain and France, respectively, had successfully run the blockade at Charleston in a speedy, coastal vessel on October 12 and were at that very moment in Havana waiting to take passage in the British mail packet
Trent
, bound for St. Thomas in the Bahamas, where they planned to take a British liner for the final leg of their trip to Europe.

The crusty, sixty-three-year-old seadog Wilkes, considered his options. After consulting several books on the law of the sea, he decided that Mason and Slidell were a form of living diplomatic dispatches. Diplomatic dispatches were contraband, articles whose warlike purpose allowed the vessel of a warring power to seize the neutral vessel carrying them. This would not be an exercise of the blockade since the ships involved would be far from any American harbor. It would depend for its justification solely on the claim that the
Trent
was carrying contraband. Wilkes was a fiery, impetuous officer, and he immediately got under way and placed the
San Jacinto
in the Old Bahama Channel, through which the
Trent
was bound to pass on its voyage to St. Thomas.

On November 8, the day after the capture of Port Royal Sound, the royal mail packet appeared, right on time. It took two shots across the bow to convince
Trent
’s captain to heave to. When he did, a cutter from the
San Jacinto
brought on board U.S. Navy Lieutenant Donald M. Fairfax, leading a boarding party. The British captain haughtily refused to produce his ship’s registration and passenger list or to allow a search of the vessel for contraband, as a cruising warship was entitled to require of a neutral vessel, and Fairfax seemed hesitant to press the point. He did nonetheless find Mason, Slidell, and their secretaries and, in compliance with his orders from Wilkes, conveyed the four men and their baggage to the
San Jacinto
. Perhaps somewhat taken aback by the British captain’s display of outraged arrogance, Fairfax did not carry out the portion of Wilkes’s orders that required him to seize the
Trent
as a prize of war, as
San Jacinto
was entitled to do with any ship carrying Confederate contraband.

When
San Jacinto
arrived in the United States with the captured Confederate emissaries, the North erupted in jubilation, celebrating the frustration both of the Rebels’ plans and of Britain’s underhanded efforts to aid them. The British reaction was national outrage. Wilkes’s action was, at worst, a milder version of exactly the sort of thing British captains had been doing to foreign ships for decades, including to U.S. vessels in the run-up to the War of 1812, but this was different as far as the British government and populace were concerned. Those incidents had been done by Britain to others, including Americans. By contrast, this had been done by Americans to a British ship. It was not to be tolerated. Prime Minister Palmerston, always hostile to the United States, told his cabinet with an oath that he would not stand for such a provocation from the Americans. To Queen Victoria he wrote that the time was right to teach “a lesson to the United States which will not soon be forgotten.”
⁴
It certainly would not have been, but fortunately for both countries, the crisis did not go that far. Nevertheless, British troops stationed in Canada were put on alert, and further reinforcements were dispatched from the Isles. The
Trent
Affair was the closest the United States and Great Britain came to armed conflict during the Civil War.

Lincoln and his cabinet were at a loss to know what to do with the diplomatic “white elephants,” as Lincoln called them, that Wilkes had brought them. The Confederate emissaries, now cooling their heels at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor, were doing more to bring about armed foreign intervention in the American Civil War than they could conceivably have done had they been running loose in the courts of Europe. Lincoln commented that the nation would do best to limit itself to “one war at a time.” Yet northern public opinion made it hard to release Mason and Slidell since this would appear to be (and indeed really would be) backing down to British bullying. The problem would have become insoluble and another Anglo-American war almost inevitable had the British cabinet sent to the United States the harshly worded ultimatum it initially composed, an insulting demand for groveling with which no American president could ever have complied. Queen Victoria, invited by the cabinet to send her comments on the message, referred the matter to her husband, Prince Albert, even then dying of typhoid. The prince suggested modifying the language of the message so as to give the Americans the option of claiming, as was indeed the case, that Wilkes had acted without instructions from his government.

Backing down was still a difficult dose for Lincoln and his cabinet to swallow, but Seward wrote the British a lengthy letter explaining that Wilkes had indeed acted without authorization and that although his halting and search of the
Trent
had been legal, he had erred in not bringing the entire ship to an American port to be adjudicated in a prize court and possibly condemned for carrying contraband. Since Wilkes (actually Fairfax) had erred by simply removing the emissaries and letting the ship go, Seward was happy to apologize and to recognize with satisfaction that the British had now come around to the American position about the rights of the sea and admitted that they had done wrong for the past sixty years. With that, the United States released Mason and Slidell to go on their ways, and the Rebel diplomats reached their respective destinations in January 1862. Palmerston grumbled that there was much in Seward’s message with which he did not agree, including the assertion that Mason and Slidell had constituted “diplomatic dispatches.” In fact, as Mason’s daughter later revealed, the Confederates had had with them on the
Trent
a pouch of actual diplomatic dispatches that remained undiscovered because Fairfax did not search the ship. A British officer carried the pouch to waiting Confederate agents in England in flagrant violation of neutrality law.

As 1861 came to an end the Confederacy seemed to be riding high. It had won the great battle of the war, Bull Run, and most of the smaller ones— Big Bethel, Wilson’s Creek, and Ball’s Bluff. Its chief losses were in western Virginia and along the southern coast at Port Royal. More significantly though less visibly, it had suffered a major blow to its security in the evaporation of Kentucky neutrality. For now, though, the Confederacy’s situation seemed secure. Britain had not yet intervened, though it had come perilously close, and southerners continued to expect that event—all the more so now since Mason was in London to explain to British officials why it was their duty to recognize the Confederacy.

The outlook appeared correspondingly gloomy for the Union—military defeats, near war with Britain, and a finance crisis within the government all combined to create a dismal picture. When in late December McClellan contracted a severe case of typhoid, Lincoln thought matters could hardly get worse. “The people are impatient,” he lamented to Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs. “Chase [Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase] has no money and he tells me he can raise no more; the General of the Army has typhoid fever. The bottom is out of the tub. What shall I do?”
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