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An eminent historian tries to answer the question of how much the Union naval blockade crippled the South's war effort. By Scott Boyd Date published: 9/2/2006
First of two parts THERE ARE three things that historians do, according to Craig Symonds, professor emeritus of history at the U.S. Naval Academy, now chief historian of the USS Monitor Center at the Mariners' Museum in Newport News. First, said Symonds, historians "research deeply," getting at the past with raw data. Second, they "make sense and synthesize" that data. Third, they "present [their findings], using moving and poetic language. "Good historians do one of these things. Great historians manage two of these. Truly exceptional historians do all three, and [tonight's speaker] is one of these," Symonds said as he introduced a speaker, James M. McPherson, Princeton University's George Henry Davis '86 professor emeritus of history, at the Mariners' Museum. McPherson, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for his Civil War masterpiece, "Battle Cry of Freedom," gave the keynote lecture on the Civil War navies during the museum's fourth annual Battle of Hampton Roads Weekend. The three tasks of the Union navy, as McPherson explained it, were (1) maintaining the Union blockade of Confederate ports; (2) conducting combined operations with the Union army in coastal and river areas; and (3) engaging in fleet or single-ship actions with Confederate ships, especially ships raiding Union commerce on the high seas, such as the CSS Alabama. "How much did the blockade hurt the South?" McPherson asked in reference to the navy's first task. In answer, he cited a postwar admission by a Confederate naval officer that the blockade shut the Confederacy off from the world and deprived it of supplies. Next, he quoted other Confederates who said, "The so-called blockade was a monstrous fiction," and, "The blockade was Old Abe's practical joke on the war." "What are we to make of these startlingly contrasting claims?" McPherson wondered aloud. "Eighty to 85 percent [of commercial traffic] got through, entering or leaving Southern ports, but this includes intracoastal traffic. "A large majority of the 8,500 [instances of ships that got through to Southern ports] is a false statistic," he explained, because the number doesn't refer solely to foreign commercial traffic to and from the South.
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