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The USS Fort Donelson, formerly the Confederate blockade runner
Attacking the blockaders: The CSS Virginia sinks the USS Cumberland on the first day of the Battle of Hampton Roads on March 8, 1862, depicted in this Currier and Ives lithograph.
Hunting down Confederate commerce raiders: The USS Kearsarge sinks |
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.
"The real purpose of the blockade was to intercept foreign trade," McPherson said. "One thousand of 1,300 foreign trading ships made it, according to Stephen Wise." Wise is the author of the classic, "Lifeline of the Confederacy: Blockade Running During the Civil War."
And 8,500 commercial ships in and out of Southern ports during the war's four years was far fewer than the 20,000 that visited them in the four years before the war, McPherson noted.
One additional limitation during the war that wasn't a factor beforehand, he said, was that "blockade runners were built for speed, not for cargo-carrying capacity."
McPherson hypothesized about another aspect of the blockade not explained by statistics, asking, "How many larger, slower ships did not even try to get out because of the blockade?
"During the war, 500,000 bales of cotton were exported to Europe. Ten million bales went to Europe in the four years before the war," he noted.
McPherson quoted Naval Academy professor James Russell Soley, who wrote shortly after the war: "The blockade was of vital importance to the operations of the war. Without the blockade, the war would have been more prolonged and bloody."
Still, due to their speed and low, stealthy profiles, blockade runners "could pass within a couple hundred yards of blockading ships without being detected," McPherson said.
One leg of a blockade runner's trip was usually more dangerous than the other, he said, noting, "Most of the captured and destroyed blockade runners were gotten on the inbound run."
He reviewed the number of ships in the Union navy, which peaked at 671, adding, "Some were always in port for resupply and repairs. There were not enough to have a leak-proof blockade."
The most straightforward way for the Confederates to break the blockade was to attack and eliminate the Union warships that maintained it. This is exactly how the Battle of Hampton Roads began on March 8, 1862.
The ironclad CSS Virginia came out and engaged the wooden Union vessels on blockade duty in Hampton Roads, destroying two. The next day, the Virginia returned to finish the job but encountered the USS Monitor instead.
"The most significant ship-to-ship action was on March 9, 1862," McPherson said of history's first battle between ironclads.
Returning to Symonds' theme, he explained that the Union navy's second task--conducting combined operations with the Union army in river and coastal areas--included operations against Vicksburg on the Mississippi River and important ports such as Charleston, S.C., and Wilmington, N.C.
The Union navy's third task--engaging Confederate warships in single-ship or fleet actions--included efforts to hunt and destroy Confederate commerce raiders on the high seas.
"Commerce raiders were the U-boats of the Civil War," McPherson said by way of analogy, referring to Confederate vessels such as the CSS Alabama and CSS Florida, which attacked Northern merchant ships on the high seas.
"Two hundred and fifty-seven American merchant ships were taken out [sunk or captured] by Confederate commerce raiders,"
"If we cannot say the Union navy won the war, we can say the war would not be won without the Union navy."
SCOTT BOYD is a freelance writer living in Spotsylvania County.
