Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

the blockade by force (at the least) or (at worst) actively intervene in the course of the war to secure Southern independence and bring the war and the blockade to an end.

For their part, the Confederates were fully aware of the value of the cotton export trade, and they expected that the loss of cotton would compel Britain, and perhaps France, to intervene before a few months had passed. Henry L. Benning of Georgia confidently declared, “We have an article which England must have.”

To deprive England of cotton would be the same as to deprive 4,000,000 of her subjects of the means of subsistence, and to throw them out to work anarchy and revolution. This she would never consent to. … She has ships enough to destroy the entire navy which the North would have, and to enter the harbor of New York and Boston, and with the improved artillery of the day destroy these cities in a few hours.4

A week and a half after Lincoln’s blockade proclamation, the English newspaper correspondent William Howard Russell noticed an advertisement in a Charleston merchant’s office for direct sailings between Charleston and Europe, and when Russell wondered whether that might be a little premature due to the blockade, he was quickly told that cotton would solve that problem in a short while.

“Why, I expect, sir,” replied the merchant, “that if those miserable Yankees try to blockade us, and keep you from our cotton, you’ll just send their ships to the bottom and acknowledge us. That will be before autumn, I think.” It was in vain I assured him he would be disappointed. “Look out there,” he said, pointing to the wharf, on which were piled some cotton bales; “there’s the key will open all our ports, and put us into John Bull’s strong box as well.”5

Southerners were also convinced that it was worth Britain’s while to remember that the South, which had always needed to import British manufactured goods as badly as Britain needed to import Southern cotton, would continue to be an important market for the sale of British exports. The Confederate states, freed from the federal government’s high import tariffs, would be in an even better position to buy British goods than if they had still been in the Union. The logic of commerce alone would seem to dictate that any attempt by the Federal navy to stopper the Confederacy’s ports would sooner or later invite some kind of unpleasant action from the vastly superior British navy, and to help that conclusion along, the Confederacy sent its first set of commissioners to Europe in the summer of 1861 to appeal to France and Britain for formal diplomatic recognition and military aid.

Entirely apart from the realpolitik of cotton, the status of blockades in international law was a highly technical and tricky affair that posed problem of its own. Lincoln insisted from the beginning of the war that the Southern states had no constitutional right to secede from the Union, and when the Confederates insisted that their republic was a legitimate and independent nation and the civil war a conflict of two belligerent nations, Lincoln would reply that it was really only an insurrection against Federal authority. This involved more than simple bandying about. For the British in particular, with their outsize naval power, it was possible for a blockade to cut off an enemy nation’s inflow of supplies, serve as an early-warning tripwire in the event of an attempted invasion, and act as a net to apprehend an enemy nation’s privateers before they could escape onto the world’s oceans and damage British commerce—all at once. The more complex blockades became, the more urgent the need to define how they operated, since the seizure of ships and cargoes attempting to penetrate the blockade included the shipping of neutrals whose antagonism the British might not want to inflame.

The first serious attempt at defining the operations of blockades—the Declaration of Paris—bound its adherents to four rules. Privateering must be abolished—in other words, letters of marque and reprisal (government licenses to private shipping to prey on the commerce of an enemy nation) must end. The ships and cargoes of neutral-nation owners must be protected from confiscation if stopped by a blockade (provided the cargoes were not actual contraband of war). The cargoes of neutral-nation owners must be protected from confiscation even if they were being shipped in vessels owned by the blockaders’ enemy (although no such protection was extended to the ships or the cargoes actually owned by that enemy). And blockades, to be legal, must be effective, not mere token or “paper” blockades. The Declaration of Paris offered no actual definition of what an effective blockade would look like, but the presumption was that everyone would know it when they saw it.

The first point operated very much to the favor of Great Britain, since it removed a threat that British commerce around the world dreaded; the second and third bought the adherence of the other major European powers, since it guarded their seaborne commerce from arbitrary seizure by British warships. However, the United States declined to endorse the Declaration of Paris. The secretary of state at the time, William Marcy, was happy to agree to the second and third points, but the United States had always looked to fall back on privateering as a way to augment its naval forces in the event of war, without having to pay for the privateers’ upkeep in time of peace; the absence of any working definition of an effective blockade provided another annoyance that Marcy objected to. Marcy proposed an amendment that would have exempted even the private property of belligerents from seizure by a blockade. But the British government would not agree to Marcy’s amendment, and there the matter rested until the outbreak of the Civil War.6

The customary alternative to blockade in the case of insurrections was a declaration of closure of ports (since any sovereign nation has the prerogative of closing its ports to foreign shipping).