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

up the staggering sum of $510,000. The naval lieutenant in command, who enjoyed the Melville-esque name of William Budd, took home $38,318.55 as his share, and the Magnolia’s ordinary seamen realized $1,350.88 each. When the ninety-day gunboat Kennebec could lap up over $1.5 million in prize money for its 100 officers and crewmen, and when Rear Admiral Samuel Philips Lee could pocket between $110,000 (Lee’s reported figure) and $150,000 (what Gideon Welles believed he had raked in) in prize money over the two years he commanded the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron, blockade duty could suddenly seem appealing after all.45

The blockade came to involve more than merely sitting in ambush for Confederate blockade-runners. A surprisingly large proportion of blockade seizures were made by the little Potomac Flotilla, which ran small expeditions up the Potomac and the other Chesapeake Bay rivers to disrupt Confederate coastal trade and the smuggling of medicines and weapons through Confederate lines in Virginia. At the other end of the scale, the navy also aimed to shut down as many major Southern ports as it could. In November 1861 the navy seized Beaufort and the Carolina Sea Islands, and the following January the army and navy together established a foothold on the North Carolina coast. In April 1862 another joint army-navy operation recaptured Fort Pulaski on the Savannah River and closed the Georgia coastline to blockade-running, while the next month Farragut and his steam sloops pushed their way past the Confederacy’s Mississippi River forts and steamed up to New Orleans. Farragut also sealed off Mobile Bay in August 1864, and in January 1865 Wilmington surrendered to yet another joint expedition led by Farragut’s stepbrother, Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter. Only Charleston managed to resist the onslaught of the Federal navy. Throughout the summers of 1863 and 1864, both the army and navy attempted to capture the Charleston harbor defenses and bombard Fort Sumter (now in Confederate hands) into submission. But Sumter, and the rest of Charleston harbor, held out until February 1865, when the approach of a Federal army from Georgia finally forced the Charleston garrison to evacuate the city.

The Confederates had been aware from the beginning of the war that the blockade represented a noose that would strangle them if they could not first find a way to cut through it. “The blockade is breaking up the whole South,” wrote “Parson” Brownlow, the Unionist Tennessean in the spring of 1862. “It has been remarked in the streets of Knoxville that no such thing as a fine-toothed comb was to be had, and all the little Secession heads were full of squatter sovereigns hunting for their rights in the territories.” So if maintaining the blockade was the item of first importance for the Federal navy, then rendering it ineffective as soon as possible became a top priority for the Confederates.46

Unfortunately, the Confederates had very little at hand to use as a weapon against the Federal ships. At least the Union started out with some kind of a navy; the Confederates had none, except for a few small sloops and revenue cutters that they were able to seize at the time of secession. By February 1862 the Confederate navy still only amounted to thirty-three ships. Nor did the Confederates have much to build with. The South had little or nothing in the way of a shipbuilding industry: it possessed few of the raw materials or manufacturing facilities for fitting and arming warships, and lacked building and repair facilities. The only naval construction yard was in the Florida harbor of Pensacola, but the waters of the harbor were controlled by Fort Pickens, whose Union garrison had clung to control of the fort even after Fort Sumter had been bombarded into surrender. Of course, Virginia had occupied the navy yard at Norfolk in April 1861, but the Norfolk yard could easily be sealed off by Federal blockading ships in Hampton Roads and at the mouth of the Chesapeake. If the South had any hope of breaking the blockade, it was going to have to be by some unexpected and unconventional means.

However, the unexpected and unconventional seem to have come naturally to the Confederate secretary of the navy, Stephen Russell Mallory, whose technical ingenuity single-handedly created a Confederate navy, which in turn almost broke up the Union blockade. Very much like his opposite number, Gideon Welles, Mallory laid hands on any possible weapon, any proposed invention, no matter how unlikely—mines made from beer kegs, submarines made from boilerplate, gunboats laminated with railroad iron—and floated them out to do battle with the Federal steam frigates. It was in that last category, ironclads, that Mallory came the nearest to succeeding in his schemes. Mallory, a former U.S. senator from Florida and formerly the chairman of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, was fully abreast of the latest developments in building ironclad gunboats and warships. He was aware that, however imposing the Federal steam frigates and steam sloops might seem, not a single one of them was ironclad, and the Federal ironclad gunboats being built for use on the Mississippi were strictly for the river, too small to venture out on the ocean. Let the Confederacy manage, somehow, to construct even one ironclad warship capable of steaming on the high seas, then that one ship would be more than a match for each and every one of the Federal frigates. “I regard the possession of an iron-armored ship as a matter of the first necessity,” wrote Mallory. “Such a vessel at this time could traverse the entire coast of the United States, prevent all blockade, and encounter, with a fair prospect of success their entire navy. … Naval engagements between wooden frigates as they are now built and armed will prove to be the forlorn hopes of the sea—simply contests in which the question, not of victory, but who shall go to the bottom first is to be solved.”47

The difficulty, for Mallory, was that nowhere in the Confederacy was there the capability of building such a