A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [234]
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18.1 Monitor ships were different from ordinary ironclads on account of their heavy guns, revolving turrets, and flat bottoms, which enabled them to lie low in the water.
18.2 Henry Adams was like his father in his tendency to exaggerate the division of opinion between the social classes. Friends, neighbors, and even families disagreed with one another, such as the Devonshires at the top of the scale—where Hartington leaned toward the South, and his brother Lord Frederick Cavendish toward the North—and the Collings family at the lower end, where Jesse Collings, a hardware merchant, bombarded the local press with letters in support of the North, and his brother Henry, a commercial sailor, joined the Confederate navy and fought on board CSS Merrimac.
18.3 The consuls reported on January 9, 1863, for example, “an armed steamer is to leave Liverpool to-morrow with important dispatches from Commodore Maury (who is still in England), Mason, and Slidell. A man by the name of Hope is the bearer of these dispatches and will go out on the steamer.”
18.4 In New Orleans, a young sublieutenant on shore leave from HMS Galatea was beaten up and thrown into the stocks. An investigation revealed that he had been strolling down Canal Street singing rebel songs. The dim-witted officer defended his conduct, saying “I did call them stinking cowards but that was nearly all.”52
NINETEEN
Prophecies of
Blood and Suffering
Blockade running becomes a serious business—Two cautionary tales—Seward is courageous—General Longstreet feeds an army—A murder—Hooker’s “perfect plan”
In London, Benjamin Moran laughed sourly when he read the naïve response of the British vice consul in Florida. There was no doubt that Captain Jarman had been blockade running; Moran had in his possession a copy of the subscription letter offered by the Peterhoff’s owners, which stated that the purpose of the voyage to the West Indies was to supply arms to the Confederacy in exchange for cotton. Nor could the uproar over Admiral Wilkes’s action disguise the fact that Bermuda and the Bahamas had become the chief supply depots for the South.
The Bahamas was the preferred route for commercial blockade runners because of their proximity to the Southern coast. It took only three days to sail from Nassau to the main Southern ports. The same trip from Bermuda—which was almost nine hundred miles due east of Charleston—took at least five days and sometimes more in poor weather. But by late 1862, Josiah Gorgas, the Confederate chief of ordnance, had realized that Bermuda’s relative inaccessibility was an advantage for his government since the competition for docking facilities and warehouses was less fierce. The Ordnance Department’s small fleet of blockade runners used the tiny island of St. George, which lay at the top end of the archipelago. Its port was closer to the open sea than the main island’s, and the approach from the South was an easy passage through crystalline waters. On the return journey, the ordnance fleet unloaded its cargoes at Wilmington in North Carolina rather than sailing to Charleston, which was expensive and crowded. Though not as convenient as Charleston—Wilmington was twenty-five miles from the sea, on the east bank of the Cape Fear River—the port could be reached via two different approaches and enjoyed the advantage of being guarded by Fort Fisher, whose large guns could hit any blockader attempting to enter the river.
Ill.36 Unloading cotton from blockade runners at the port of Nassau, by Frank Vizetelly.
The supply system between Bermuda and Wilmington was growing so rapidly that in early 1863 the Confederate Ordnance Department appointed Major Norman Walker to oversee