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“Glorious news reached us today,” Benjamin Moran wrote in his diary on January 30, 1865. “The rebels are tired and will come back [into the Union] soon.” Bulloch pressed on, however, and sent an engineer to Ferrol to oversee the Stonewall’s repairs. “The fall of Fort Fisher seriously deranges our plans for sending supplies, but all of us who are charged with such duties will speedily consult and make new and suitable arrangements,” he promised Mallory.18 Mason was also defiant, telling Benjamin that the Southerners in England approved of the Confederate Congress’s declaration on December 13, 1864, to fight on “at whatever cost or hazard.”19

The Economist criticized the public’s overreaction to the news of Fort Fisher, since the South “still [has] large armies in the field, they have still the ablest generals of the Republic in their ranks,” but most other papers now declared the Confederacy to be without hope.20 It was common knowledge that the South would not be able to survive without its imports. During the past four years, 60 percent of the Confederacy’s rifles had come through the blockade, 75 percent of her saltpeter, and 30 percent of her lead, and, particularly after 1862, the blockade runners had become the South’s lifeline.21 Consul Thomas Dudley in Liverpool had recently completed his statistics for 1864 and amassed evidence against 113 steamships and 304 sailing vessels. Despite the U.S. Navy’s efforts, the South had managed to export 124,700 bales of cotton in return for meat, shoes, arms, medicines, and all the other necessities of war. A total of 303 steamships had successfully run into Wilmington during the war, more than twice the number that reached Charleston.22 The port had become indispensible to the Confederacy. On February 15, Consul Dudley reported that the blockade-running business had died almost overnight.

It had taken four years and seven hundred U.S. ships at a cost of $567 million to close every Southern port. During that time, there had been 6,316 attempts and 5,389 runs past the blockade. The average capture rate for the whole war was only 30 percent, but this figure hides the increasing success of the Federal navy over time. In 1861, roughly nine out of ten blockade runners reached their destinations, but by 1865 the number was only one in two. Although criticized as inept at the time, it is now clear that the blockade played a vital role in the Northern war effort. Guns, meat, and shoes could be shipped in on the blockade runners, but not the heavy cargoes such as iron rails, telegraph poles, and train carriages that the South needed in order to move its armies, feed its people, communicate over long distances, and transport supplies. These hammer blows to the South cost only 10 percent of the total expenditure of the war; except for Rose Greenhow and a few others, almost no one was killed; and a mere 132,000 sailors were employed by the Federal navy compared to 2.8 million soldiers in the army.23

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Mrs. Adams, Henry, Mary, and Brooks left London on February 1 to begin a tour of the Continent. The family had given up the house in Ealing in the expectation that Charles Francis Adams would follow them soon, assuming that Seward would grant his request and appoint a successor. They also were hoping for a visit from Charles Francis Jr., who had surprised them by becoming the colonel of his regiment and proposing marriage to Mary Hone Ogden in the same month.

“Neither Henry nor Brooks Adams had the decency to bid me goodbye,” Moran raged in his diary. “I didn’t expect so much civility from the boy, but I did from Henry.” He was equally incensed with his new assistant secretary, Dennis Alward, for ingratiating himself so easily into Adams’s favor. “Mr. Adams is very civil, but it is the smile of the ogre,” he wrote. The minister had wounded Moran to the quick by inviting Alward to ride in his carriage, and, at a reception given by the Countess of Waldegrave, he had taken “special pains to introduce Mr. Alward to everybody