 On the night of July 16th, 1861, William Tillman snuck into the captain's room of the ship the SJ Warring. He had with him a heavy club, and while the captain of the ship was sleeping, he swung the club and killed him. He moved on to the next room, where a sailor was sleeping, and he killed him as well. Moving on to a third sleeping sailor, he struck another blow with his club, but this time the sailor was not killed. Facing Tillman, the third sailor drew his revolver and called for help, but not quickly enough to prevent him from receiving a fatal blow. With the third sailor dead on the floor, Tillman took the man's revolver and used it to take the final two crewmen hostage. William Tillman declared that the ship was now his. Tillman was a free black man, who worked as a cook on the SJ Warring, but with the war underway, this took place days before the First Battle of Bull Run, Confederate privateers were taking prizes of northern commercial ships. The most infamous privateer ship in the first year of the war was the Jefferson Davis, a former slave ship that was renamed in honor of the new Confederate president. In July and August, it took eight prizes, one of which was the SJ Warring. Five members of the Jefferson Davis boarded the SJ Warring and kept Tillman and two other northern crewmen as they started to sail the ship to the Charleston Harbor, where Tillman was to be sold into slavery. Before they made it, Tillman killed three of the crewmen, and with the revolver he took from the third, put the two remaining Southerners and the iron shackles used for slaves. He then sailed the Warring back to New York, where he arrived shortly after the Union failure at the First Battle of Bull Run. The New York Tribune praised him as one of the first Union heroes. Quote, To this colored man was the nation indebted for the first vindication of its honor at sea. It goes far to console us for the sad reverse of our arms at Bull Run. I'm Chris Calton, and this is the Mises Institute podcast, Historical Controversies. We just finished our three episode look at the complicated history of the five civilized Native American tribes at the outset of the war, and we're pretty much finishing up 1861. I have to admit that when I'm writing these episodes, I'm constantly reorganizing my outline and rethinking how I want to tell the story, but a lot of times I devote an episode or several episodes to something, and then later wish I had told some other element of the history beforehand. The naval conflicts in 1861 are such episodes. I kept putting them off because the history is on this topic, and there are quite a few. I'll tell the story very differently, and it's hard to weave the Civil War on the water and do the larger narrative of the war. It's really its own theater of the war, just like we have the Eastern Theater and the Western Theater. I decided to put the naval information at the end of 1861, even though the story starts very early into the war, because it leads so well into some of the most important Union operations of 1862, when the blockade starts to look effective, and the Western Theater claims what turns out to be very significant victories that would not have been possible without the Union naval power. But in light of some other events we've talked about, particularly the Trent Affair, some of the information in this and the next episode will provide some useful context that would have been helpful prior to those episodes. The minor victories that the Union wins on the water in 1861 also proved to be more significant than they immediately appeared. Mark Thornton and Bob Eakland, in their collection of articles on the Civil War, write that the war at sea is the most important theater of the war, and that, economists at least, consider the blockade to have been the decisive battlefield in the war. And finally, the 1861 operations demonstrate to that new naval technologies, just like rifling technologies for land combat, tremendously change the way warfare had to be conducted. Lincoln announced his blockade plan on April 19, 1861, only days after the fall of Fort Sumter and his call for 75,000 Union volunteers. The plan to blockade southern ports was the first idea Union strategists seized upon. This isn't surprising. Naval blockades were a tradition for naval powers waging war against countries who were weaker at sea, and the Union certainly had a stronger navy than the Confederacy, whose navy was essentially non-existent at the outset of the war. There were problems with the Union blockade plan that were more unique to the Civil War as well. General Winfield Scott formalized the plan to blockade the southern coast and what became referred to as the Anaconda plan, which I've seen explained because it looked like the map of the blockade would snake around the Confederacy from North Carolina around Florida and up through the Mississippi River like a giant snake, but also and more commonly because it was intended to squeeze the Confederacy into submission like an Anaconda would its prey. I don't actually know which one of these was the foundation for the original analogy, though there is a famous political cartoon with the caption, Scott's Great Snake, ridiculing the plan with a drawing of a large Anaconda around the Confederate States and a different political cartoon implies the other analogy depicting a mustachioed figure, I don't know who it's supposed to represent, if anybody, on the body of a snake that is coiled around a bunch of dead bodies with the names of slave states on its coils. The idea with blockades was typically to stop enemy warships and protect domestic commerce, but the Union blockade of the Confederacy was designed to do the opposite. In April of 1861, there were no enemy warships, but the cotton economy of the South was highly dependent on foreign trade. But the Confederate coastline spanned more than 3,500 miles with as many as 189 harbors, inlets, and river mouths that in many cases only certain ships could traverse. A blockade of this nature and scope, if successful, would be the first in global history, and success was key. International law stipulated that for a naval blockade to be legally binding on foreign powers, it had to be effective. If the Confederacy could show that the blockade was, as they called it, a paper blockade, foreign ships had no internationally recognized obligation to respect it, so the Union government would have to effectively barricade all 189 points of Confederate access to the ocean. Another legal dilemma that the federal government faced was the recognition of the Confederacy, which I talked about a bit on the two episodes I devoted to Union diplomacy. International law stipulated that a blockade could only legitimately be used against foreign powers. If they blockaded the Confederacy, foreign powers might interpret this as the Union's de facto recognition of Southern independence, which could prompt countries like Britain and France to offer the same recognition. This is why, in Lincoln's inaugural address, he promised to enforce the laws of the nation, which included the collection of customs duties on Southern ports. Some people like to erroneously point to this as evidence of the Northern tariff thesis, which is the idea that Lincoln waged the war because he did not want to lose out on tariff revenues, but this statement was actually made on the advice of William Seward, who proposed the enforcement of customs duties as a defense of the blockade that would not imply recognition of the Confederacy. If it was an official blockade, the Confederacy would be considered belligerents rather than insurrectionists, and if they were belligerents, they would be seen as a sovereign entity. Ultimately, the facade would be abandoned, as nobody really bought it anyway, and in 1863, the Supreme Court would rule that the blockade did indeed imply that the Confederacy was a belligerent power, but that belligerent rights did not imply sovereignty or independence, upholding the constitutionality of the blockade. The dissenting justices argued that this perspective did not hold because Lincoln ordered this blockade before Congress actually declared war, but their dissent didn't matter, and long before the case made it to the Supreme Court, nobody was pretending the blockade was anything else anyway. So when Lincoln announced his blockade, he faced both practical difficulties of making the blockade effective and legal difficulties of imposing the blockade on a country that he did not want to recognize as a sovereign entity. Given these complications, it is understandable that the Confederates received his blockade declaration with amused skepticism. The effectiveness of the blockade was the more immediate concern in 1861, though. The Confederate Navy may have been non-existent at the beginning of the war, but the Union Navy wasn't as far ahead of them as we are inclined to think, and the new Secretary of the Navy had to look for solutions to his problems. Gideon Wells was hardly qualified to be Secretary of the U.S. Navy. Like most of Lincoln's cabinet, he was selected for political reasons rather than because of his qualifications. Patronage was a common practice in the U.S. government by the mid-19th century, and most of Lincoln's appointees were granted as rewards for their service to the Republican Party. Wells was no exception. He was from Hartford, Connecticut, and he became an early supporter of Abraham Lincoln before the party decided on who should be the presidential candidate in 1860, and without Wells, Lincoln may not have received the support of the Connecticut delegation, and therefore he may not have won the candidacy. Additionally, with Lincoln's cabinet being composed of people from Maryland, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, he wanted a New Englander to round out the administration. Wells was expected to be rewarded with a cabinet position, but he was hoping to be appointed as the Postmaster General, which he thought he was qualified for because he had previously served as Hartford's Postmaster. Instead, the position was offered to Montgomery Blair, but after his term as Hartford's Postmaster, Wells had been given the job as head of the Navy Department's Bureau of Provisions and Clothing. Wells' job was to make sure that the Navy was adequately supplied, and he did his job well, but his employment in the Department of Navy did not translate to any knowledge of the sea or ships. Still, the position was enough of a justification for Lincoln to award him the position as Secretary of the Navy. When Wells got to Washington and first spoke with the President about the job, Lincoln said, quote, I know but little about ships, end quote. In reality, Lincoln undoubtedly knew more about ships than Gideon Wells did. He was hardly a naval expert, but Lincoln is the only President to ever receive a patent, and he got his in 1848 for a steamboat innovation that would make it easier for cargo ships to pass over shallow waters. The invention itself never got put into practice, and most experts doubt it would have worked, but Lincoln's law partner William Herndon, who was one of the skeptics about the invention's practicality, said that, quote, although I regarded the thing as impracticable, I said nothing, probably out of respect for Lincoln's well-known reputation as a boatman, end quote. So this is not to say that Lincoln himself had the knowledge or experience to serve as Secretary of the Navy, either, but he was at least more qualified than Gideon Wells. But despite Wells' clear lack of qualifications, he appears to have handled his unwanted position relatively well, so either Lincoln saw something in him that is less apparent to most people than in now, which I think is an unrealistically generous interpretation, or he got lucky with the appointment. Either way, Gideon Wells proved an effective Secretary of the Navy. This is particularly impressive considering the situation that Wells was thrust into. I don't know if I could argue that any other Cabinet Minister faced as difficult and demanding of a situation as Gideon Wells did upon taking his position. He was expected to find a way to implement Lincoln's incredibly ambitious blockade plan, and he barely had a Navy, and even fewer men to operate it, as much of the Navy, especially officers, joined the Confederacy. Wells also had to face the difficulty that so many other people were experiencing. Secretary of State William Seward, who did not consider it outside of his authority to meddle with naval appointments. Early into his position, Wells received an order that replaced Captain Silas Stringham, a man Wells trusted, with Captain Samuel Barron to serve as Wells' assistant to help him in the selection of officers. The order was signed by the President, but when Wells confronted Lincoln about it, Lincoln admitted that he barely looked at the order, which had come from William Seward. Wells believed Barron was a secessionist, even though his home state of Virginia had not yet seceded. Even though he didn't know it, he was completely right, as Barron had already been given a Confederate naval commission, even before Seward took it upon himself to give him a high-level union appointment. In total, the U.S. Navy consisted of about 90 ships when Wells took office, but only 24 of these were steam-powered, the rest were still sailing ships, which had advantages in peacetime for their reliability, but the dependence on wind power made them very unreliable for chasing enemy ships. Add to this the fact that the majority of these ships were either currently inoperable or out in international waters. On the first day as Secretary of Navy, Wells effectively had three ships at his disposal. So Wells made some decisions that were not popular in the press, but seem in retrospect to have worked out quite well for the Union. First off, he called in all the union ships and ordered the repairs of any ship that could be made to work. More importantly, he ordered the construction of a large number of boats that could be thrown together very quickly. This was controversial, because the speed at which they were built meant that they would hardly be powerful ships. The derisive term for them was 90-day gunboats, referencing the fact that it took only three months to build one. They were wooden steamers that could operate in shallow waters and had modest firepower. But even three months was a long time when facing an oncoming war, so Wells also went about purchasing every boat he could. He was willing to indiscriminately buy any civilian or commercial ship just as long as they were steam-powered. This included tugboats, transport ferries, and any other operable boat that would not typically be thought of when people talk about a navy. This group of ships also got a derisive nickname, the Soapbox Navy. The person Wells appointed to purchasing the ships was a source of controversy as well. George Morgan was Wells' brother-in-law, so the job looked like graft. He was giving family opportunities for wartime profit. It didn't look good. And when Morgan made a whopping $70,000 on commission for only six months' work, it looked even worse. But despite how it looked, Morgan made this money by procuring 89 ships for the Union Navy in only a few months, and he did so with skillful negotiations that saved the U.S. government nearly $1 million if we look at the original asking prices for the ship's owners. So Morgan made a lot of money by effectively doing his job in saving the U.S. government far more than he pocketed in commissions. With Wells' efforts largely invisible to the public eye, the Northern Press excoriated him. One paper even published a four-line poem mocking him, quote, retire O'Gideon to an onion farm. Ply any trade that's innocent and slow. Do anything where you can do no harm. Go anywhere you fancy. Only go. Wells' priority in assembling his Navy was very much quantity over quality, which looked bad to the critical press, but it made a lot of sense. He was expected to barricade 3,500 miles of coast and the enemy had no Navy to speak of, so stronger ships didn't seem necessary and time was obviously a factor. After Lincoln started pushing for the blockade following the Union defeat at Wilson's Creek, Wells was able to put his quickly assembled Navy of now more than 200 ships into action and he would be vindicated before the year's end. The Confederacy's problems were quite different than the Union's and more significantly they were at a distinct disadvantage, even factoring in the Union's thinly stretched Navy. The one advantage they had over the Union was the surplus of Naval officers who had resigned from the U.S. Navy and joined the Confederacy. But while the Union struggled to find people to man its ships, the Confederacy struggled to get ships for its sailors to man. The Confederate Secretary of the Navy was far more experienced than Gideon Wells for the job he found himself in at the outset of the war. Stephen Mallory was one of the many men who had served in the U.S. Navy before joining the Confederacy and even when he was practicing law he accumulated vast maritime knowledge while working as a judge in Key West where he oversaw several disputes between ship owners. It was also a Florida senator for some time and while in Congress he served as chairman of the Naval Affairs Committee where he actually helped pass legislation that modernized the U.S. Navy pushing the government to build steam powered vessels. As weak as the Union Navy was in 1861 it probably would have been even weaker had it not been for Mallory's efforts 10 years earlier. But Stephen Mallory was clearly an asset to the Confederacy. Even though he took office as head of a Navy that didn't exist, Confederates had seized a total of four revenue cutters and a single sidewheel steamer, this being a steam powered ship that had a giant waterwheel on each side instead of a propeller. But five ships, none of which were fit for combat, hardly constituted in Navy. However it wasn't long before Mallory obtained some important resources. In April the Gosport Navy Yard, one of the largest naval facilities in the country, was under the command of Commodore Charles Macaulay who was so old that he was serving in the Navy since before President Lincoln was even born. His position was a matter of seniority rather than competence and he was slow to order the evacuation of the yard in anticipation of Virginia's secession. So on April 20th Virginia secessionist stormed the Navy Yard and the Union men there hastily tried to set fire to everything. They did successfully sink the incredible 40 gun steam powered ship the USS Merrimack which was immobilized while its engines were being repaired. I'll be talking a great deal more about the Merrimack in a few weeks. But the Confederates seized the yard before significant damage was done, claiming 1200 cannons, 52 of which were the most advanced naval cannons in existence at the time. As well as a huge supply of artillery ammunition. They still had to get ships but the cannons meant that once they got them they were in good shape to arm them and the cannons also meant that they could equip their forts which traditionally were effective in fending off warships though we will also see how that changed by the civil war. If Gideon Wells' strategy was to focus on quantity over quality which was sensible for his situation Mallory's strategy was to focus on quality over quantity which was equally sensible. There was no way that the Confederacy could ever catch up with the U.S. naval power in sheer numbers but by building better ships and looking for naval innovations they could potentially counter the U.S. Navy in other ways. Ultimately the Union Navy won the day but Mallory's creative innovations certainly caused the Union more trouble than they anticipated. The most famous innovation was the ironclad warship which I'm saving for later episodes because this contributes what I consider to be one of the most fascinating stories of the war but ironclads weren't American innovations anyway as other navies had already employed iron armored designs. The two most successful innovations that the Confederacy employed both taking to the waters by 1862 were torpedoes and commercial raiders. The Confederate Torpedo Bureau was formed in 1861 and began working on buoyant mines which is all a torpedo was at the time and over the course of the war the technology became increasingly advanced and the torpedoes successfully sunk their first union ship in December of 1862. 42 more union ships would either be sunk or damaged by Confederate torpedoes before the wars end. Commercial raiders were naval ships designed to attack merchant vessels and over the course of the war a total of hundreds of northern merchant and whaling ships were destroyed by these commercial raiders. This innovation is a great representation of how the Confederacy dealt with their naval disadvantage. They knew they couldn't go toe to toe with the union navy but it didn't take a very powerful ship to interrupt American commerce. The most formidable commerce raider the CSS Alabama took out 65 ships by itself over the course of two years one of which was actually a U.S. warship. They were so effective at hunting commerce ships that most American merchant ships registered as foreign vessels so they would avoid being targeted. They also had the effect of diverting the attention of union naval ships from enforcing the blockade to chasing the more easily maneuverable raiderships which helps Confederate blockade runners. Not all innovations were as effective but the Confederacy can also boast the first combat submarine the H.L. Hunley which sank a union blockade ship in 1864. Another important tool for the Confederacy was far from new but it was very important. This was the use of privateers privateerships were those that in times of war were given legal license to capture enemy merchant vessels. The license that allowed them to do this was called a letter of marquee and Jefferson Davis started to issue them on April 17th. The United States had used privateers effectively against the British during both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. It was an effective tactic for dealing with a more powerful navy just as the Confederacy was facing in 1861. Even though modern parlance rarely reflects it there are technical distinctions between pirates privateers, corsairs and buccaneers. All would be bandits that operated on water but they were not of the same nature. The term pirate refers to what we typically think of being pure outlaws who criminally preyed on private vessels. Privateers and corsairs were legally sanctioned vessels who were granted licenses to prey on certain types of ships. Corsairs targeted ships from regions of a different religion while privateers targeted enemy ships during a time of war. Buccaneers were something of a combination as they were French pirates who after the Spanish took over Tortuga where the buccaneers had settled the buccaneers took two raiding Spanish vessels sometimes legally and sometimes illegally. But pirates and privateers are what concerns us in the American Civil War. The Treaty of Paris which I mentioned in the Trent Affair episode outlawed privateering for the signatory countries. Neither the Union nor the Confederacy signed it though the Confederacy would eventually sign it but only after modifying it to omit the clause banning privateering because they considered this too important for their efforts against the Union Navy. Lincoln's Block 8 announcement which came only two days after Jefferson Davis invited ship captains to apply for Confederate letters of marquee stipulated that any captured privateers would be treated as pirates. This was huge. International law dictated that pirates should be hanged while privateers should be treated as prisoners of war. Lincoln's statement was seen as tremendously draconian by the Confederates as well as much of the international community. Jefferson Davis responded to Lincoln by saying that for every Confederate privateer executed he would execute a Union officer being held as prisoner of war. After the Union captured the privateer ship the Savannah taking prisoner 13 crewmen Jefferson Davis actually wrote to Lincoln imploring him to treat the privateers as prisoners of war but Lincoln never replied though he did read the letter. But Davis wasn't bluffing in his promise to execute Union officers and in preparation of Lincoln's execution of the privateers he selected the 10 field officers currently in Confederate custody and three minor officers to match the number of Union executions. The three minor officers were selected by a lottery to decide who would die and their names were picked out of a box by congressman Alfred Eli who had been taken prisoner during the battle of Bull Run where he'd been among the spectators. Eli was likely relieved that he was not among them and selected for execution which he had previously been told he would be by a former congressional colleague from Texas. Davis also decided that if Lincoln was going to treat his privateers as petty criminals then he should do the same for the Union officers and this meant not just readying them for execution but moving them to the Henrico County Jail. Officers were typically treated rather well by enemy governments at this point so the move to a county jail meant significantly worse conditions. All three men were crammed into a single small cell where rats moved around their feet. Some of them wrote their wives thinking it was going to be the last letter they ever sent. The standoff over the prisoners dragged until early 1862 and after the early defeats in the release of the Trent's hostages Mason and Slidel several northern presses were pressuring Lincoln to follow through with his promises to execute the privateers. The Harper's Weekly asked, quote, will he have the courage to hang the pirate captain? But Lincoln did finally back down on January 31st having the prisoners quietly handed into the custody of the War Department which handled prisoners of war. Davis responded by returning his prisoners to the tobacco warehouse that had been converted into a prison for captured soldiers. Going forward privateers would be treated as privateers. But by the time Lincoln did this Confederate privateering had almost completely ceased anyway as the Union blockade was too intimidating and most foreign nations refused to let them bring their prizes into their ports. Blockade running looked to be a better way to make a profit. Thus, the Confederacy's commerce raiders took over the job of privateers typically burning ships rather than capturing them. But for the year they were in operation Confederate privateers did cause the Union quite a few headaches. The most famous Confederate sea captain, Raphael Sims was the captain of a commerce raider, the Sumter. Adamently pro-slavery Sims believed that the Confederacy was defending slavery not just for the southern states but for other countries with legal slavery such as Cuba and Brazil. He wrote to the governor of Martinique explaining quote the true issue of the war to wit an abolition crusade against our slave property end quote and he similarly told a Brazilian provincial president that quote this war was in fact a war as much in behalf of Brazil as ourselves that we were fighting the first battle in favor of slavery and that if we were beaten in this contest Brazil would be the next one to be assailed by Yankee and English propagandists end quote at the beginning of July he claimed his first prize the golden rocket which he said after setting it ablaze that it quote made a beautiful bonfire and we did not enjoy the spectacle less because she was from the black Republican state of Maine end quote he captured seven more ships over the next four days trying to act as a privateer he attempted to take the captured ships to Cuba but when the Cuban government wouldn't accept them because of Spain's neutrality in the war Sims burned these ships as well by the first couple of weeks in 1862 he had captured 18 Union ships thoroughly frustrating Gideon Wales with the sumpter in need of repairs he sold the ship to a Liverpool merchant who turned it into a blockade runner and Sims took over the CSS Alabama another famous confederate vessel but blockade runners were possibly the most important element of the confederate efforts on the sea the Union blockade was designed to restrict the confederacy's access to foreign commerce and blockade runners undermined that in 1861 with the U.S. Navy spread so thin blockade running was not incredibly difficult not only were there a few ships but at night time they faced the dilemma of either staying in the dark or shining lights that made it easier to spot blockade runners but also easier for blockade runners to spot them as a consequence most runners simply snuck past Union ships in the dark of night but even then the Union did capture some runners the first captured ship came as early as May 11th when the USS Niagara captured a merchant steamer off the coast of Charleston the steamer was taken to New York as the first captured prize for the Union Navy over the course of the war roughly 1500 ships would face a similar fate other blockade runners narrowly escaped as the war progressed the Union blockade tightened and running became increasingly risky in one example from June of 1862 the runner The Nashville the same ship that the Union previously believed was carrying Mason and Slidell to Europe barely got past three Union ships after being pursued for three hours only the fastest of the three Union ships kept up the chase but this created a desperate enough situation that the crew of the Nashville resorted to tossing their drinking water and anchor chains overboard to lighten their load still the Union ship was gaining on them so they resorted to an even more desperate measure they tossed the more than one million dollars worth of cotton they were carrying into the water and they also started to break apart their cabins to throw the wood in with the coal to create more steam they escaped but it came at great cost this anecdote is illustrative of an important element of the Union blockade statistically in the first half of the war especially the vast majority of runners made it through without capture the Confederacy needed successful blockade runners not just to maintain supply lines with other countries but also to demonstrate that the Union blockade was ineffective and therefore illegitimate according to international law but the effectiveness of a blockade can be defined in different ways the escape of the Nashville can be counted as a success in breaking the blockade but it was also very much a failure in the sense that they only escaped by dumping their valuable cargo the risk of capture also created a disincentive for commercial ships to attempt carrying goods to and from the Confederacy in the first place Britain and France factored in these problems when considering whether to recognize the legitimacy of the blockade in November of 1861 British Foreign Secretary Lord Russell asked to the British ambassador to the U.S. Lord Lyons for his opinion on the blockade Lyons wrote back saying that he wasn't sure how to answer the question but admitted that the blockade is quote certainly by no means strict or vigorous along the immense extent of coast which it is supposed to apply on the other hand it is very far from being a mere paper blockade a great many vessels are captured it is a most serious interruption of trade and if it were as ineffective as Mr. Jefferson Davis says in his message he would not be so very anxious to get rid of it end quote in France John Slidel once he finally arrived after the Trent affair was resolved made a serious faux pas in his argument that the blockade was ineffective he showed French officials a list of vessels that had successfully escaped the blockade demonstrating that his perspective of effectiveness was measured by how many ships got through but the French officials asked Tim quote how it was that so little cotton had reached neutral ports end quote Slidel answered that most runners used ships that had minimal cargo capacity because the weight of cargo increased the chance of being captured this explanation was counterproductive to Slidel's goal of convincing the French to treat the blockades as illegitimate they measured effectiveness of the blockade not according to how many ships the Union fleet captured but by how much cargo they prevented and Slidel just admitted that according to this measure the Union blockade was a rousing success incidentally Mark Thornton and Bob Eaklin's study of the blockade also identifies the incentive for blockade runners to smuggle cargo that had high value in proportion to its size such as jewelry they named this phenomenon the Rhett Butler effect after the famous fictional blockade runner from Gone with the Wind this kind of luxury cargo was hardly helpful through the Confederate cause but the balance between potential profit and risk of capture was most favorable with these kinds of goods the actual effectiveness of the blockade is still a matter of some debate but it is important to understand the complexities and nuances of judging the success of the Union blockade from a military perspective Lord Russell made this perspective official when he issued a statement in February of 1862 saying that quote assuming that a number of ships is stationed and remains at the entrance of a port sufficient really to prevent access to it or to create an evident danger of entering or leaving it the fact that various ships may have successfully escaped through it will not of itself prevent the blockade from being an effective one by international law end quote to organize the Union blockade Gideon Wells established the blockade board also referred to as the Navy board the strategy board at the end of May the board consisted of only four members and the only one that I think warrants mentioning is Captain Samuel DuPont who will lead some of the earliest Union naval successes he was also appointed president of the blockade board and with good reason during the Mexican-American war DuPont commanded a vessel during the two failed attempts at blockading Mexican ports the failures instilled in DuPont some key lessons first is that a successful blockade entirely depended on a sufficient number of ships enough to cover all ports this seems obvious but the previous thinking was essentially that if you could cover half the ports you would cut off half of the enemy's access to supplies in reality of course supply vessels would just divert to open ports the second lesson from the failed blockade of Mexico was that the ships also needed to have access to adequate supply lines which was a tremendous challenge but was necessary to keep the blockade ships in commission the Navy either needed to have ships devoted to carrying supplies so the blockade ships did not have to depend on resupplying themselves or there needed to be enough blockade ships to essentially work in shifts where one ship stayed on duty while the one it replaced resupplied both of these insights meant steep challenges obviously but DuPont's experience with the failures in Mexico meant that the blockade board could at least contend with them up front DuPont's idea for solving the supply issue was to establish a sufficient number of land bases from which the naval ships could be maintained at the outset of the war the United States basically had control of Hampton Roads off the coast of Virginia and Key West Florida this meant they had to choose strategic points of capture between Hampton Roads and Key West covering the Atlantic coast and then from Key West to the southern tip of Texas to cover the Gulf Coast this was how Wells explained the priorities to DuPont the importance of this is so often understated in the histories of the Civil War the blockade was not just the simple act of aligning ships along the Confederate coast it was a meticulously methodical strategy of capturing strategic points from which union ships could be supplied first and foremost and only then focusing on securing Confederate ports the selection of the first strategic locations in 1861 would begin a long-term plan of putting the Anaconda plan in motion Wells was not uninvolved in the selection of strategic locations which I do believe demonstrates how well he handled a job that he was not really qualified for at least not by any standard of assessment that doesn't rely on hindsight Wells cited Fernandina in Florida and Port Royal Sound in South Carolina as important points and he would be correct on that the organized leader that he was Wells established an Atlantic blockading squadron and a Gulf blockading squadron giving a basis for the initial allocation of ships as the Navy grew rapidly as I mentioned earlier in the episode the two squadrons were each split into two giving four squadrons each responsible for a given region DuPont and the rest of the board provided the flesh of Wells' skeleton of a plan the strategy that DuPont advocated for the capture of these bases would prove enormously effective and although few people recognized it at the time tremendously significant for the Union War effort this was the use of joint operations between the Navy and the Army where strategic points were attacked on land and from sea the land forces would help support the blockade and hold the forts they captured and they could also potentially serve as launching points for assaults inside the Confederacy the board identified several more strategic points that would prove useful in implementing Wells' plan they started with identifying major ports that were vital to the Confederacy but would also be much more difficult to conquer and then the more minor points that would help provide a base from which to execute the attack on the more significant points Port Royal Sound in South Carolina was one such well-defended port that the Confederacy depended on and the board added the port of New Orleans to the list as the most obvious location in the Gulf from there they said that New Orleans would benefit from the seizure of Mississippi's Ship Island which was a midway point between New Orleans and another Confederate point, Mobile, Alabama for Port Royal Sound Heterra's Inlet in North Carolina would be the best place to start and from there the Northern Atlantic Squadron could consolidate control over the North Carolina coast while the Southern Atlantic Squadron could pursue the strategic points that would connect Hampton Roads to Key West putting this plan into motion the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron led by DuPont himself would successfully seize Fort Walker in Port Royal Sound, South Carolina claiming a significant and often understated strategic victory for the Union We will look at this story in the next episode Historical 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