President Lincoln's Naval Blockade
President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a
naval blockade of the seceded southern states
on April 19, 1861, only five days after the fall of
Fort Sumter at Charleston, South Carolina, to
Confederate forces. He revised the blockade on
April 27 to include Virginia and North Carolina,
although the Tar Heel state was still in the Union
and did not go out until May 20, 1861. Lincoln
realized that the South did not possess the
industrial capacity to manufacture large quantities
of war materials to sustain a war effort and
would turn to Europe for help. He intended for
foreign nations, especially Great Britain, which
depended heavily on the importation of southern
grown cotton to fuel its cloth industry, to
stay out of the ensuing American conflict. Queen
Victoria of England and other heads of state
agreed to respect the blockade, but they turned
a blind eye to the profitable smuggling trade
that soon began in association with Confederate
merchants and importers.
The US Navy faced many challenges in the
spring of 1861 to establish the blockade. Only
12 steamships out of 42 commissioned vessels
were available for immediate service to guard
3,549 miles of coastline from Virginia to Texas.
As a testament to Yankee ingenuity, that
motley array of vessels had grown to 671 ships
by war’s end. Two out of every three Union
vessels saw duty on the blockade. Despite its
exponential growth, the navy failed to prevent
many commerce vessels from carrying supplies
into Confederate seaports. The North Atlantic
Blockading Squadron found it all but impossible
to halt the trade at Wilmington as blockade-
runners could access the Cape Fear River by two
entry points — Old Inlet at the mouth of the
waterway and New Inlet to the north. The
success rate for blockade-runners operating at
Wilmington was 80 percent, leading the port to
become known as the “lifeline of the Confederacy.”
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WBM january 2013
maps by Dr. Chris E. Fonvielle Jr.