Blockade: The Civil War at Sea (review)

Book Reviews EDITED BY CHARLES T. MILLER B-Il University Hall Iowa City, Iowa Blockade: The Civil Warat Sea. By Robert Carse. (New York: Rinehart and Company. 1958. Pp. 279. $5.00.) the strategy of blockading a continental opponent which depends upon sea traffic to keep its armed forces supplied and its citizens fed and clothed has been used from time immemorial by nations possessing or thinking tiiey possess the means of doing so. Hawkins and Drake were blockaders; the British successfully blockaded Napoleon; the Germans tried it, unsuccessfully, but barely so in both world wars; and the United States succeeded in blockading Japan in the late unpleasantness. The history of blockading is full of romance, danger, and all the boredom, delays, and hardships common to war. Whether one's sympathies lie with the crafty blockade runner or the harassed convoy, or with the daring commerce raider or submarine, there is much in the lore of the blockade to make interesting reading. Mr. Carse in his book Blockade has succeeded in a historical work in giving life to the strangle hold which the North clamped about the South during the Civü War. Whüe the book is a history, it is written from place to place almost like a novel; the author by drawing extensively upon memoirs, diaries, and letters of the participants has tried to convey the immediacy and the personal nature of the meaning of the blockade to those directiy concernedin it. This is always a difficult thing to do, but on the whole Mr. Carse has succeeded admirably in presenting a vivid picture not only of what the blockade meant in statistics and strategy, but also what it meant to the men who ran the gantlet from Bermuda to Wilmington, North Carolina, and to the men who tried to stop them. For the fact is that with the loss of Norfolk and New Orleans early in the war Wilmington and Charleston were the only suitable ports open to Southern trade. The North knew this and acted accordingly. The problem for the South was to ship southern cotton or money (and they were virtually the same thing) to English traders in exchange for materials of war so desperately 110 needed in the Confederacy. A system was devised of shipping British supplies to Nassau, Bermuda, and Halifax, Nova Scotia, a perfectly lawful enterprise, and there transferring the materials of war into ships willing to try to sneak or shove through the North's cordon of ships stationed in three arcs across the lines of commerce. These lines converged upon an area off Cape Fear, North Carolina. The first and least effective blockade line was set in an arc from Cape Lookout south to 32 degrees north. The second was 60 miles or so closer to shore, and the third was deployed in the area immediately about Wilmington . Most of the fireworks took place in that sector. It is a maze of shallow inlets, sand bars, and reefs, not a good place to safl under the best conditions, let alone war. The blockade runners' problem was to get into the harbor through this gantlet of ships and navigational hazards, no easy thing to do. Wind and tide had to be just right for even a shallow drift vessel to bump over the bars and get under the protection of the guns of Fort Fisher, which was commanded by Colonel William Lamb, C.S.A., a gallant and attractive man. A wise blockade runner timed his approach for wind, tide, and visibility. He might he off the coast all day and then, seizing the right time, make a mad dash through the Union ships, hoping to catch them out of position or asleep and hoping to navigate successfully through the maritime perils of the coast to reach his safe haven. Mr. Carse gives an admirable picture of several such attempts, conveying vividly the excitement on "The Fox" as the dark blobs which meant Union vessels hove into view, the ghosting between the blockaders, the moment of discovery and the hair-breadth chase. Many got through, particularly earlier in the war when Union ships were few and the strangling cord was weak...