A Notorious Nest of Offence: Neutrals, Belligerents, and Union Jails in Civil War Blockade Running

[Correction]

Early on the morning of September 22 1863, lying eight miles off Wilmington, North Carolina, Cdr. Thomas Patterson of the USS James Adger spotted the masts of an unmarked, grey side-wheel steamer flying no colors. Instantly recognizing the sight of a blockade-runner, he gave chase. During a twelve-hour, 120-mile race toward Nassau, Patterson counted 169 bales of cotton thrown off the steamer to lighten her load. The Edward Lawrence Company of Liverpool's vessel Banshee, her captain, Jonathan Steele, and Supercargo Tom Taylor enjoyed legendry luck. They had already narrowly evaded capture on several occasions. During the race, the blockade-runner's engines began to overheat. Steele ordered them stopped while his engineer loosened the bearings with salad oil. The engines restarted with the pursuing cruiser almost within firing range. Darkness eventually forced Patterson to break off, but the chase put the Banshee so far off course that the vessel ran out of coal. The crew had to burn the masts and deck cabin in order to reach the Bahamas safely.¹

Hundreds of vessels successfully violated the Union blockade on more than one thousand occasions during the American Civil War. But few evaded capture forever. Several weeks later, the Banshee embarked on an attempted fifteenth run through the blockade, this time without Taylor, who remained in Nassau to oversee other company ventures. The USS Fulton captured the vessel entering Wilmington on November 21, 1863, and her crew enjoyed a month's sojourn in a U.S. jail as a result. Though much scholarship exists describing the blockade and the illicit trade which it inspired, very little addresses the treatment and legal position of the crews of captured blockade-runners. One chapter in Mark Neely's monograph The Fate of Liberty provides the most significant consideration. Neely's bottom-up social history of U.S. suspension of habeas corpus concludes that Abraham Lincoln's government did not abusively overstep international law in its treatment of captured sailors. Indeed, a military commission under Maj.-Gen. John Dix upheld the right of foreign seamen serving on neutral vessels to immediate release. Secretary of State William Seward directed Gideon Welles's Navy Department to abide by this standard on multiple occasions.²

Welles showed little sympathy. He often felt frustration at Seward's persistent requests that the Navy Department fastidiously observe the technicalities of international law. At one point Welles complained in his diary that Seward lacked firmness and had "no convictions, no fixed principles." Army judge advocate general Joseph Holt and his corps of associate judge advocates made similar complaints against the Dix commission's impractical ruling in June 1863. Levi Turner, the judge advocate for the Potomac region, complained that the men Dix identified for release were "generally, whether citizens or foreign subjects, employees of the rebels." In October 1862 Holt described one passenger captured aboard a British-owned vessel and suspected of having previously taken American citizenship as "a quasi-prisoner of war." The U.S. Congress had expanded the Army's judge advocate position in July 1862 to provide legal advisors for each military department. The corps advised the War Department and local officials such as provost-marshals and constables on issues including treatment of prisoners and suppression of disloyal subversives. Judge advocates whose departments handled captured blockade-runners largely shared Welles's view that little if anything separated them from rebels in arms.³

The division within Lincoln's government over the proper treatment of captured blockade-runners should not be overstated. Even Seward consistently defended the discretionary rights of naval officers to detain captured sailors for investigation if they suspected direct ties to the Confederacy. Slight differences of emphasis between executive agencies meant little to incarcerated sailors. Captured blockade-runners often protested against U.S. detention policies they complained were draconian and unjust. But, as Neely rightly concludes, a case-by-case examination of their appeals reveals that few possessed just grounds to complain about the treatment they received. Copious evidence supports Welles's view of blockade running...