Captain James Carlin: Anglo-American Blockade Runner by Colin Carlin (review)

Until recently, historians have typically given short shrift to the naval aspects of the American Civil War, often treating the war at sea as a sideshow of peripheral importance. In the past decade or so, however, with the general revival of interest in the history of the Civil War, many books have been published on various aspects of the naval war that redress the previous landlubber historiographical imbalance. With regard to the literature on blockade-runners, it must be noted that although these vessels were primarily crewed by British and European sailors, many works have been written from an almost entirely American perspective. In this respect, Colin Carlin's intimate portrait of his ancestor, British Confederate James Cornelius Carlin (1833–1921), who was among the successful captains who ran the blockade of Confederate ports, provides a potentially welcome addition to literature on the blockade.

The son of an Irish member of the British Coast Guard Service, James Carlin was born in England and raised in County Antrim, Ireland, and he completed his merchant marine officer apprenticeship with Fitzsimmons of Belfast. By 1854 Carlin "was serving as a master's mate and pilot with the U.S. Coast Survey Department," where he gained extensive knowledge of the South Atlantic coastline (p. 11). After marrying and settling in Charleston, South Carolina, Carlin resigned from the Coast Survey Department in 1860 and started running the blockade with a "small sailing schooner" in 1861 (p. 35). The volume's most intriguing contribution is its analysis of Carlin's five-month imprisonment in Fort Lafayette, New York, following the capture of the SS Memphis in July 1862. Upon his release, Carlin vigorously returned to blockade-running. In August 1863 he captained a spar torpedo boat, the CSS Torch, during its failed attack on the USS New Ironsides. In 1864, as a senior captain of the Importing and Exporting Company of South Carolina, Carlin traveled to Britain to commission new vessels. He moved his family to Liverpool, England, but he continued to run the blockade until the last stages of the war. After the war, Carlin returned to Charleston to secure his assets, and in 1869 he embarked on a gun-running expedition for Cuban rebels. By 1890, Carlin was committed to Ward's Island Asylum in New York and was diagnosed with a "'paranoiac condition'" (p. 223). He remained there until his death in 1921.

The book consists of thirty-five short chapters, some of which are only two pages long. The author declares in the introduction that his account "is not a neo-Confederate paean; nor is it a romantic take on the Old South" (p. 1). As a descendant of the titular subject, Colin Carlin may have felt compelled to make this unusual declaration to avoid accusations of ancestor worship. Despite the author's reassurances, the book does at times slip into romanticized language and provides a clichéd Cavalier versus Yankee narrative of the war. While Carlin is steady at the helm in describing his ancestor's story, he navigates a course that avoids contextualizing this particular biography with the modern historiography of the Civil War era. The limited use of modern scholarship is apparent in certain sections where outdated and somewhat biased concepts of key historical moments prevail. For example, Carlin remarks that by the end of 1865, "carpetbaggers were busy taking revenge on the Old South, stripping it of privilege and wealth. Reconstruction was under way, and Northerners were determined to reward themselves" (p. 181). Researching blockade-runners is a complicated process, owing to the clandestine nature of such activities. Colin Carlin uses source materials located in archives in Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States to reconstruct the story of James Carlin's career, and he should certainly be commended for that. The author also provides clear and useful maps and many well-chosen illustrations that illuminate James Carlin...