The Confederacy's foreign policy rested on a single proposition, and the proposition was wrong. Cotton was about sixty per cent of United States exports in 1860, three-quarters of the world's supply came from the American South, and something like a fifth of the British population depended directly or indirectly on the Lancashire mills. It followed — to the men who made the argument in Charleston and Montgomery — that Britain would have to intervene to keep the cotton moving, and that France would follow Britain. James Hammond of South Carolina had put it in the Senate in 1858: no power on earth dares make war upon cotton; cotton is king.
It was the most consequential miscalculation of the war, and unlike most such errors it was not merely a failure of prediction. The Confederacy acted on it, immediately and aggressively, in a way that destroyed the very leverage it was counting on.
The embargo that nobody declared
In 1861 the Confederate government did not formally prohibit cotton exports — that would have been an admission that coercion was the policy — but it encouraged an unofficial embargo through the press, planters' committees and local vigilance associations, and the cotton stayed on the wharves. The intention was to create a famine in Lancashire severe enough to force Palmerston's hand within months.
The timing could hardly have been worse. The crops of 1859 and 1860 had been enormous, and Liverpool was sitting on a surplus so large that the mills were on short time in 1861 for reasons of over-supply. The shortage did not begin to bite until late 1862, by which point the Union blockade was tightening anyway, so the pain in Lancashire could be blamed on the blockade rather than credited to Confederate policy. By the time it did bite, the Confederacy had voluntarily given away a year and a half in which it could have exported freely, banked the proceeds in Europe and bought arms.
And the world adjusted. Cotton acreage in Egypt roughly quadrupled during the war and Egyptian exports to Britain rose several-fold, which made Ismail Pasha rich enough to build an opera house and indebted enough to lose the Suez Canal shares a decade later. Indian cotton exports rose sharply, and Bombay boomed. Brazil planted more. The distress in Lancashire was real and severe — perhaps half a million people were on relief at the peak of the cotton famine in the winter of 1862–63 — but it did not produce the political result the Confederacy had bought it for.
The most-quoted episode in the whole story is the meeting at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester on the last day of 1862, at which an audience of working men, many of them out of work because of the cotton famine, resolved to support the Union and the abolition of slavery. Lincoln's reply, thanking them for an instance of sublime Christian heroism, was read aloud in mills across the region. Historians have since shown that Lancashire opinion was more divided than the myth allows, with pro-Confederate sentiment in some towns. But the meeting happened, the address was sent, and a statue of Lincoln stands in Manchester because of it.
Recognition, and how close it came
Britain and France recognised Confederate belligerency in May 1861, which allowed Confederate warships into neutral ports and Confederate agents to buy arms. Neither ever went further. No government on earth extended diplomatic recognition to the Confederate States of America at any point in its existence.
It came closest in the autumn of 1862. Lee had won at Second Manassas and was across the Potomac, the Union looked incapable of ending the war, and Lord John Russell as foreign secretary prepared a cabinet paper proposing that Britain offer mediation, with recognition to follow if the North refused. Gladstone, then chancellor, told an audience at Newcastle on the 7th of October that Jefferson Davis had made an army, was making a navy, and had made what was more than either — a nation. He had not been authorised to say it and was obliged to retract.
Two things killed the proposal. The first was Antietam: Lee was turned back on the 17th of September, and mediating in a war the South might be losing looked much less attractive than mediating in one it was winning. The second was the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation five days later. From January 1863 any intervention on the Confederate side would have been an intervention in favour of slavery, and no British government could have proposed that to a country that had spent fifty years and a great deal of money suppressing the slave trade. Russell's paper was dropped in November and never revived.
There had been an earlier crisis and a later one. In November 1861 a United States warship stopped the British mail steamer Trent and removed the Confederate commissioners James Mason and John Slidell, which produced genuine war fever in London, the despatch of troops to Canada and an ultimatum; Lincoln released the commissioners with the observation that one war at a time was enough. And in 1863 the dispute over the Laird rams — two ironclads with spiked bows building at Birkenhead for the Confederacy — ended with Russell detaining them, on the calculation that a Union victory was now likely and Britain would rather not have supplied the losing side's fleet.
The blockade
Lincoln proclaimed a blockade of the southern coast on the 19th of April 1861, four days after calling for troops — which was itself a legal oddity, since a blockade is an act of war between sovereigns and the administration's position was that the Confederacy was not one. The Supreme Court sorted it out in the Prize Cases of 1863 by holding that a rebellion could be both an insurrection and a war at once.
The coast to be blockaded ran three and a half thousand miles with something close to two hundred usable harbours and inlets, and the United States Navy began with about forty ships in commission. It finished with over six hundred. The Union bought merchantmen, converted ferries, built ninety-day gunboats and set up a blockade board that systematically took the entrances: Hatteras Inlet in August 1861, Port Royal in November, New Orleans in April 1862, Pensacola, Galveston, and finally Wilmington in January 1865 when Fort Fisher fell.
Whether the blockade was effective is one of the long arguments of the subject. Most individual runs succeeded — perhaps five in six early on, still around one in two by the end — and the runners brought in some 600,000 rifles along with medicines and salt. But the measure that matters is not the proportion of voyages intercepted; it is total tonnage. Before the war, thousands of ordinary merchant vessels entered southern ports freely. During it, trade was reduced to a few hundred specialist runners — shallow, fast, low-slung, coal-burning, painted grey — which could carry only a fraction of the cargo and had to charge accordingly. Southern imports fell to something like a third of pre-war levels and exports far further. That is what a blockade is for.
It also distorted what came in. A ship-owner running from Nassau or Bermuda to Wilmington made a fortune on silk, brandy, coffee and luxuries, and rather less on rails and gunpowder, so the cargoes skewed towards what would sell. The Confederate government did not begin regulating cargo space until early 1864, which most historians consider two years too late.
The war at sea
Having almost no navy and no capacity to build a conventional one, the Confederacy pursued two asymmetric strategies, and both were more successful than its land war in proportion to what was spent on them.
The first was the ironclad. The conversion of the scuttled steam frigate Merrimack into the casemate ram Virginia produced, on the 8th of March 1862 at Hampton Roads, the most destructive day the United States Navy would experience until Pearl Harbor: two wooden warships destroyed in an afternoon. The following day Virginia met the Union's Monitor, and the two ironclads fought for four hours without either being able to hurt the other seriously. Nothing was decided, and every wooden battle fleet in the world was made obsolete. The Confederacy laid down perhaps fifty ironclads and completed about twenty, hampered throughout by a shortage of iron and of marine engines it had no industry to build.
The second was commerce raiding. Alabama, built at Birkenhead and armed in the Azores, took sixty-five prizes in two years under Raphael Semmes before the Kearsarge sank her off Cherbourg in June 1864 while French crowds watched from the cliffs. Florida, Shenandoah and a handful of others took perhaps two hundred more between them. The raiders never threatened the Union war effort, but they drove marine insurance rates up so far that American shipowners transferred more than seven hundred vessels to foreign registry, and the United States merchant marine never recovered its share of world trade. Britain's role in building the ships was settled afterwards by international arbitration at Geneva, which in 1872 awarded the United States $15.5 million in the Alabama claims — a landmark in the history of arbitration, and an implicit admission that a neutral power had not been neutral.
The Confederacy also built the first submarine to sink a warship. H. L. Hunley, hand-cranked by an eight-man crew, sank the USS Housatonic off Charleston on the 17th of February 1864 with a spar torpedo, and then sank herself with all hands for the third and final time. She was located in 1995, raised in 2000, and is now in a conservation tank in North Charleston. Her crews had a mortality rate of a hundred per cent.
None of it was enough, and the reason is the one that runs through the whole volume. The Confederacy could innovate brilliantly at the margins and could not build an industrial base in four years that the North had spent forty acquiring. Shenandoah, still burning New England whalers in the Bering Sea in June 1865 because nobody had told her crew, finally lowered her flag at Liverpool on the 6th of November — the last Confederate force anywhere to surrender, in the port where much of the Confederate navy had been built.
End of Chapter VII