New & Noteworthy: Campaign Fort The Confederate Coast: Blaocking, Blockade Running and Related Endeavors During the American Civil War, Gil Hahn

 

 

Campaign for the Confederate Coast: Blockading, Blockade Running and Related Endeavors During the American Civil War, Gil Hahn, 2021.$21.95, 322 pp., illustrations, index, bibliographic notes, West 88th Street Press 

Hahn offers a through but concise discussion of the aims, means available to the Confederacy as it seeks to maintain its economic trade with Europe and the aims and means available to the Union to restrict and minimize that economic intercourse. He well establishes the social and economic circumstances involved along with the evolution of the sea tactics and the emerging technologies of blockade and blockade running which include naval rams and seacoast fortresses.

Also, Hahn reviews the variety of ‘laws of the sea’ along with the rights of belligerents. His chapters on the commerce suppression campaigns of 1861 through 1863 and the successful adaptions made by the Federals during 1864 and 1865.

Benefiting readers, Hahn offers 13 chronological charts composed of the attempts, the seasonal successes and the losses of block-runners for the Confederate ports of Wilmington, Charleston, Savannah, St. Marks, Mobile, New Orleans, and Galveston.

Additionally, for 1859-1865 Hahn presents charts for the production, the consumption, and the exports and the imports of 500 pound bales of cotton. These charts show related trends and blockade successes.  Importantly the charts include U.S. imports of cotton from the U.K and from the British West Indies and causes Civil War Librarian to wonder: Did the U.S. import cotton which had previously run the naval blockade? 

Campaign for the Confederate Coast: Blockading, Blockade Running and Related Endeavors During the American Civil War clearly and cogently describes, from both Southern and Northern points of view, the dozens upon dozens economic, technology and military policy conditions and adaptations which created military outcomes of the war. Throughout, Hahn offers these discussions in a writing style which is both accessible and concise.