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. 

News---Second Blockade Runner Found In Florida Riverbed

Civil War Steamship Is Found In Riverbed, Robbyn Mitchell, Tampa Bay Times, September 15, 2009

Burned and sunk, the steamship Scottish Chief lay at the bottom of the Hillsborough River for 146 years, a legend for its ability to keep Tampa afloat amidst the city's isolation during the Civil War. Underwater archaeologist John William Morris, with the Florida Aquarium, said Tuesday a research team has found the ship, a vessel not seen since the night in 1863 when Union troops raided the shipyard.

Morris' team first spotted the suggestion of a ship August 29 with new sonar technology, but it took until Tuesday to confirm that the shadowy trace in the sand was that of the lost blockade runner. The relic has been lodged underwater near the Interstate 275 exit to the Hillsborough Bridge, across from Blake High School, said aquarium spokesman Tom Wagner. The find comes one year after the discovery of the Kate Dale in the river, which had been reduced to wooden ship's ribs, he said.

"It helps tell the story. Some people weren't even aware Tampa even had a small role in the Civil War," Wagner said. "These boats were part of the skirmish at Ballast Point, the only battle in Tampa where soldiers lost their lives." As the story goes, naval bases at Egmont Key and Key West controlled the movement of ships in the Gulf of Mexico during the war, blockading Tampa Bay to keep supplies for the Confederacy from moving in or out.

The Scottish Chief and Kate Dale were two of the dozen ships that sailed through the blockades to Havana to trade cotton in exchange for medicine, liquor, food and other supplies. Union sailors slipped ashore in the darkness on Oct. 17, 1863, and marched 14 miles to the Jean Street Shipyard near what is now Lowry Park, where they captured and burned the two blockade runners, each loaded with cotton. The ships had been ferrying supplies to the town under the command of Tampa's first mayor, James McKay, according to historian Canter Brown Jr.'s Tampa In Civil War and Reconstruction.

McKay, who owned a local salt works, was aboard the Scottish Chief that night, and escaped along with several crew members, who alerted the town. The Union landing party soon had to contend with Tampa militia and Confederate soldiers in what became a running, bloody skirmish. The next day, Tampa lost its salt works, several homes and buildings as two Union ships systematic shelled Fort Brooke and the town.

Wagner said this story and others are crucial to Tampa's maritime history and will be documented in the aquarium's project. But excavation of the rear-wheel steamship will have to wait. "We had funding for the search and discovery, but excavation can be very timely and costly," Wagner said. "We'll try to get funding, but it boils down to dollars needed to do that and then the human resources needed to do the excavation."

Text and Top Image Source: Tampabay.com

Bottom Image Souce: The Wreck of the Kate Dale, weblog Battlefield Journal