Trading With The Enemy

Nassau in the Bahamas went from a sleepy colonial seaport to the most important single way station on link to the Southern Confederacy. During the American Civil War it became the place where fortunes could be made more quickly than anywhere else on earth. The town was filled with men with too much money to spend, not enough time to spend it, and the reckless high spirits born of the knowledge that no matter how much they spent they would get it all back in a very few days.

Nassau was like this because it was a neutral port within easy reach of the Confederate coast, it was busier than Bermuda, Havana, Matamoros, and Halifax. At all of these places the blockade-runners got their cargos, which came from England in complete security, and here they delivered the cotton which the outside world wanted so much. A ship that made two round trips between Nassau and the mainland paid for herself and showed a profit besides. Sailors got the unheard of wage of $100 per trip plus a $50 bonus.

The forces of commerce were a different side of the war than battles and armies and they were at work in other places - in Virginia and Tennessee, along the Mississippi and in New Orleans. At almost every place where the estranged sections physically touched. They involved cotton, and gold, and the whole list of goods and services which the Northern and Southern people had supplied each other before they went to war.

What the profiteers were doing reflected not so much human baseness as the peculiar stresses generated by the effort to conduct a civil was according to the rules and standards conventionally applied to was with a foreign country.

Cotton was so important to the Northern economy that Yankees began growing it on the captured Sea Islands of South Carolina. Soon the neutral port of Matamoras, Mexico, became a major trading center, where nearly all the munitions shipped to the port―much of it from Northern armories―went to the Confederacy. After the fall of New Orleans and Vicksburg, a frenzy of contraband-for-cotton swept across the vast trans-Mississippi Confederacy, with Northerners sometimes buying the cotton directly from the Confederate government.

This dynamic will be the subject of the March 26th Little Round Table.

While Confederate blockade runners famously carried the seaborne trade for the South during the American Civil War, the amount of Southern cotton exported to Europe was only half of that shipped illicitly to the North. Most went to New England textile mills where business “was better than ever,” according to textile mogul Amos Lawrence. Rhode Island senator William Sprague, a mill owner and son-in-law to Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, was a member of a partnership supplying weapons to the Confederacy in exchange for cotton. The trade in contraband was not confined to New England. Union General William T. Sherman claimed Confederates were supplied with weapons from Cincinnati, while General Ulysses S. Grant captured Rebel cavalry armed with carbines purchased in Union-occupied Memphis. During the last months of the war, supplies entering the Union-controlled port of Norfolk, Virginia, were one of the principal factors enabling Robert E. Lee’s Confederate army to avoid starvation. Indeed, many of the supplies that passed through the Union blockade into the Confederacy originated in Northern states, instead of Europe as is commonly supposed. Merchants were not the only ones who profited; Union officers General Benjamin Butler and Admiral David Dixon Porter benefited from this black market. President Lincoln admitted that numerous military leaders and public officials were involved, but refused to stop the trade.