Civil War naval operations and logistics. Despite the cover illustration of the battle of Mobile Bay, there is very little about naval battles here; instead it’s how the navies were organized, how the ships were built, and how overall strategy came about.


Both navies had pretty good leaders – Gideon Welles for the North and Stephen Mallory for the South. Interestingly, both navies prepared for a long war from the start – something neither army did. The North had a navy from the beginning – although most of its ships weren’t suitable for the kind of war they would end up fighting. The South’s sole advantage at the start was some of its citizens were officers in the Federal navy and in a position to influence things in the South’s favor – that’s how they ended up with the Merrimack/Virginia and the Norfolk Navy Yard.


The South adopted all the usual strategies of a weaker naval power against a stronger one – coast defense, privateering, blockade running, and technology. Coast defense didn’t work very well – the Confederacy had too much coast to defend and the North had no problem seizing naval bases for the blockade (although seizing port cities became increasingly difficult). The Union Navy deliberately chose Southern sites with poor communications with the interior; it made them easier to defend but harder to use as bases for movement against the interior. One of the mysteries of the war is why the North didn’t make more use of amphibious capabilities – perhaps the early failure of the Peninsula campaign soured Northern strategists. Arguably, of course, a lot of the action in the West was amphibious, with Union troops supported from the rivers rather than the railroads. In some Civil War games I’ve played, the North can make a real mess out of the Southern supply network by conducting an amphibious campaign from the Gulf Coast into Alabama and Georgia; apparently no thought was ever given to that in reality. Perhaps the rivers were not as navigable as the game designers thought.


I learned something I didn’t know about privateering; a warship that seizes an enemy merchant vessel can destroy it or put on a prize crew and send it into a friendly or neutral port; however, a privateer must send a prize into port; if it deliberately destroys a capture it’s a pirate, not a privateer. All those Jack Aubrey and Horatio Hornblower novels and I never learned that. That requirement left the Confederate privateer program dead in the water; since no major power ever recognized the Confederacy as a belligerent their ports were closed to prizes and except at the very start of the war Confederate ports were closed by the blockade.


Blockade running worked fairly well. Most runners got through; a typical voyage earned 67%. (Blockaders got prize money from captures but nobody except admirals got rich off of it; half a prize’s value went into the Navy pension fund; every ship in sight at the capture got an equal share and at a port like Charleston there might be 15 Union ships in visual range; and ordinary seamen and marines on those ships shared 35%. Author William Roberts gives a typical example; the blockade runner Secesh was valued at $17,685.69 but there were 12 Union ships in sight; a lieutenant on one of those ships got $30 in prize money. Not that bad by 1863 standards, but not enough to retire on).


The energetics of blockade running favored the runners. The Union blockaders had to conserve coal and kept their fires and steam head relatively low while patrolling; the runners (usually based out of Bermuda or the Bahamas, where cargo had been transshipped) would keep steam at the maximum for the relatively short run into a Confederate port. (Details like this are one of the things that make the book fascinating; I’m sure Gone With The Wind would have interested me a lot more if it had included more on the mechanics of Rhett Butler’s blockade runners and less about his romance with Scarlett O’Hara).


Blockaders and runners eventually almost worked in partnership – most blockade runner crew were British and were working for wages rather than a share of the profits. When captured, they would obligingly sail (or, rather, steam) their ship into the nearest Union port under the direction of one or two Union officers rather than an entire prize crew; they had no incentive to try and recapture the vessel. Once on shore, they would be interned for a few days – rarely as long as 10 – under supervision of the British consul, then released.


At first, most blockade runners were privately owned but eventually the Confederacy recognized the inefficiency of this – the runners preferred high value consumer goods to military stores. Unfortunately even then it remained something of a free-for-all; every bureau in the War Department operated its own blockade runners, as did the Treasury Department, the Navy Department, and most state governments. Things were finally got in hand when it was too late – in 1864 the Confederate Army set up the Bureau of Foreign Supplies and took over all import and export, over the vehement protests of private ship owners.


Technologically the South had great ideas and miserable execution. The South’s industrial base was already stretched to the limit and couldn’t support the construction of an ironclad fleet, or even maintain the marine steam engines it already had. While the Confederacy got more than its share of former Federal naval officers who “went South” when the war started, it attracted proportionally fewer naval engineers. Further, the Confederate navy never developed a coordinated construction program. Although the casemate design made Confederate ironclads look basically similar, they were extremely different inside, with engines, armor and armament being whatever local shipyards could cobble together. The shortage of marine engineers made them, without any noticeable exception, underpowered, over armored, over armed, and drawing too much water for coast defense vessels. At one point, it was proposed to standardize the design and buy engines in Europe, but nothing ever came of it.


The Union Navy, in a sense, had the opposite problem; once the Monitor fought the Virginia to a last-minute draw at Hampton Roads “Monitor Mania” took over. It didn’t help that the two principal parties involved in monitor construction, designer John Ericsson and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus Fox, were both prima donnas. Fox, in particular, exemplified the engineering axiom “perfect is the enemy of good” when he took Ericsson’s design for a simple and easy-to-build shallow draft monitor for riverine operations and “improved” it, resulting in a class of vessel that were improved to the point that they wouldn’t float. Several partially completed vessels had to be completely dismantled and rebuilt from the keel up.


This is fascinating stuff; there are any number of books on Civil War naval battles – and some spectacular battles were fought. However, the day-to-day operations of the naval campaigns – in this war and any other – are the real stuff of victory or defeat. Highly recommended; I’d very much like to see a similar work on how land based logistics and operations were organized. ( )