I remember reading in the book “Gone with the Wind” that one of the reasons Rhett was so rich was that during his blockade running days, he and other blockade runners had been bringing in luxury items instead of less profitable war material.
I’ve been trying to confirm it but so far have had trouble pinning it down. Did this happen a lot during the CIvil War or just a plot device by mitchell.
So it is often said, although I can offer you no primary material (or even a link) as a cite.
It happened a lot. In fact, it happened mostly.
Blockade runners were privately owned, right up until just before the end of the War. And they hauled…whatever. Luxury goods, weapons, medicine, explosives…whatever they could make a buck on. They charged an arm & a leg, & demanded all payments in gold or silver–no paper currency. (Although, there are stories of Runners who would take Union bills.) HUGE profits.
They were mercenary as hell, & often were organized & outfitted in Canada. Nova Scotia, in fact, is where a good many were outfitted, gandered & crewed.
If the South had created a fleet of Government-owned Runners, the War might have turned out oddly, if not decisively, differently. But they thought it uneconomical at first, failed to see the problems, & organized the effort too late.
It’s true. Blockade runners tended to concentrate on high-profit luxury items, instead of everyday necessities. The Confederate government eventually had to pass laws requiring that some percentage of cargo space be reserved for government use.
Link to Blockade Runner Info
This site
http://www.wideopenwest.com/~jenkins/ironclads/captains.htm
Obliquely refers to the Canada Nova Scotia connection.
The Infamous Dynamite Fiend of the 19th Century, Sandy Keith, was hooked up in the Nova Scotia connection.
A book on the Canada Connection
http://www.stmarys.ca/administration/gorsebrook/publications/marquis.htm
Bermuda was a big port for blockade runners, too - there’s a good brief history here: http://washtimes.com/civilwar/20051230-095927-3239r.htm
It’s a fascinating, and relatively little-known, part of Civil War history. The blockade was largely ineffective (a “paper blockade”) at the beginning of the war, but got progressively tighter and more effective as the war went on and the U.S. Navy committed more and better ships to it. Navy officers and seamen were given prize money for the runners they captured, and some became pretty well-off as a result. Some of the captured blockade runners were themselves commissioned as Navy warships, often under the same name, but with “USS” preceding it (under the theory of “to catch a thief [or a smuggler]”).
For all that some blockaders made out well, most blockaders never even saw an blockade runner.
I remember reading an amusing contemporary description of blockade duty. It ran something like: Imagine standing around on the roof of your house in the blazing sun, making small talk with a bunch of degenerates. Every now and then, go downstairs to your basement and drink lukewarm rusty water. Climb back up to the roof again. Repeat day in, day out.
No cite, but I vaguely recall reading that your average civil war blockade runner was a small-ish vessel, very fast and maneuverable, and lightly armed, with an even smaller-ish cargo capacity.
And, IIRC, that even if the runners had concentrated soley on transporting critical war material, by the later half of the civil war they would have been almost completely ineffectual at delivering said material in any usefull quantities due to the tightening blockade and their small cargo capacity.
Check the link in post #5 for Runner specification/photos.
They would have to be. The Union Navy had all the South’s deepwater ports covered, leaving only the endless series of shallow inlets and river banks along the entire rest of the coast available to the blockade runners. The Navy couldn’t cover every single one of those themselves, or even very many of them, so it’s no wonder they rarely saw a runner. The flip side is that those tiny vessels couldn’t carry enough materiel to make much difference in the war anyway.
I remember that same quotation - you just about nailed it.
IIRC, Jules Verne’s novel The Blockade Runners is about the Civil War blockade runners. Been a long time since I read it, though.