Breaking the Blockade: The Bahamas during the Civil War

By Charles D. Ross

On April 16, 1861, President Abraham Lincoln issued a blockade of the Confederate coastline. The largely agrarian South did not have the industrial base to succeed in a protracted conflict. What it did have—and what England and other foreign countries wanted—was cotton and tobacco. Industrious men soon began to connect the dots between Confederate and British needs. As the blockade grew, the blockade runners became quite ingenious in finding ways around the barriers.

Boats worked their way back and forth from the Confederacy to Nassau and England, and everyone from scoundrels to naval officers wanted a piece of the action. Poor men became rich in a single transaction, and dances and drinking—from the posh Royal Victoria hotel to the boarding houses lining the harbor—were the order of the day. British, United States, and Confederate sailors intermingled in the streets, eyeing each other warily as boats snuck in and out of Nassau. But it was all to come crashing down as the blockade finally tightened and the final Confederate ports were captured.

The story of this great carnival has been mentioned in a variety of sources but never examined in detail. Breaking the Blockade: The Bahamas during the Civil War focuses on the political dynamics and tensions that existed between the United States Consular Service, the governor of the Bahamas, and the representatives of the southern and English firms making a large profit off the blockade. Filled with intrigue, drama, and colorful characters, this is an important Civil War story that has not yet been told.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Dec 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781496831361

Charles D. Ross

Charles D. Ross is professor of physics at Longwood University. He is author of Trial by Fire: Science, Technology, and the Civil War and Civil War Acoustic Shadows and coauthor of Never for Want of Powder: The Confederate Powder Works in Augusta, Georgia.

Book preview

1

Two Arrivals

On the morning of December 3, 1861, a seventeen-year-old boy set foot on the public wharf in Nassau. As he stepped ashore he was greeted by thundering salutes from the guns of the 2nd West India Regiment and almost equally loud cheers from the crowds surrounding the wharf. Over the next four days he toured New Providence island by carriage and yacht and was fêted at dinners, balls, parades, and outdoor exhibitions. This often-forgotten outpost of the British Empire was being graced by its first royal visit. The arrival of His Royal Highness Prince Alfred Earnest Albert, second son of Queen Victoria and second in line to the throne, had been anticipated for almost a year.

Prince Alfred came to Nassau as a midshipmen in the Royal Navy on board HMS St. George. The stone steps upon which the prince made his way onto the wharf would for decades be known as Prince Alfred’s Landing. In May 1863 the Bahamian legislature enacted a law that the third of December would be a public holiday to mark and perpetuate the remembrance of the royal visit. A local newspaper summed up that the visit would be long commented upon not only by our children but by our children’s children, even when many of us who have witnessed the event, shall be forgotten and laid low in the dust.

As the St. George left the harbor on its way to Jamaica later in the week, most on the island felt that the prince’s departure meant a return to their normal monotonous existence. These people were unaware that the royal visit had by chance coincided with the beginning of one of the most action-packed eras in the history of the island. It is sometimes said that the history of the Bahamas parallels the weather: long periods of calm punctuated by short periods of frenzied activity. Nassau was about to experience a storm of events that would be remembered long after Prince Alfred was long forgotten.

A little over three years later another boat made a much less auspicious landing. On February 26, 1865, Captain John Maffitt lowered a small boat from the blockade runner Owl into the roaring surf off Shallotte Inlet, about forty miles south of Wilmington, North Carolina. With the capture of Fort Fisher on January 15, blockade running through the Cape Fear River to Wilmington had stopped. When the Owl left Nassau several days earlier, no one on board knew that Wilmington itself had finally fallen into the hands of Union forces on February 22. By heading to Shallotte Inlet, Maffitt did his best to get the several men in the small boat to a spot where they might enter the Confederacy before he took the Owl south in search of somewhere to bring his cargo ashore.

As the small boat made its way toward shore in a cold driving rain, a large breaker swamped the vessel and threw the men and their luggage into the surf. The men succeeded in righting the boat and collecting their bags and finally hit the sand on the beach off the Shallotte River. Exhausted, cold, and soaked by rain and salt water, they made their way through a deserted village laid bare by Union raids. They continued through swampland until they found an occupied house. After assuring the frightened occupants that they were not Yankees, they were treated to a hot meal and comforting fire.

One of the men making the landing was William Boyd Sterrett. A native Virginian, he made his way to Nassau in the second half of the Civil War as had so many others looking to get in on the lucrative business taking place on the island. Sterrett made thousands of dollars selling cloth and shoes to a Confederate agent in Nassau, but by early 1865 it had become obvious to all that the fun was over. Packing his wife onto a more conventional steamer heading to New York, he decided to take a less conspicuous route home. Given his connection with the blockade-running trade, he was not assured of a warm reception in New York.

Accompanying Sterrett was Irishman Thomas Connolly, a member of Parliament from County Donegal. Connolly had intended to take part in the blockade-running frenzy himself, but when the boat in which he had part ownership was damaged and turned back off of Portugal, he continued on alone. He boarded a ship in Madeira and made his way to Nassau in late January 1865. The middle-aged bachelor was determined to make an adventure of touring the dying Confederacy. In his month in Nassau, he made a number of friends including Mr. and Mrs. Sterrett. During early March 1865, Sterrett and Connolly made their way through North Carolina to Richmond.

In the Confederate capital, Sterrett greeted old chums and the two travelers managed to resume their high-living ways, meeting with President Jefferson Davis, washing down fried oysters with Champagne, and finishing their evenings with cocktails and cigars. Connolly brought with him some diplomatic dispatches from England for officials in Richmond. By the time they reconnected with Mrs. Sterrett in New York in April, the war was over. Sterrett and Connolly parted ways in early May as the Irishman headed back to his aristocratic life and Sterrett planned a future based on his lavish Nassau earnings.

Men won and lost many fortunes in Nassau between late 1861 and early 1865. Some men like Sterrett made their way out of the city in 1865 richer than they could have imagined, while others lost everything. Nassau was witness to a transformation that in retrospect seemed to turn the city into a mixture of Sodom, Gomorrah, and the Dutch tulip craze of the 1600s. One observer commented that it was the obscurest of colonial capitals…. Then the war broke out and gold began to pour into its astonished lap.

As boats worked their way back and forth between Nassau and the Confederacy and between Nassau and England, everyone from scoundrels to naval officers wanted a piece of the action. While men died by the thousands on the battlefield, other men spent their time adding columns on balance sheets and watching their profits grow. Poor men became rich from one transaction, and dances, drinking, and gambling were the order of the day from the posh Royal Victoria Hotel to the decrepit boarding houses lining the harbor. British, United States, and Confederate sailors intermingled in the streets, brawling and eyeing each other warily as boats snuck in and out of Nassau.

A small group of loyal United States citizens in Nassau tried their best to interfere with the trade that was keeping the Confederacy alive, but they were often thwarted by the Southern sympathies of the British ruling class on the island and by the almost comical incompetence of the series of consuls sent by Washington to Nassau to police the activity. As the government coffers filled, physical improvements to the city came to life in parallel with a crime rate unimaginable before the war. By 1864, the island government had to request more policemen from England.

A history of the Bahamas written a couple of decades after the war captured it well:

Everyone was wild with excitement during these years of the war. The shops were packed to the ceilings, the streets were crowded with bales, boxes and barrels. Fortunes were made in a few weeks or months. Money was spent and scattered in the most extravagant and lavish manner. The town actually swarmed with Southern refugees, captains and crews of the blockade-runners. Every available space in or out-of-doors was occupied. Men lay on verandas, walls, docks and floors. Money was plenty, and sailors sometimes landed with $1,500 in specie. Wages were doubled, liquors flowed freely and the common laborer had his champagne and rich food. Not since the days of the buccaneers and pirates had there been such times in the Bahamas.

Another commented, The atmosphere of indolent acquiescence in its own obscurity was exchanged by Nassau for an air of importance and a financial intoxication which must seem like a strange, exciting dream to the survivors.

But it was all to come crashing down as the Union blockade tightened and the final Confederate ports were captured. In the spring of 1865, dozens of boats sat at the ready in the Nassau harbor, but there was nowhere to go. The men who had made millions began to pack up their shops and warehouses and move to England or elsewhere. They had made far too much money to ever be able to spend it in the islands.

On October 1, 1866, one of the most violent hurricanes of the nineteenth century devastated the Bahamas. In Nassau, more than six hundred homes were destroyed, and almost all of the more than two hundred boats in the harbor were lost. The storm packed winds now estimated at 140 miles per hour and produced waves reportedly in excess of sixty feet in height. On the modern Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale, the storm would have been a fairly strong Category 4 hurricane.

Despite the era of debauchery, the permanent residents of Nassau were largely devout Christians. Some observers seemed to see in this storm the work of God in punishing a people for years of misbehavior. In short order, the city found itself back in the state it was in before the riches flowed in or perhaps worse. As writer Charles Ives said a few years later, Nassau awoke to find herself only weakened by the dissipations which the great carnival had caused.

The Stage is Set

2

George Trenholm Sees the Future

George Trenholm was one of the savviest businessmen in the United States and probably the richest man in the South when the Civil War began. He began work as a teenage clerk for John Fraser and Company, a commission and shipping firm in Charleston. By the time he was thirty-one he had become a partner in the firm, and when John Fraser died in 1854, he took over the company as senior partner and principal owner. Handsome, debonair, witty, and creative, Trenholm has been proposed as Margaret Mitchell’s inspiration for Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind. Trenholm’s would show his genius over the next four years in his ability to balance being a patriot and a profit seeker.

By the time the Civil War began, Trenholm built the firm into an international powerhouse that was highly respected by the powerful in New York and Europe. In addition to their main office on the North Central Wharf at the foot of Cumberland Street in Charleston, the company had a branch office in New York and had recently opened another office in Liverpool. Trenholm’s partners were Theodore Wagner, James Welsman, Charles Prioleau, and Trenholm’s son William. Wagner managed the Charleston operation and Welsman the New York branch. When the war began William Trenholm joined the Confederate army, and while a major stockholder, he was not active in the firm’s operations.

Decades of acrimony between the slaveholding Southern states and the more industrial Northern states boiled over with the election of Abraham Lincoln as president on November 6, 1860. Three days later George Trenholm introduced a measure in the South Carolina General Assembly denouncing the election and stating that South Carolina should preserve her sovereignty by securing supplies and weapons to arm the state. The city was wild with restless energy.

On December 6, a large palmetto flag representing the state was raised next to John Fraser and Company at the office of Edward Lafitte and Company, another shipping firm. A large crowd cheered as the flag was raised and joined the members of the Lafitte firm for a festive, wine-soaked cruise around Charleston harbor on the steamship Cecile. Edward Lafitte’s brother John would play a key part in George Trenholm’s upcoming blockade-running adventures.

Two weeks later South Carolina made her feelings official by seceding from the United States. As if tensions were not high enough in Charleston, two US Army companies under Major Robert Anderson were stationed at Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island just outside the city. To avoid being overrun by state militia, on December 26 Anderson moved his men over to the much more secure Fort Sumter on an island in the middle of the harbor.

An interesting event with ties to Nassau occurred three days later. The steamship Marion made regular trips with passengers and freight between Charleston and New York. As the Marion passed Fort Sumter on its way out of Charleston harbor to New York, Captain Sam Whiting paid the courtesy of dipping his US flag to the Union defenders of the fort. So high were the emotions of the time that a number of people on the shore were incensed that he had not instead dipped the Palmetto flag of South Carolina. Charleston merchant John Tuomey sent a message to Whiting demanding to know which flag he had dipped to the fort. Whiting’s reply by telegraph as reported in the New York Times and then throughout the country made him a hero in the North: He was born under the Stars and Stripes, and had always sailed under them, and with the blessing of God would die under them. Before long both Whiting and Tuomey would be in Nassau.

Trenholm had his eye on the company’s bottom line as he looked at the coming war. Charles Prioleau was already in Liverpool managing that branch, which went by the name Fraser, Trenholm and Company. Liverpool had a long history of receiving cotton from the southern states, and with ten miles of waterfront it was the busiest port in the world. The South did not have the capacity to build the kind of steamships that would be needed in the coming conflict, so Liverpool would become the perfect place for the creation of the new breed of blockade runners. To ease the company’s dealings in England, Prioleau applied for and gained British citizenship. At this time, the company had five sailing ships making transatlantic voyages.

In February 1861, as South Carolina joined Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and Florida in establishing the Confederate States of America, Trenholm started a trend that would be rapidly copied by others: he began to change the registry of his ships to British and obscuring the names of the true owners. For example, Gondar was registered in the names of two British employees of Fraser, Trenholm and Company. George Trenholm was far ahead of others in seeing what was to come. During the war, most of his ships were registered to the Liverpool firm of M. G. Klingender and Co. Melchior Klingender was a strong Confederate sympathizer, and in an amusing twist his company’s offices were in the same building as the office of US Consul Thomas Dudley.

Charles Prioleau sent the first rifled cannon to be used in the war to Charleston on the Gondar. The inscription read, Presented to the State of South Carolina by a citizen resident abroad, in commemoration of the 20th December, 1860. All the other blockade-running firms followed Trenholm’s lead by switching their boats to British registry. For example, as early as November 1861 Nassau merchant Henry Sawyer was changing the registration of Island Belle from South Carolina to British.

On April 12, 1861, Confederate forces bombarded Fort Sumter, and the war was on. The accurate cannon sent by Prioleau had arrived on April 9 and was used in the shelling. By the next day, the gun had done its work, and Anderson surrendered. He and his men were ferried away on the steamer Isabel to ships waiting to take them north.

One week later President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a blockade of ports in South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. After federal property was seized in Virginia and North Carolina, Lincoln extended the blockade to those two states on April 27, 1861. The South had little in the way of arms and munitions or the machinery, raw materials, and expertise with which to make them. If the rebellion lasted any length of time, Lincoln intended to make it difficult for the rebels to obtain what they needed to fight.

Almost exactly a month after Lincoln’s proclamation, Queen Victoria issued a proclamation of her own declaring Britain’s neutrality in the American conflict. The proclamation stunned and angered many in the North as it essentially gave validity to the national status of the Confederacy.

But the British were taking a reasonable position. The South had always been a consistent customer for British products, and with the industrial North out of the equation, profits were sure to rise. The British in turn were highly dependent on cotton from the South for the many textile mills of Lancashire, and the British hunger for cotton turned out to be the main source of funding for the Confederacy. And from a legal standpoint, maritime law stated that a blockade had to be enforceable or it did not exist. It seemed impossible for the relatively small US Navy to effectively blockade the 3,000-mile coast from Virginia to the Rio Grande.

Within a week the provisional Confederate Congress came up with a proclamation of their own. In order to force the hand of England and France in recognizing the Confederacy as a legitimate nation, the proclamation prohibited the export of any cotton without government approval beginning on June 1, 1861. Almost twenty-five thousand bales of cotton left Charleston for England in May, but not a single bale was exported in June. Starving the Lancashire mills would end up not working in favor of the Confederacy. The huge cotton crop of 1860 flooded the market, and by the time that was used up, England had found other sources in India and Egypt to help. By the end of 1861, the South realized that they needed England more than England needed them, and cotton began to flow again.

Trenholm decided to test the blockade by sending Gondar from Liverpool to the Confederacy in early July. In addition to the British registry, which should make the ship untouchable on the high seas, Trenholm began what would become a most common deception of the war by listing the intended destination as Nassau. By sending a British ship from one British port to another, he hoped to hide the vessel’s true intent. The US consul in Liverpool was not fooled and alerted Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles to the changed registry and what was most likely a bogus destination. US ambassador to England Charles Adams wanted to catch the ship and bring the case to court to test the ownership, but Gondar made it safely into Beaufort, North Carolina, on September 2.

The Battle of Bull Run on July 21, 1861, made everyone realize that this war might not be over quickly. Many in the North expected the battle to be an easy, war-ending victory, but the Confederate triumph meant both sides needed to prepare for extended conflict. The Confederacy, lacking in weapons and industry, was going to quickly need help from abroad. Even before Bull Run, the two-month-long transatlantic voyage of sailing ships like Gondar had Trenholm thinking. To speed things up, especially when penetrating the blockade, he needed ships powered by steam. To this end, in June he purchased Isabel, the steamship that ferried Robert Anderson and his men off of Fort Sumter. Renamed Ella Warley in honor of partner Theodore Wagner’s wife, this ship became one of the earliest blockade-running success stories.

In early July, he also had Prioleau purchase a steamer named Czar in Liverpool. The great advantage of steamships over sail was their speed, but they came with a voracious appetite for coal. As more ships became steam-powered, maintaining a sufficient supply of coal would be a critical objective for both sides in the coming years. The steamers generally had sails so that coal could be saved for those times when speed was necessary. The saying of the day was you need steam to catch steam, and this blockade would therefore be different from all those that preceded it.

While Trenholm was considering his options, others were also testing the waters. As the Confederates began to consider how to get through the blockade, they also went on the offensive by recruiting privateers. A privateer was a private armed ship that had been fitted out at the owner’s expense and granted government permission to attack enemy commerce. The permission, in the form of a government issued Letter of Marque and Reprisal, gave a privateer the same rights as a government warship and differentiated the vessel from pirate ships. The owners of the ship were allowed to keep some of the spoils of their conquests, while giving a cut to the government. On April 17, 1861, Confederate President Jefferson Davis invited applications by individuals to become Confederate privateers.

Privateering had been practiced for centuries, and the United States had engaged in it during the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. But the Declaration of Paris that ended the Crimean War in 1856 essentially ended the practice. The only major country not to sign onto the declaration was the United States, and this came back to haunt them in 1861. When Abraham Lincoln proclaimed his blockade two days after Davis’s announcement, he also wrote British Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell indicating that the United States would now abide by the Declaration of Paris. This would mean that the crews of any Confederate privateers caught by US or British ships could be tried (and probably executed) as pirates. Russell, not wanting to be bound to treat Confederates as pirates, declined the offer.

The early attempts at Confederate privateering were largely ineffective and became more difficult as the strengthening blockade closed off ports where captured ships and cargoes could be delivered. While privateers were later replaced by more powerful government commerce raiders like CSS Alabama and CSS Florida, one of the earliest privateers has a connection to events in Nassau. The ship Savannah, formerly a Charleston harbor pilot boat, but now outfitted with a cannon and a crew armed with muskets, pistols, and sabers, set sail on June 2, 1861. The next day the ship captured the brig Joseph, headed from Cardenas to Philadelphia with a cargo of sugar. The captain of Savannah, T. Harrison Baker, then put a group of his men, called a prize crew, onto Joseph, and they sailed the ship (with the original crew now as prisoners) to Georgetown, South Carolina, where the cargo was valued at $30,000. When a prize crew brought a captured ship to port, an admiralty court determined whether the prize was caught legally. The court joyously so proclaimed the Joseph, and the ship was condemned to have the proceeds from the ship and cargo distributed to the crew and to the government.

The crew still on Savannah was not lucky enough to enjoy the proceeds as she was captured the next day by the brig USS Perry. Savannah and her crew were brought to New York, where they were imprisoned in the notorious lower Manhattan prison called the Tombs. The Tombs was intended for criminals, while prisoners of war were incarcerated at Fort Lafayette in New York harbor. Because the US government considered the current events to be an insurrection within their own country and not a war against a foreign nation, the Letter of Marque held by the Savannah was deemed invalid. Their trial became something of a circus as they were marched through the streets in irons as the crowd shouted for the pirates to be executed.

This treatment prompted Jefferson Davis to send Abraham Lincoln a letter informing him that he had selected an equal number of prisoners now held in Richmond to suffer whatever fate awaited Savannah’s crew. Federal officials finally backed down and moved the privateers to Fort Lafayette. Two of the crew died in captivity, but the others were exchanged for Union prisoners held in Richmond in the summer of 1862. One of the crew who survived the ordeal was nineteen-year-old Charles Sidney Passailaigue (pronounced pass-a-lay), who left his newspaper job at the Charleston Mercury to join the crew as purser. Undaunted by the experience and itching to get back into the action, Passailaigue made his way to Nassau, where he played a very interesting role in the blockade-running enterprise.

Both the Union and Confederate governments scrambled to put people in the right places to win the war. Trenholm offered to make his Liverpool business a financial conduit for the Confederacy, an offer that was quickly accepted. Fraser, Trenholm and Company had European connections and a sterling reputation, so the firm could obtain deals and credit where the Confederacy could not. For a commission paid to Trenholm, the Confederate government could deposit funds with the Charleston branch, and letters of credit would then be sent to the Liverpool branch. Southern agents stationed in England could then use the letters of credit to obtain cash for purchases there.

The first agent to show up was Captain Caleb Huse, who arrived in Liverpool on May 10, 1861, to direct Confederate purchasing operations there. Huse took a tortuous route to Liverpool. He made his way from Charleston to New York, where he met James Welsman at the Trenholm office downtown. Welsman advanced Huse enough money to get to Liverpool but told him not to sail from New York, as anti-Southern feeling was so high that if caught he would be hanged. Welsman closed the New York office not long after this and made his way to Liverpool himself. Huse finally found transatlantic passage from Portland, Maine.

He was joined in Liverpool on June 4 by Commander James Bulloch, who would oversee the acquisition of shipping for the Confederacy. One observer described Bulloch as a broad-shouldered, blue-eyed giant. Huse and Bulloch would work closely with Charles Prioleau, and Bulloch set up shop in the Trenholm office at 10 Rumsford Place. For the next three years, the dealings of Trenholm’s company and the Confederacy became so intertwined that it was sometimes hard to unravel them. Perhaps it was an acknowledgement of their inseparable linkage when Trenholm was named the Confederate secretary of the treasury in 1864. The Union was also sending purchasing agents to Europe, and Huse and Bulloch successfully outmaneuvered them for needed armaments and supplies much of the time.

Bulloch’s charge was to quickly procure armed ships that could be used to harass Union merchant shipping. While the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond and the Augusta Powder Works eventually provided the Confederates with some self-sufficiency in weapons and ammunition, there was no place in the South where the kinds of ships needed could be constructed. Because of the Queen’s neutrality proclamation, Bulloch’s work would be quite tricky. Britain’s Foreign Enlistment Act prevented ships for either combatant from being fitted out anywhere in the empire.

So Bulloch needed to have his ships built by one manufacturer, the weapons and ammunition by others, and then work out the logistics for all these things to come together somewhere outside of British territory. With US spies prowling the docks, everything needed to be done in secret. Despite the complications, Bulloch got moving right away. Before June was out a wooden cruiser known as Oreto was under construction, and a second boat called the 290 was started. These became Florida and Alabama. While waiting for Bulloch’s cruisers to be built, the Confederates made an early attempt to go on the offensive by converting the steamship Habana into CSS Sumter. The ship, under the command of Raphael Semmes, broke through the blockade at the mouth of the Mississippi River in late June and roamed the seas for the next six months before breaking down and laying up in Gibraltar. She took eighteen prizes during that time.

The Union also made another move that at the time appeared to have little connection to the war. The US consul in Nassau at the beginning of 1861 was sixty-two-year-old Isaac Merritt. Merritt was apparently awarded the consul position in 1857 because of his mercantile connections in New York and his strong support of then President James Buchanan.

Merritt’s work did not seem to satisfy some important figures in the insurance world. The wrecking industry in the Bahamas was a constant headache for those who insured the ships and cargoes. With few lighthouses and no reliable charts, the treacherous Bahamian waters claimed a tremendous number of ships every year. As soon as a ship was stranded, native sailors descended on the vessel to salvage the cargo that would then be sold at auction in Nassau. Exacerbating the situation were under-the-table deals made between wreckers and ship captains for salvaged goods and the possibility of intentional wrecks by nefarious captains. Merritt did not seem to have the skills or connections to halt this activity.

The New York Board of Underwriters included some very prominent men of that city, including Moses Hicks Grinnell, president of the Sun Mutual Insurance Company. Grinnell had been a successful merchant and shipper before going into the insurance industry, and as president of the New York Chamber of Commerce, he was very well connected. In February 1861, President-Elect Lincoln visited New York, and Grinnell hosted a breakfast for him where he met about a hundred of the city’s merchants. Not long after that, Grinnell and Jeremiah P. Tappan, president of the Neptune Insurance Company, nominated someone they thought would be a better