388 Chronicles of the Cape Fear River

bales of cotton sometimes realized a profit of a quarter of a mil-
lion dollars on the inward and outward run within two weeks.
Cotton could be purchased in the Confederacy for three cents
per pound in gold, and sold in England at the equivalent of
forty-five cents to one dollar a pound, and the profits on some
classes of goods brought into the Confederacy were in the same
proportion. lt is probably within the bounds of truth to say
that the blockade-running traffic during the war, including the
cost of the ships, amounted to about one hundred and fifty mil-
lion dollars, gold standard.

The Confederate States steamer R. EH. Lee, under Captain
Wilkinson, ran the blockade at Wilmington twenty-one times
and carried abroad nearly seven thousand bales of cotton, worth
at that time about two million dollars in gold; and she also took
into the Confederacy equally valuable cargoes.

The steamer Siren, most successful of all, made sixty-four
runs through the blockade, and her profits ran into millions.

Montesquieu has said that it is not the number killed and
wounded in a battle that determines its general historical im-
portance, and Creasy, in Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World,
from Marathon to Waterloo, says: “It is not because only a few
hundred fell in the battle by which Joan of Are captured the
Tourelles and raised the seige of Orleans that the effect of that
crisis is to be judged.”

Napoleon said that an army moves upon its belly. The re-
sources of the Confederate Army commissariat, steadily de-
pleted by the incessant drain upon the food producers and by
the blockade of the Southern ports, were largely sustained dur-
ing the war by the successful blockade runners from the West
Indies to Wilmington, whence cargoes of increasing value were
immediately transported to our starving Confederates in the
field; but when the multiplied arms of the new navy, like the
deadly tentacles of the octupus, reached into every hiding-place
of these fugitives of the sea, they gradually brought to an end,
in the capture of Fort Fisher, this wonderful epoch in our naval
and commercial history.

New Inlet, since closed by harbor and river improvements,
was more frequently used by the blockade runners than the
Main Bar, under the guns of Fort Caswell, It was protected
for four years by Fort Fisher, which commanded the last gate-
way between the Confederate States and the outside world.
Its capture, with the resulting loss of ail the Cape Fear River

Blockade Running 389

defenses and Wilmington, the entrepdt of the Confederacy,
effectually ended blockade running and compelled the subse-
quent surrender of the Confederate Army in the field.

It was, therefore, not the valor of the Federal or of the Con-

federate forces in the contest at Fort Fisher that made it most
memorable in the history of the war. It was the fatal blow to
the Confederate commissariat, the cutting off of supplies, the
starvation of Lee’s army, the closure of the last hope of the
Confederacy, which gives to the victory of Curtis, the gallant
leader of the Union forces at Fort Fisher, its lasting importance
as an historical event.

THE PORT OF WILMINGTON DURING THE WAR.

When Beauregard fired that fateful bombshell which burst
over Fort Sumter at half past four on the morning of April 12,
1861, it sent a thrill of dismay into every Southern port, and
panic-stricken master mariners hurriedly prepared their ships
for sea, and welcomed any wind that would blow them away
from the impending danger.

In a short time the Cape Fear was deserted, and the occupa-
tion of pilots and longshoremen was gone. At that time there
were sixty or seventy licensed bar and river pilots and appren-
tices, who had no thought of the rich harvest of golden sovereigns
which Fortune was to pour into their -pockets in the strange
commerce of the beleaguered city that became the gateway of
the Southern Confederacy.

Tur BLocKADE.

On the nineteenth of April, 1861, President Lincoln declared
by proclamation a military and commercial blockade of our
Southern ports, which was supplemented by the proclamation
of the 27th of May to embrace the whole Atlantic coast from
the capes of Virginia to the mouth of the Rio Grande. This
was technically a “constructive,” or “paper,” blockade, inas-
much as the declaration of the great powers assembled in con-
gress at Paris, in 1856, removed all uncertainty as to the prin-
ciples upon which the adjudication of prize claims must pro-
ceed by declaring that “blockades, in order to be binding, must
be effective; that is to say, must be maintained by a force sufh-
cient really to prevent access to the enemy’s coast.”