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412 Norta Caroiina Troops, 1861-’65.

the Duke of Devonshire (then Lord Hartington) and Colo-
nel Charles Leslie, M. P., when they successfully accom-
plished the same feat in the upper waters of that majestic
river, which divides the North from the South. Less fortu-
nate than ourselves, the late Mr. George Lawrence was fired
upon, wounded and taken prisoner not far from the awful
gorge where the Potomac cuts its way through the rocks at
Harper’s Ferry, and thence glides rapidly onward to the
city of Washington. It should be premised that my experi-
ence of blockade-running both by land and sea, as a special
war correspondent between 1862 and 1865, were more exten-
sive than in my printed account of them I shall ever attempt
to delineate. All that I now propose to do—I hope without
wearying my readers—is to contrast the two modes of get-
ting into and out of the Southern States when, with an en-
ergy and tenacity which did the Washington Government
and the gallant soldiers and sailors under its command infin-
ite credit, it was resolved that were it possible not an ounce
of quinine or other necessary medicine, not a musket or a
cannon, not a copper cap or a pound of gunpowder, not a
tooth brush or a pair of lady’s stays—the last two articles
being in almost universal request before the war had entered
its third year—not a suit of uniform or a military great coat
should enter Dixie Land from the hour when the blockade
was proclaimed until the ‘rebels’ had reached their last ditch.
Fortunately for the latter, it was not possible, even when the
war was in its final stage, to prevent courageous and experi-
enced blockade-runners from slipping through the meshes
and evading the traps plentifully set to catch them.

“In every great emergency that arises on a large scale in
human affairs, a new race or profession of hardy men, and
oceasionally of equally hardy women, springs into existence
to meet it. I do not believe that any of the soldiers who
fought in a war wherein the most magnificent courage was
exhibited on both sides, were braver men than some of. the
captains, officers, engineers and common sailors engaged
month after month and year after year, in defying the block-
ading fleets and their satellites—the swift cruisers—to keep
them out of Wilmington, Charleston, Mobile, Galveston, and

BLocKADE RUNNING. 413

one or two other Southern ports. A grander school to teach
sailors their business, and to cultivate in them the presence
of mind, readiness of resource, iron nerve, grim tenacity, and
power of magnetizing all around them, which every fresh
revelation as to Lord Nelson’s wondrous career showed that
he possessed, it would be impossible to imagine. Let it not
be forgotten, moreover, that excepting a few Southerners, the
captains, officers and engineers of the blockade-running craft
were Englishmen, Scotchmen and Irishmen. Were I to at-
tempt to pay my humble tribute to each of the captains I
knew—and I knew them nearly all—who ran into the Cape
Fear river, upon which Wilmington, in North Carolina,
stands, the space at my command would be exhausted before
T could begin to do them justice. Their names might be as
familiar to their compatriots as those of the heroic command-
ers of the men-of-war that won Copenhagen, the Nile and
Trafalgar, were it not that the Muse of History is often com-
pelled to be mute about some of the pluckiest of human
achievements. Because Captains Hobart, Hewett, Murray-
Aynsley, and Burgoyne, all of the Royal navy, were obliged
to change their names and resign their commissions before en-
gaging in what international law declared to be a surrepti-
tious trade, they can never share the fame belonging to Nel-
son’s captains, although in daring and resource they never
had superiors. More fortunate than the bearers of her Ma-
jesty’s commission, Captain Steele, of England’s mercantile
navy, ran the blockade in his own name more frequently than
any of his congeners, and all that I have said of Hobart,
Hewett and Murray-Aynsley—I omit Captain Burgoyne be-
cause he only made two or three trips—is at least equally
applicable to Captain Steele (a Yorkshireman), and also to
Captain Wilkinson and Captain Halpin. Wilkinson, a Con-
federate naval officer, ran the blockade twenty-one times in
ten months and Halpin, of the British mercantile marine
was, as a blockade-runner conspicuous for his courage and
coolness, and afterward commanded the Great Fastern when
she was laying ocean cables. ‘Nor,’ to quote from a capital
paper contributed by the still living Colonel Lamb, of the
Confederate army, to the Southern Historical Papers, ‘must