About the Author
ANDREW F. SMITH is a faculty member at the New School and editor-in-chief of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America. He lives in New York.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
Lincoln’s Humbug of a Blockade
Abraham Lincoln was elected the sixteenth president of the United States on November 6, 1860. He opposed the extension of slavery into new territories, and his election convinced many Southerners that it was time to leave the Union. By the time of Lincoln’s inauguration on March 4, 1861, seven slaveholding states had seceded, immediately expropriating as much Federal property as they could, including arsenals, forts, military camps, and the United States Mint in New Orleans. Eight other slave-holding states remained in the United States, but any precipitate action by the new administration might tip them into seceding as well.
The Lincoln Administration confronted many crises, but the most volatile was what to do with a few remaining Union-held forts in states that had seceded. Fort Sumter was the flashpoint: It controlled the entrance to Charleston, South Carolina’s largest port. The fort was garrisoned by a small army detachment commanded by Major Robert Anderson, a pro-slavery, former slave owner from Kentucky. Anderson attended West Point, where he met Kentucky-born Jefferson Davis and tutored a Creole from Louisiana named Pierre T. G. Beauregard. In 1861, the commander of the Confederate troops stationed in Charleston was Beauregard, who under orders from Jefferson Davis, then the provisional president of the Confederacy, refused permission for Anderson’s garrison to buy food and supplies in Charleston. Instead, Davis and Beauregard demanded that Anderson surrender the fort. Anderson refused. By early March 1861, the fort began to run out of provisions. Anderson told the War Department that “unless we receive supplies I shall be compelled to stay here without food, or to abandon this post.”1
All Loyal Citizens
Lincoln’s cabinet was divided about whether to send provisions to the garrison. William Seward, the U.S. Secretary of State, favored withdrawal, as did Simon P. Cameron, the Secretary of War, and Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy. Relieving the fort, they argued, would require an army and a navy that the United States just did not have. Others disagreed. Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, and Montgomery Blair, the Postmaster General, thought that surrendering the fort would be treason, and any such action would dampen the morale of the many Unionists who lived in the slave-holding states. Others feared that withdrawal would be tantamount to official recognition of the Confederacy.
Lincoln concluded that if the Union troops evacuated Fort Sumter, the nation would be irrevocably split in two. At a cabinet meeting on March 28, 1861, he made the decision to send provisions to the Union garrison at the fort. A small flotilla of vessels loaded with supplies left Northern ports on April 5. When the ships arrived off the coast of South Carolina six days later, Beauregard gave Anderson a choice of immediately surrendering or facing bombardment. Anderson declined to surrender, and at 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, batteries fired on the fort.2 The cannonade continued through the following day, until Anderson agreed to a cease-fire. On April 14, Anderson and his men lowered the American flag, boarded the ships that had come to supply the fort, and headed north. Thus ended the first military engagement of the Civil War.
Even before the Confederate artillery fired the first shots of the Civil War, various proposals were circulating in Washington on how best to encourage the South to return to the Union. Winfield Scott, the General-in-Chief of the U.S. Army and a Virginian by birth, is credited with the proposal to blockade the Confederacy’s Atlantic and Gulf ports and then to take control of the Mississippi River. Such actions would prevent war materiel from coming into the Confederacy from abroad and would split the Confederacy in two. After the South stagnated commercially, it would then peacefully rejoin the Union, or so proponents believed. The plan was leaked to the press, where it was disparagingly referred to as the “boa-constrictor,” the “anaconda,” or “Scott’s Great Snake.”3 The press and the public wanted no part of it. Northern newspapers demanded the immediate conquest of Richmond and a speedy end to secession.
On April 15—one day after Fort Sumter surrendered—Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for the mobilization of 75,000 volunteers to suppress the rebellion. In the North, the proclamation generated widespread support and unity. In the South, four states responded to Lincoln’s call by seceding from the Union, and strong secession movements pressed the remaining four slave-holding states to follow their example.
Within the Lincoln Administration, debate ensued about whether to declare a blockade of the Confederacy. It was Jefferson Davis’s action that tipped the debate in favor of doing so. Two days after Lincoln’s call for volunteers to suppress the rebellion, Davis invited applications for “Letters of Marque” authorizing Confederate agents to seize and destroy American merchant ships. On April 19, Lincoln responded by declaring a blockade of Southern ports with the intent of preventing cotton, tobacco, and sugar from being exported and military equipment and supplies from coming into the South from abroad.4
Declaring a blockade was easy; enforcing it was another matter. The South had nine major ports and more than 3,500 miles of coastline, and it would be impossible for the North to prevent small ships from landing goods along thousands of bays, inlets, rivers, and islands. The Federal navy had only ninety ships at the beginning of the war, and more than half of these were outmoded sailing ships, many of them unseaworthy. As soon as Lincoln declared the blockade, the Navy Department recalled naval ships from foreign waters, purchased merchant ships, which were quickly converted into gunboats, and launched a major shipbuilding program. Within weeks, the United States had 150 ships ready for duty, and construction had begun on another 50 ships.
As ships returned from abroad and new ships came on line, the blockade became more effective. By December 1861, the navy had 264 ships on line, and the effects of the blockade were “severely felt” in the Confederacy.5
The Provision Blockade Is Nothing
Most Southerners did not see the blockade as a serious threat. Some, in fact, welcomed it. Jefferson Davis called it “a blessing in disguise,” believing that the blockade would force England and France “to a speedy recognition of the Confederacy, and to an interference with the blockade.” Even if the blockade became effective and England and France were not drawn into the conflict, Southerners concluded that “Lincoln’s humbug of a blockade” would still not succeed because of the South’s abundant food supply. As one Confederate officer in Nashville proclaimed, “The provision blockade is nothing; we shall have wheat, corn, and beef beyond measure, besides tobacco, sugar, and rice.” No one imagined that the blockade of the Atlantic and Gulf ports would have much of an impact on the availability, distribution, or cost of food in the Confederacy.6
Although the Anaconda plan was never officially approved, a modified version of it shaped Union strategy after the Northern defeat at Bull Run in July 1861. Southerners were well aware of the supposed “anaconda” strategy of the North, and many called it a “starvation policy.” This Anaconda strategy was well understood in both the North and South, and regular mention of the serpent—“contracting coils of the anaconda,” the “embraces of the Northern anaconda,” “the great anaconda has begun to enfold,” or “strangulation by the great anaconda,”—appeared in both Northern and Southern newspapers and magazines as the war progressed.7
An assistant to Jefferson Davis accurately foretold Union strategy, which was “to take our chief sea-coast cities, so as to cut off all supplies from foreign countries, get possession of the border States of Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee, which are the great grain-growing States, properly belonging to the Confederacy; cut the railway connections between Virginia and the cotton States, and cut the cotton region in two divisions by getting full possession of the Mississippi River by getting possession of the sea-coast cities on the one side and the principal grain-growing region on the other; by separating the cotton region of the Confederacy from Virginia and cutting it into two separate divisions; by commanding completely the Mississippi River, they expected to starve the people into subjection.”8
Severely Felt
The U.S. Navy needed coaling and supply depots in the South to resupply blockading ships. On August 28, 1861, Federal forces captured Fort Hatteras and Fort Clark on Cape Hatteras Inlet on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, and later captured Roanoke, New Bern, Elizabeth City, and Plymouth. In South Carolina, U.S. Army and Navy units seized Fort Walker and Fort Beauregard, guarding the entrance to Port Royal Sound. On November 24, 1861, the North seized Tybee Island in Georgia near the Savannah River estuary and immediately began constructing long-range batteries to fire on Confederate-occupied Fort Pulaski, which surrendered months later. From forts and fortified positions on offshore islands, Federal gunboats prevented coastwise trading. These conquests also gave the United States access to the South’s food production areas, among them the fertile strip of land along the coast of the Carolinas and Georgia; raiding parties ventured far into the hinterland confiscating commodities, dismantling the dikes, and flooding the rice fields. As a result, rice and other food production in these areas nosedived.9
From the beginning, the blockade reduced food imports into the South. Coffee, tea, spices, and wine quickly became difficult to acquire...
