CHAPTER XIV WAR AND ITS RUIN. 1861-75 American Marine Declining and Steam Lines lost before War came — Our Vulnerable Sailing Ships - The Anglo-Confederate Cruisers British Ships, British Seamen, and British Guns with Southern Officers - The "Florida " and "Alabama Burning Yankee Clippers in Mid-Atlantic Harrying our Commerce in Eastern Seas-The" Alabama's " End off Cherbourg - Destroyer of Merchantmen sunk by Yankee Merchant Tars American against British Gunnery and Seamanship - Cost of AngloConfederate Depredations - Three Quarters of a Million Tons of Shipping disappears The Merchant Service in the Civil War An Indispensable Reserve for the United States - Peace brings no Revival-Mail Lines to Brazil and China Rise of "Free Ship" Idea The Case for and against It - Our One Transatlantic Line Why There Were No Others A Fast-Shrinking Fleet THE next fifteen-year period to be considered in the history of the American merchant service that between 1861 and 1875— was an era of stunning disaster and swift and humiliating decline. The Civil War in this country and the growth of iron steamship-building abroad are the chief causes which wiped off the register almost one-half of the American ocean fleet, and reduced by more than one-half the American share of our own import and export carrying. In 1861 the deep-sea shipping of the United States amounted to 2,496,894 tons; in 1875, to only 1,515,598 tons. The percentage of our foreign commerce carried in American ships was in 1861 65.2, and in 1875 only 26.2. It has already been shown that this deplorable shrinkage had set in long before the firing on Sumter, though it was due to influences not wholly disassociated from the war. The old sentiment of vigorous nationality, which led Washington, Jefferson, and Madison to join with the North in framing laws for the protection and encouragement of the American merchant marine, and later moved other Southern men to vote generous subsidies to American mail steamships, had been weakened by the slavery controversy and sectional attack. The withdrawal of these subsidies by Congress in 1858, under Southern leadership, was not a war measure; it was not an act of conscious disloyalty. It was the natural and perhaps inevitable result of sectional strife, enfeebling the old sense of national patriotism. But it began to close American shipyards and to drive the stars and stripes from the great highways of commerce several years before the stars and bars had been hoisted above the first Anglo-Confederate cruiser. This stripping away of protection from American steamship lines in 1858 had struck our merchant marine at just the point where it was most vulnerable. It did not immediately affect the building of wooden sailing ships, though for the half-decade before the war this industry had steadily declined. We launched only one-fourth as many ships and barks in 1859 as in 1855. The withdrawal of the subsidies fell as a crushing blow upon the few American marine engine and boiler works, upon the young, ambitious, and skilful firms that had launched some noble wooden ocean steamships and were now experimenting with iron hulls, upon the progressive American merchants and shipowners who saw that the ships of iron and steam were the sea carriers of the future, and were ready to create a network of American mail lines if their government would give to them such recognition as should fairly offset the subsidies enjoyed by their European competitors. These men saw their hopes ruined by national legislation, against which the Senators and Representatives of the shipowning North had protested and voted all in vain. When the war actually began, in April, 1861, of all our proud steam fleet only one poor and struggling line was left in the transatlantic trade, and that was very soon abandoned. There is no popular error more prevalent than the idea that the Civil War destroyed the American merchant marine, but there is no delusion more inexcusable. The war did not destroy our merchant marine; it found it already shrinking, and hastened its disappearance. In the spring of 1861, the United States had a total tonnage registered for foreign trade of 2,496,894. Some of these vessels were laid up in port awaiting remunerative freights; others were receiving or discharging cargoes. But the greater part of this immense fleet was scattered all over the seven seas. Nearly all of these Yankee merchantmen were owned in the North, and were, therefore, the lawful prey of Confederate cruisers and privateers. Nearly all of them were sailing ships. All were unarmed and defenceless, for merchantmen no longer carried the sixpounders, nines, or twelves that had frowned from the ports of important trading craft in the first years of the nineteenth century. The South, in 1861, owned relatively few ocean-going ships or steamers, and these were immediately shut up in their home ports by the iron blockade of the overwhelming Federal navy. The Southern government sought to strike back not at the Northern warships, with whose swarming numbers it could not cope, but at the helpless and unsuspecting Northern ships of commerce. As a war measure this was wholly justifiable, and from the Southern standpoint it was a wise expedient, though nobody regrets more bitterly now than Southern men themselves the terrible after-effects of this blow at American prestige upon the ocean. At first a few privateers were fitted out from the Southern coast at points which the Federal blockade had not yet gripped with its bristling steel, but these enterprises were short-lived and inglorious. Then the "Sumter" and a few other hastily armed merchant steamers were sent to sea. They were more successful. They easily made several captures in the North Atlantic, and aroused intense alarm among Northern shipowners, underwriters, and merchants. Moreover, they awakened the Richmond government to a fuller sense of the potency of this mode of ocean warfare. It was the good fortune of the Confederacy to be represented in Great Britain by a naval agent or commissioner of remarkable persistence, resource, and audacity, Captain James D. Bulloch. This gentleman, a Southern uncle of President Theodore Roosevelt, was intrusted with large funds and extraordinary power to expend them for the best interests of the Confederate cause. He recognized very early that sail craft and converted merchant steamers were not fit instruments to chase and seize the peerless Yankee clipper ships. He secretly procured the building in British yards of two vessels modelled after the latest type of British steam sloops-of-war. Indeed, both the "Florida," when she ran the blockade of Mobile, and the "Alabama," in her fight with the "Hatteras," passed themselves off as cruisers of Her Majesty's navy. They were, of course, inferior in all points save speed to our larger men-of-war, but they were very formidable vessels for the peculiar service for which they were designed. They were the first steam commerce-destroyers. The " Alabama " and "Florida" were graceful, fine-lined corvettes, barkrigged with a full spread of canvas. They were capable of cruising under sail alone, and could, therefore, keep the sea for long periods without re-coaling. Their steam machinery was supposed to be sufficient to enable them to overtake the fastest of our clipper merchantmen, and to escape from our heavy warships. It was an obvious breach of neutrality to build these ships in Britain for use against a friendly power, and Captain Bulloch cleverly managed to encourage the fiction that they were intended for the service of some continental |