Earlier this year Craig Symonds gave an interview to a South Carolina radio show about the blockade, and was asked if the blockade was effective. He first described some of the ways that other historians have measured success, and than gave his own perspective:
But here’s the statistic that I appeal to most often. And that is, if you take the twelve-month period prior to Fort Sumter, and calculate the total number of ships that came out of southern ports, the ports belonging to the states of the Confederacy, and the tonnage of goods, and compare that with the twelve months after Fort Sumter, and this was when the blockade was in its weakest state, it declined by more than 90%. So a number of ships that tried made it, but lots and lots and lots of ships never tried, because the blockade was there.
So what kind of impact does that have, cumulatively, on the attitude of those running this war? We see it, particularly in 1864, the year we’re really interested in tonight, because by 1864, now the blockade is really becoming pretty restrictive. And affecting not so much the Confederacy’s ability to have shoulder weapons and saltpetre and cannon shells and the fundamental tools of the army, but on all of the other parts of a nineteenth century economy, and this has kind of a wasting effect. It affects inflation, it affects of course, by then inflation was affected by Confederate paper money as well, so this is a double whammy in terms of the domestic economy of the Confederacy.
And the wives and children and families left behind, of all those soldiers fighting at the front, were feeling this rather desperately, and I know the tradition is, “oh, we just toughed it out,” but soldiers who would get letters, and I’ve seen thousands of these saying, “Jake, we can’t eat. We shall die if you don’t come home. Jake, you must dessert and come home, or we shall surely perish.” That’s a rough paraphrase of thousands of letters. So what cumulative effect does that have on the Confederacy’s ability to sustain the war?So it’s not measurable, I think, just by how many ships violate the blockade, or whether indeed the Confederate armies had enough wherewithal to sustain battle – they did. But [the blockade] had a sort of cumulative, wearing effect on the society as a whole, and how you calculate that statistically, I think is impossible. But I believe that it had a significant impact.
What he said.