Blockade vs Closed ports.

[JerryD]

Was reading about the discussions within the Lincoln Cabinet about the decision to declare a blockade of southern ports. Apparently the decision was driven by the opinions of the British ambassador. Normally a nation in our situation would declare the ports in the South closed to commerce, and anyone who attempted to bring in goods to those ports would be smugglers, who would be committing a crime and would be subject to arrest. Blockades, on the other hand, were done between warring nations and was not appropriate for a domestic rebellion. The British Ambassador was opposed to closing the southern ports as he knew Englishmen still intended to do business with the South and did not want his countrymen treated as criminals. With a blockade it was not a criminal act to get caught running the blockade, although you did run the risk of losing your ship (thus leading to the Prize Cases). This was preferable to the British, apparently. And apparently Lincoln was well aware of this distinction and the British preference, and since he did not want to provoke a problem with the British, he chose the blockade course.

i had always read that Lincoln was surprised to hear the Britain recognized the CSA as a belligerent, due to the oft quoted discussion with Thaddeus Stevens when Lincoln claimed he relied on Steward and did not know the blockade would force Britain to grant the CSA belligerent status. According the book I am reading, Lincoln and the Court, Lincoln was lying to Stevens and feigning ignorance.

So I did not know that Britain all but dictated this choice by Lincoln. I also find it interesting that Lincoln could not close the ports and just promise the British that British nationals would not be prosecuted as smugglers.

 

[USS ALASKA]

@Mark F. Jenkins wrote:
Third, they served a diplomatic and international legal function. A formally-declared blockade gave certain rights and responsibilities to the blockading power, including a recognized right to stop and search neutral shipping on the high seas, and the right (and responsibility) to detain/impound suspect vessels and cargoes and submit them to a court's jurisdiction for determination of whether the ship and cargo should be released to their owner or seized in the name of the government.

The Blockade: Waste or War-Winner? | Naval War - At Sea & Along Inland Waterways

Sparked by a comment in http://civilwartalk.com/threads/why-the-south-lost.74029/ ... I think it's fair to say that the effectiveness of the Union blockade has been debated since its very inception (and in fact, even earlier than that), so there are plenty of contrasting viewpoints. To begin...

civilwartalk.com

@Mark F. Jenkins wrote:
This is a common misapprehension. The pros and cons of "blockade" versus "port closure" were debated extensively in Lincoln's cabinet, and it was fully understood that "blockade" would grant de facto belligerent status to the Confederacy. But in the end, it came down to what Britain could live with. Britain would not cooperate with a "port closure" as that was administered under domestic law, and Britain, not being part of the US, had no reason to comply except voluntarily-- and that would be materially aiding the Union rather than remaining neutral. The administration was extremely reluctant to give the slightest shade of legitimacy to the Confederacy, but in this case the realities of international relations forced their decision.

Blockade Proclamation | Naval War - At Sea & Along Inland Waterways

By The President of the United States of America A Proclamation Whereas an insurrection against the Government of the United States has broken out in the States of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida. Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, and the laws of the United States for the...

civilwartalk.com

@Mark F. Jenkins wrote:
Essentially, Navy Secretary Gideon Welles campaigned earnestly for Lincoln to declare the ports of the South closed, as that was something that was clearly legal under existing precedent and did not have the weakness of an implied recognition of the Confederacy as a belligerent. But Britain would never have gone along with it, and attempts to coerce them into going along with it would likely have led to an increased chance of war with Britain. The blockade decision, though it had the "con" of implied recognition of belligerency, was something that Britain would tend to support; first, because it allowed her to remain neutral instead of forcing her to decide which side to support (as voluntarily abiding by the port closure would clearly be aiding the North); and second, because Britain herself was one of the most frequent operators of blockades, she had a national interest in increasing the legitimacy of blockade operations.

Blockade Proclamation | Naval War - At Sea & Along Inland Waterways

I understand when President Kennedy used the word "quarentine" instead of "blockade" during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he was trying to avoid using a term that meant going to war. Interesting... I hadn't been thought of quite yet at that point, so I don't have any contemporary memories of that...

civilwartalk.com

@Mark F. Jenkins wrote:
Given that the Lincoln administration wanted to close off the seceding states from exterior resources and assistance, there were two known methods of doing so:

1) Port closure. The simpler and less-expensive of the options; the country simply declares one or more ports to be closed to entry. This is administered under municipal/domestic law and litigated in the usual court system of the country. It does not require military presence to be enforceable, but to be practicable it requires a civil/enforcement presence in the ports in question.

2) Blockade. The more elaborate and expensive of the options. Under certain conditions accepted in international law and diplomacy, a country stations warships off the coast of another country to prevent ingress and egress. This is a creature of international law and the law of war and is by definition a military action; related legal challenges are mounted in special-purpose courts ("prize courts") and among the diplomatic representatives of the countries affected.

Because blockade presupposes an armed conflict, and a war presupposes an enemy, the way the treaties were written presumed another country, generally called a "belligerent" or similar term. Under the mid-19th century understanding of international law and the law of war, belligerency conferred a certain set of accepted rights and standards upon the belligerent, as well as a sort of de facto legitimacy. This conferred legitimacy was what Lincoln's cabinet would have vastly preferred to avoid, because it was logically inconsistent with the stance that the seceding states had not left the Union to form a separate country. Significantly, Navy Secretary Gideon Welles argued strongly for port closure and against blockade, based on this very conviction that the 'states in revolt' were not a separate country and therefore international law was inapplicable. (It also would have been considerably easier on the Navy to not have to mount a massive blockade of a 3,500-mile coastline.) (Much of what's said in many places about the closure/blockade debate is derived from Welles' recollections, and is filtered through his opinions.)

The Catch-22 here is that, since port closure is domestic and does not apply internationally, it doesn't apply to any other nations. In order to conform to a port closure, those other nations would have to voluntarily comply. In Britain and France's case, they saw this as a naked attempt to enlist their assistance against the rebellion, and therefore a violation of their own declared neutrality. (Seward tried to do this as well with offering to sign the 1856 Treaty of Paris outlawing privateering, which would have required France and Britain to help catch Confederate privateers. They didn't want to get involved at all in that, either.)

Blockade was the sole acceptable option from Britain's and France's standpoints. There was an established body of law to define and support it and well-understood customs and procedures. This was not a decision the U.S. could make unilaterally without significantly harming its relations with the other powers; as such, Seward was a strong proponent of blockade as opposed to port closure (and came in for a good deal of pen-lashing in Welles' writings as a result).

Essentially, it was the pragmatic reality of the situation that swung the decision toward blockade from port closure. The Lincoln administration had to face up to the fact that to maintain ideological purity in the stance of 'no separate country' that they would incur the wrath and opposition of other nations, and thereby make that 'separate country' all the more likely to exist.

It was not a decision taken lightly at all, nor an uninformed one. Even still, Lincoln tried to have it both ways by the wording of his blockade proclamation, justifying it in terms of collection of customs duties, but that was ignored by Britain and France.

Proclaiming a Blockade (vs. closing the ports) | Naval War - At Sea & Along Inland Waterways

This is a thread that's been attempted before, but unfortunately collapsed in a pile of ad hominem arguments and other questionable logic. Here's the basic contention: Given that the Lincoln administration wanted to close off the seceding states from exterior resources and assistance, there...

civilwartalk.com

@Mark F. Jenkins wrote:
But British merchant vessels were not required to follow American laws, only British and international law. A port closure would have been administered under American law, so a hypothetical British merchant vessel would have been arrested and prosecuted in an American municipal court, which the British were not prepared to accept, being a slight to British sovereignty; the alternative forced on the British in that case would have been to order their own vessels to obey an American law, which was not considered to be neutral behavior-- the British would be in effect obeying an American "blockade" of their own accord, with no American vessels needing to be present. It would be, in short, a "paper blockade."

There's also the matter of how the U.S. was going to have any enforcement personnel in the closed harbor.

Blockade, on the other hand, safeguarded the rights of neutrals in a way that was internationally accepted. U.S. vessels had the internationally-recognized right to stop and search vessels under neutral flags, provided they followed the legal procedures in doing so. (The actual technical fault of Wilkes stopping the Trent was not that he stopped and searched the vessel, which he had a legal right to do, but that he forcibly removed Mason and Slidell without submitting to due process in a legal proceeding. The bluster between Britain and the U.S. was actually about more than just that, but that was the formal legal principle involved. Stopping and searching other vessels had been a sore point between the U.S. and Britain for decades, of course.)

In the larger sense of "what does it matter," it was what Britain insisted upon (if you're going to blockade, really blockade, and put your ships out there and don't try to make us do it for you); and in the interests of keeping the war contained and winnable, Lincoln had little choice.

Proclaiming a Blockade (vs. closing the ports) | Naval War - At Sea & Along Inland Waterways

This is a thread that's been attempted before, but unfortunately collapsed in a pile of ad hominem arguments and other questionable logic. Here's the basic contention: Given that the Lincoln administration wanted to close off the seceding states from exterior resources and assistance, there...

civilwartalk.com

Once again, apologies to @Mark F. Jenkins for pulling his quotes out of their original threads and thanks to him for writing all that up in an easy-to-digest manner!

HTHs,
USS ALASKA

 

[JerryD]

@Mark F. Jenkins wrote:
Third, they served a diplomatic and international legal function. A formally-declared blockade gave certain rights and responsibilities to the blockading power, including a recognized right to stop and search neutral shipping on the high seas, and the right (and responsibility) to detain/impound suspect vessels and cargoes and submit them to a court's jurisdiction for determination of whether the ship and cargo should be released to their owner or seized in the name of the government.

The Blockade: Waste or War-Winner? | Naval War - At Sea & Along Inland Waterways

Sparked by a comment in http://civilwartalk.com/threads/why-the-south-lost.74029/ ... I think it's fair to say that the effectiveness of the Union blockade has been debated since its very inception (and in fact, even earlier than that), so there are plenty of contrasting viewpoints. To begin...

civilwartalk.com

@Mark F. Jenkins wrote:
This is a common misapprehension. The pros and cons of "blockade" versus "port closure" were debated extensively in Lincoln's cabinet, and it was fully understood that "blockade" would grant de facto belligerent status to the Confederacy. But in the end, it came down to what Britain could live with. Britain would not cooperate with a "port closure" as that was administered under domestic law, and Britain, not being part of the US, had no reason to comply except voluntarily-- and that would be materially aiding the Union rather than remaining neutral. The administration was extremely reluctant to give the slightest shade of legitimacy to the Confederacy, but in this case the realities of international relations forced their decision.

Blockade Proclamation | Naval War - At Sea & Along Inland Waterways

By The President of the United States of America A Proclamation Whereas an insurrection against the Government of the United States has broken out in the States of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida. Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, and the laws of the United States for the...

civilwartalk.com

@Mark F. Jenkins wrote:
Essentially, Navy Secretary Gideon Welles campaigned earnestly for Lincoln to declare the ports of the South closed, as that was something that was clearly legal under existing precedent and did not have the weakness of an implied recognition of the Confederacy as a belligerent. But Britain would never have gone along with it, and attempts to coerce them into going along with it would likely have led to an increased chance of war with Britain. The blockade decision, though it had the "con" of implied recognition of belligerency, was something that Britain would tend to support; first, because it allowed her to remain neutral instead of forcing her to decide which side to support (as voluntarily abiding by the port closure would clearly be aiding the North); and second, because Britain herself was one of the most frequent operators of blockades, she had a national interest in increasing the legitimacy of blockade operations.

Blockade Proclamation | Naval War - At Sea & Along Inland Waterways

I understand when President Kennedy used the word "quarentine" instead of "blockade" during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he was trying to avoid using a term that meant going to war. Interesting... I hadn't been thought of quite yet at that point, so I don't have any contemporary memories of that...

civilwartalk.com

@Mark F. Jenkins wrote:
Given that the Lincoln administration wanted to close off the seceding states from exterior resources and assistance, there were two known methods of doing so:

1) Port closure. The simpler and less-expensive of the options; the country simply declares one or more ports to be closed to entry. This is administered under municipal/domestic law and litigated in the usual court system of the country. It does not require military presence to be enforceable, but to be practicable it requires a civil/enforcement presence in the ports in question.

2) Blockade. The more elaborate and expensive of the options. Under certain conditions accepted in international law and diplomacy, a country stations warships off the coast of another country to prevent ingress and egress. This is a creature of international law and the law of war and is by definition a military action; related legal challenges are mounted in special-purpose courts ("prize courts") and among the diplomatic representatives of the countries affected.

Because blockade presupposes an armed conflict, and a war presupposes an enemy, the way the treaties were written presumed another country, generally called a "belligerent" or similar term. Under the mid-19th century understanding of international law and the law of war, belligerency conferred a certain set of accepted rights and standards upon the belligerent, as well as a sort of de facto legitimacy. This conferred legitimacy was what Lincoln's cabinet would have vastly preferred to avoid, because it was logically inconsistent with the stance that the seceding states had not left the Union to form a separate country. Significantly, Navy Secretary Gideon Welles argued strongly for port closure and against blockade, based on this very conviction that the 'states in revolt' were not a separate country and therefore international law was inapplicable. (It also would have been considerably easier on the Navy to not have to mount a massive blockade of a 3,500-mile coastline.) (Much of what's said in many places about the closure/blockade debate is derived from Welles' recollections, and is filtered through his opinions.)

The Catch-22 here is that, since port closure is domestic and does not apply internationally, it doesn't apply to any other nations. In order to conform to a port closure, those other nations would have to voluntarily comply. In Britain and France's case, they saw this as a naked attempt to enlist their assistance against the rebellion, and therefore a violation of their own declared neutrality. (Seward tried to do this as well with offering to sign the 1856 Treaty of Paris outlawing privateering, which would have required France and Britain to help catch Confederate privateers. They didn't want to get involved at all in that, either.)

Blockade was the sole acceptable option from Britain's and France's standpoints. There was an established body of law to define and support it and well-understood customs and procedures. This was not a decision the U.S. could make unilaterally without significantly harming its relations with the other powers; as such, Seward was a strong proponent of blockade as opposed to port closure (and came in for a good deal of pen-lashing in Welles' writings as a result).

Essentially, it was the pragmatic reality of the situation that swung the decision toward blockade from port closure. The Lincoln administration had to face up to the fact that to maintain ideological purity in the stance of 'no separate country' that they would incur the wrath and opposition of other nations, and thereby make that 'separate country' all the more likely to exist.

It was not a decision taken lightly at all, nor an uninformed one. Even still, Lincoln tried to have it both ways by the wording of his blockade proclamation, justifying it in terms of collection of customs duties, but that was ignored by Britain and France.

Click to expand...https://civilwartalk.com/threads/proclaiming-a-blockade-vs-closing-the-ports.99309/#post-867836

@Mark F. Jenkins wrote:
But British merchant vessels were not required to follow American laws, only British and international law. A port closure would have been administered under American law, so a hypothetical British merchant vessel would have been arrested and prosecuted in an American municipal court, which the British were not prepared to accept, being a slight to British sovereignty; the alternative forced on the British in that case would have been to order their own vessels to obey an American law, which was not considered to be neutral behavior-- the British would be in effect obeying an American "blockade" of their own accord, with no American vessels needing to be present. It would be, in short, a "paper blockade."

There's also the matter of how the U.S. was going to have any enforcement personnel in the closed harbor.

Blockade, on the other hand, safeguarded the rights of neutrals in a way that was internationally accepted. U.S. vessels had the internationally-recognized right to stop and search vessels under neutral flags, provided they followed the legal procedures in doing so. (The actual technical fault of Wilkes stopping the Trent was not that he stopped and searched the vessel, which he had a legal right to do, but that he forcibly removed Mason and Slidell without submitting to due process in a legal proceeding. The bluster between Britain and the U.S. was actually about more than just that, but that was the formal legal principle involved. Stopping and searching other vessels had been a sore point between the U.S. and Britain for decades, of course.)

In the larger sense of "what does it matter," it was what Britain insisted upon (if you're going to blockade, really blockade, and put your ships out there and don't try to make us do it for you); and in the interests of keeping the war contained and winnable, Lincoln had little choice.

Click to expand...https://civilwartalk.com/threads/proclaiming-a-blockade-vs-closing-the-ports.99309/#post-867972

Once again, apologies to @Mark F. Jenkins for pulling his quotes out of their original threads and thanks to him for writing all that up in an easy-to-digest manner!

HTHs,
USS ALASKA

Really excellent summary of the issues involved. The one issue not discussed was that in the American system, only Congress has the power to declare war, and a blockade was considered a war measure. So The Prize Cases revolved around whether Lincoln acted illegally when he declared a blockade rather than closing the ports. And only by the slimmest of margins the Supreme Court bu a 5-4 vote supported Lincoln's establishment of the blockade. But it would have been interesting to see how Britain and France would have reacted if the blockade was illegal. Thus all of their nationals' ships taken during that time were illegally seized, when it was Britain and France that in effect dictated the blockade.

 

[wausaubob]

Whatever was going to happen had to have the approval of Great Britain. If Britain remained neutral and its ports and courts were closed to Confederate privateers, privateering and commerce raiding by CSS would quickly lose its economic incentive. The rest of the European nations would almost certainly follow the lead of Great Britain.

 

[wausaubob]

British neutrality seems to have been enforced more rigorously after the news from Vicksburg and Gettysburg was sent to London and was confirmed by British agents in the US and Confederacy.

 

[Rhea Cole]

British neutrality seems to have been enforced more rigorously after the news from Vicksburg and Gettysburg was sent to London and was confirmed by British agents in the US and Confederacy.

Nothing succeeds like success.

 

[Saphroneth]

British neutrality seems to have been enforced more rigorously after the news from Vicksburg and Gettysburg was sent to London and was confirmed by British agents in the US and Confederacy.

British neutrality was actually pro-Union overall (certainly the acts of the government were). In fact (for example) there was no international law forbidding the Confederacy from openly purchasing a warship built, fitted out and armed in British shipyards, but there was British neutrality law that they imposed upon themselves - and a law forbidding any belligerent from buying warships would naturally work to the advantage of the Union.

Similarly the British forbade both sides to run captured prizes into British ports, which benefitted the Union and harmed Confederate commerce raiding.

 

[USS ALASKA]

Sirs, please see this short paper https://civilwartalk.com/threads/civil-war-blockade-papers.149497/page-8#post-2609296

Cheers,
USS ALASKA