How Successful were Rebel Privateers and Commerce Raiders?

Well, if the Laird rams had escaped to the United States it would have happened approximately September 1863. By that time the United States would have fully capable of fighting the British. Would it have been costly? Sure. Put Irish independence at issue and the net affect on the United States war effort may have been positive. The undetected escape of the warships was nearly impossible. The United States had agents watching them.
Since the British were not interested in finding out how the United States would have responded, we don't know what the affect would have been. But as our illustrious leader often states, in the what if world everything is free.
 
Well, if the Laird rams had escaped to the United States it would have happened approximately September 1863. By that time the United States would have fully capable of fighting the British.
I'm not so sure that's the case. The Royal Navy was very strong, the British Army had the resources to put ca. 60K troops in Canada to supplement the Canadian militia (with the limiting factor being shipping), and the US doesn't have a 100K man army just knocking about spare to go and attack Canada. (They might well be able to invade Canada by abandoning operations against the CSA, but that's something else.)

The USN can't win a battle with the Royal Navy in September 1863, because it can't at just about any point in the 19th century. In September 1863 the wooden RN is still very strong compared to the wooden USN, and the RN's ironclad fleet is at minimum:
Warrior, Black Prince
Defence, Resistance
Royal Oak

While the USN's ironclad fleet is almost entirely Passaics, essentially a not-very-improved Monitor design with all the flaws of the type (such as only two guns).

It is a better time for the US to launch a war against Britain than average, though, Trent is instantly crippling and any of the time April 1862-August 1862 and July 1864-February 1865 would see the loss of the Army of the Potomac simply from naval intervention.



Of course, the only plausible scenarios in which the CSA gets the Laird Rams are:
1) The British know this will lead to war with the US, and so have made preparations.
In which case those 60K troops are already in Canada etc.
2) The British have no idea this will lead to war with the US because they don't think they're giving it to the CSA.
In which case the CSN has successfully tricked the Admiralty into not noticing the ships are bound for the CSA, and the British have not violated neutrality.
 
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I'm not so sure that's the case. The Royal Navy was very strong, the British Army had the resources to put ca. 60K troops in Canada to supplement the Canadian militia (with the limiting factor being shipping), and the US doesn't have a 100K man army just knocking about spare to go and attack Canada. (They might well be able to invade Canada by abandoning operations against the CSA, but that's something else.)

The USN can't win a battle with the Royal Navy in September 1863, because it can't at just about any point in the 19th century. In September 1863 the wooden RN is still very strong compared to the wooden USN, and the RN's ironclad fleet is at minimum:
Warrior, Black Prince
Defence, Resistance
Royal Oak

While the USN's ironclad fleet is almost entirely Passaics, essentially a not-very-improved Monitor design with all the flaws of the type (such as only two guns).

It is a better time for the US to launch a war against Britain than average, though, Trent is instantly crippling and any of the time April 1862-August 1862 and July 1864-February 1865 would see the loss of the Army of the Potomac simply from naval intervention.



Of course, the only plausible scenarios in which the CSA gets the Laird Rams are:
1) The British know this will lead to war with the US, and so have made preparations.
In which case those 60K troops are already in Canada etc.
2) The British have no idea this will lead to war with the US because they don't think they're giving it to the CSA.
In which case the CSN has successfully tricked the Admiralty into not noticing the ships are bound for the CSA, and the British have not violated neutrality.
That's kind of silly. Everyone knew for whom they were intended.
 
Lets not get sidetracked. Did tonnage unloaded at New York decline during the war years? Did the price of any imported good rise significantly? Did the tonnage unloaded at City Point accumulate to levels described as "extravagant"?
I am not aware that any United States Army ran short of material and food when it was connected to a railroad. But who knows, maybe you'll find one.
 
Citation?

Yes sir,

THE U.S. SHIPBUILDING INDUSTRY: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE by Clinton H. Whitehurst, Jr.

Used here...

https://civilwartalk.com/threads/the-decline-of-american-merchant-shipping.143659/

... given the impact they had on the Union economic bottom line...

What impact to the Union? They MIGHT have made things marginally more expensive. So what? In a fight for your national existence, this is inconsequential.

I doubt it would have been that simple...

Never said 'simple'...

As for their demise, they were very tough ships indeed - their armour was all but impervious to most USN weapons and their guns could put shell through a Monitor target at hundreds of yards.

Not a question - but for them to do any damage, they have to either attack Union harbors - and do what? Send a landing party ashore?...or attack the Union fleet. They have to come to me. For once I don't have to hunt them down. And there isn't unlimited options for them to really cause war-changing damage so the Union can rally the masses at a few vital points. Once ID'd, the Hounds of Heck will descend. This will kinda be like hunting the Bismarck. Once known to be out on the open ocean, all ops will cease until they are found and killed. I don't care about armor and guns. They are two ships. When rundown by 100 vessels, you're doomed. Rammed, burned, boarded, something bad is going to happen. I will take my loses - and like Jutland, the prisoners might attack their jailers but at the end of the day, the jailers will prevail. While potentially spectacular, those two vessels had no more ability to change the course of the war than giving the Confederacy two Sherman tanks and no ability to reproduce, repair, supply same. By the way, where are they going to get a steady supply of coal?

Of course it did.

Sir, can you show any source that demonstrates a decline of shipping into Union ports over the course of the war? That is all that counts regardless of cost.

Of course it matters.

No sir - it didn't 'matter'. We stayed the course, we continued the war. The Union prevailed. The open seas CSN did not effect, and did not influence the final result.

Cheers,
USS ALASKA
 
By 1860 the much more efficient compound steam plant was in wide use.
As has been noted, this is untrue.

In 1856 the second blow was felt by the growing demand for iron ships. Still this demand was not so pressing as to be injurious to our carrying trade, and in 1862 we had only lost 1000 tons.
This makes clear that the carrying trade had barely moved in six years, one of which is a war year.

What impact to the Union? They MIGHT have made things marginally more expensive. So what? In a fight for your national existence, this is inconsequential.
Since it caused widespread worry and forced the fire-sale of a huge chunk of merchant marine... yes, it had an impact. And your blasé claim that nothing economic matters in a fight for national survival is a little odd...

Not a question - but for them to do any damage, they have to either attack Union harbors - and do what? Send a landing party ashore?...or attack the Union fleet. They have to come to me. For once I don't have to hunt them down.
It takes a long time for a ship to sail from one port to another, you know, you can't have the whole Union navy at every possible location.
As for attacking Union harbors, yes, that's what they were intended to do - attack Union harbors. Run through or blast through the forts, spend a day wrecking everything that doesn't take an oath of parole, and leave again...


I don't care about armor and guns. They are two ships. When rundown by 100 vessels, you're doomed. Rammed, burned, boarded, something bad is going to happen. I will take my loses - and like Jutland, the prisoners might attack their jailers but at the end of the day, the jailers will prevail.
At Jutland the "jailers" had more powerful guns (15" and 13.5" guns) and faster ships. The Scorpion and Wivern, with trial speeds in excess of 10 knots, can outrun just about every US ironclad and sink the wooden ships sent to chase them. (The only Union guns which have much chance of doing penetrative damage to the rams are the 15" Dahlgren and the 8" and 10" Parrotts - not many of which went on fast wooden cruisers.)

The Rams can control the conditions of engagement, and they're also fast enough to deal with Monitor types by ramming - which would sink them very quickly.

By the way, where are they going to get a steady supply of coal?
There were coal mines in the CSA, and the Laird Rams are tough enough to fight their way into a harbor to recoal before fighting their way out again. That's if they don't coal from British possessions, like so many US warships did.

Sir, can you show any source that demonstrates a decline of shipping into Union ports over the course of the war? That is all that counts regardless of cost.
Well, the purchase of weapons overseas ceased in the summer of 1863, some time before all Union smoothbore muskets had been replaced.

No sir - it didn't 'matter'. We stayed the course, we continued the war. The Union prevailed. The open seas CSN did not effect, and did not influence the final result.
That's almost tautological. It argues that because the Union was ultimately victorious therefore nothing the Confederacy did mattered.
One might so argue that because the Allies won WW1 and WW2 therefore the German submarines had no effect.

Instead, I contend that the Confederate cruisers - representing as they did a way for the CSA to do financial damage to the Union (indeed, about the only way to do so directly) were an important factor in driving the things which made civilians directly suffer from the war (i.e. things like financial loss and wartime inflation).
 
I am studying for my US Naval History final now, and currently have my "Sea Power" by Potter open next to me. This is a great question but has a rather simple answer.
This is a fair summary, but I have to take exception to applying the term "privateer" to blockade runners. They are very different, in practice and in law.
 
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This is a summary, but I have to take exception to applying the term "privateer" to blockade runners. They are very different, in practice and in law.
Not least in that privateers were now functionally illegal, a judgement the CSA largely accepted (though there was initial wrangling because the US was not a Paris signatory).


There's three categories:

Privateer - illegal under Paris 1856. A privately owned ship with a letter of marque that raids enemy commerce.
Commerce raiding cruiser - a governmental warship that raids enemy commerce.
Blockade runner - a vessel (privately owned or under government authority) which is primarily concerned with getting into a blockaded port.
 
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Per a civil war criculum article by 1864 only 27%of American Merchant Marine was still registered under the U.S. Flag.

I can't vouch for the accuracy of that figure, but if it's correct, that suggests that those wily New Englanders were just as adept at "godfathering" their ships to a foreign flag as Southerners were. It's a legal sleight-of-hand, rather than a substantive change of ownership.
 
I can't vouch for the accuracy of that figure, but if it's correct, that suggests that those wily New Englanders were just as adept at "godfathering" their ships to a foreign flag as Southerners were. It's a legal sleight-of-hand, rather than a substantive change of ownership.
Actually the substantive change of ownership was very important. The Alabama and the other raiders burned many ships which tried the legal-trick means of changing ownership, and most countries had fairly strict laws about the requirements.






Ships destroyed
'At half-past eleven A. M., "sail ho!" was cried from the mast, and about one P. M., we came up with an exceedingly American-looking ship, which, upon being hove to by a gun, hoisted the English colors... The register purported that the stranger was the British ship Martaban, belonging to parties in Maulmain, a rice port in India. Manifest and clearance corresponded with the register; the ship being laden with rice, and having cleared for Singapore- of which port, as the reader sees, she was within a few hours' sail. Thus far, all seemed regular and honest enough, but the ship was American- having been formerly known as the Texan Star-and her transfer to British owners, if made at all, had been made within the last ten days, after the arrival of the Alabama in these seas had become known at Maulmain...

'every line of the ship was American... Passing up the side, I stepped upon deck. Here everything was, if possible, still more American, even to the black, greasy cook, who, with his uncovered woolly head, naked breast, and uprolled sleeves in the broiling sun, was peeling his Irish potatoes for his codfish... In the person of the master, the long, lean, angular-featured, hide-bound, weather-tanned Yankee skipper stood before me. Puritan, May-Flower, Plymouth Rock, were all written upon the well-known features. No amount of English custom-house paper, or sealing-wax could, by any possibility, convert him into that rotund, florid, jocund Briton who personates the English shipmaster. His speech was even more national- taking New England to be the Yankee nation- than his person; and when he opened his mouth, a mere novice might have sworn that he was from the "State of Maine" -there, or thereabouts. When he told me that I "hadn't-ought-to" burn his ship, he pronounced the shibboleth which condemned her to the flames.

'The shrift was a short one. When the papers were produced, I found among them no bill of sale or other evidence of the transfer of the property--the register of an English ship, as every seaman knows, not being such evidence... In half an hour, or as soon as the crew could pack their duds, and be transferred to the Alabama, the Texan Star- alias the Martaban- was in flames; the beautiful, new English ensign being marked with the day, and latitude and longitude of the capture, and stowed away carefully by the old signal-quartermaster, in the bag containing his Yankee flags.' (p.717-9)

Ships saved:

'The next vessel that we overhauled was a "converted" ship--that is, a Yankee turned into an Englishman. I desired very much to burn her, but was prevented by the regularity of her papers and the circumstances surrounding her. She was a Maine-built ship, but had evidently been bona fide transferred, as her master and crew were all Englishmen' (p.625)

'another American ship passed us, but she proved, upon being boarded, to have been sold, by her patriotic Yankee owners, to an Englishman, and was now profitably engaged in assisting the other ships of John Bull in taking away from the enemy his carrying-trade. I examined the papers and surroundings of all these ships, with great care, being anxious, if possible, to find a peg on which I might hang a doubt large enough to enable me to burn them. But, thus far, all the transfers had been bona fide. In the present instance, the papers were evidently genuine, and there was a Scotch master and English crew on board.' (pp.631-2)

'On the afternoon after leaving the Strait of Malacca, we overhauled another American ship under neutral colors--the Bremen ship Ottone. The transfer had been made at Bremen, in the previous May; the papers were genuine, and the master and crew all Dutchmen, there being no Yankee on board. The change of property, in this case, having every appearance of being bona fide, I permitted the ship to pass on her voyage' (p.722)





From Chelyabinsk's look into the subject:




In this era, the concept of limited liability is still very much in its infancy. Most ships are owned by a single person or by a partnership, and they own them in their own right and not as an agent or director of a corporate entity. When the ship suffers losses, the owner or the partnership becomes personally liable for those losses. Take the case of Zachariah Pearson, for instance. Pearson was a shipping magnate who branched out into blockade running, and suffers a series of serious losses as a result. Nowadays, Pearson's liability would be limited to his capital in 'ZCP Blockade Busters Ltd'; despite the failure, he could have shrugged his shoulders and gone on with his life. Back then, when Pearson's business capital wasn't enough to pay his debtors, his own property was seized and sold to raise the funds.

This also has repercussions for the way we understand trading in multiple companies. The free movement of global capital means that nowadays you can set up a local limited company in a particular territory and run your operations through that. However, we're in an era here where trading entities are, for the most part, individuals rather than companies. Notice that in the case of the Baltica the way in which the ship was to be transferred was not through the creation of a local subsidiary, but by Mr Sorensen junior occupying property at Altona and Hamburg and being admitted as a burgher. So the idea of somehow disguising the ownership of vessels behind a series of corporate firewalls is basically impossible: it simply doesn't work that way.

This is also why talking about the American Civil War seeing a 'flight from the flag' is really misleading. It implies that owners, masters, vessels and crews transferred their allegiance en masse from the Union to the United Kingdom- 'flying' from one flag to another to find greater security. It also implies that, if Britain had not been there to accept the vessels, those owners, masters, vessels and crews could have gone to any other country's flag without any greater difficulty than they encountered historically. However, even the most cursory study of British trade policy between the repeal of the Corn Laws and the 1906 election's focus on Tariff Reform will show that Britain is exceptional in its openness during this period. It's exceptional even in comparison to the United States, whose legislation on foreign merchant vessels and tariffs are both far more closed than the British equivalents.

There are a number of reasons that countries would not be welcoming to a sudden influx of foreign merchant vessels... Some countries ban ships built in foreign countries from their registry, because they want to preserve their own shipbuilding industry. Some countries ban foreign owners, on the grounds that they want their own trade to enrich their own subjects. Others ban foreign crews, to preserve their merchant sailors to man ships in wartime. Having a vast merchant marine requires you to invest in a navy sufficient to protect it in both war and peace, a cost which many countries are either unable or unwilling to pay. Furthermore, they are unlikely to have any interest in protecting Union merchant ships... when that risks the same merchant ships transferring back once the war is over. The reason that the standard for ship registry detailed above are so high is to ensure that the only merchants these neutral nations have to protect are unquestionably their own.

Furthermore, what we see is not a 'flight from the flag'. It's actually a fire sale of Union merchant ships, whose owners can no longer ply their trade profitably, and who are trying to cut their losses by selling off their assets. Notice that all the ships described above have functionally lost their American identity: owner, masters and crew are all different. It's the equivalent of a high street chain buying the stores of a bankrupt rival.
 
Also relevant, from The Adventures of a Blockade-Runner:

As no vessel can be under the United States flag unless she has been built in the United States (or condemned in a United States prize court), and any vessel once transferred from the United States flag to a foreign flag can never be re-transferred, or again become an American vessel, and a provisional register holds good for only six months, it was necessary to send the vessel at once to a British port, to be entered upon the British shipping list, and obtain a permanent register and official number.'

Note that transferral from the US flag to a foreign flag is permanent.
 
I cede the point, re: long-term damage to the American merchant marine.

US Shipping Tonnage 1840-1880.jpg
 
And in turn I concede that there appears to have been something of a decline going on in US tonnage. It's pretty clear though that the ACW hacked the merchant marine off at the knees to a level which foreign tonnage could not entirely replace.
 
I can't vouch for the accuracy of that figure, but if it's correct, that suggests that those wily New Englanders were just as adept at "godfathering" their ships to a foreign flag as Southerners were. It's a legal sleight-of-hand, rather than a substantive change of ownership.
Also @WJC,
The article in question is a very comprehensive article on U.S.-UK relations during the Civil War; eseentialcivilwarcurriculum.com
Thomas E.Serbell II
Two interesting figures
1. Sebell estimated that three out of four blockade runners got through which would give the Union Navy a 25% success rate vs the usually cited 10% success rate.
2.Serbell states that in "the summer of 1862 half of all Atlantic merchant ships sailed the stars and stripes,two years later only 27% did."
Obviously other nations sailed the Atlantic still that is,quite a drop of U.S. Merchant Marine vessels.
Leftyhunter
 
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1. Sebell estimated that three out of four blockade runners got through which would give the Union Navy a 25% success rate vs the usually cited 10% success rate.
Marcus Price published the critical analysis of this in the American Neptune back in the 1950s. Long story short, the success rate varied widely by time, place, and type of runner. The Confederacy could have had huge successes in 1861-62, before the blockade really got ramped up, but at that stage there were relatively few attempts compared to later on.
 
As the railroad system grew in the United States the economy became more self sufficient. Plus the railroads and their vendors drew off a tremendous amount of capital. Once the transcontinental railroad was completed, it became the easiest way to move people and mail across the country. That also meant that railroad supplies and equipment could move to the west by rail.
One source of revenue was lost to the shipping industry. The pressure to build a canal across Mexico or Panama just was not the same, because such a canal would have competed with the railroads.
Railroads, iron, coal, telegraphs, then oil, telephones and electricity, and steel, drew off so much capital that the ship building industry moved to England.
The Confederate raiders just sped up the process, if I am paraphrasing Alaska's sources correctly.
 
For what they spent, the Confederates got a lot of good press from the raiders. And it sure made the whalers mad.
But it had no affect on Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota and Kansas. The ships loaded with railroad equipment made it to San Francisco anyway. The evidence is that New England carriers were the targets.
 
One source of revenue was lost to the shipping industry. The pressure to build a canal across Mexico or Panama just was not the same, because such a canal would have competed with the railroads.
Er... a canal was completed across the Panama isthmus, and it was after the point you claim rail routes became better. Ships may be slower than rail lines, but they're much higher capacity and always have been - that's why shipping is so much cheaper by sea or river than by rail, and always has been.

Railroads, iron, coal, telegraphs, then oil, telephones and electricity, and steel, drew off so much capital that the ship building industry moved to England.

This is essentially a false statement, because the shipbuilding industry didn't move to England. It always was in England and Scotland (the Clyde being one of the biggest shipbuilding areas).
 
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Marcus Price published the critical analysis of this in the American Neptune back in the 1950s. Long story short, the success rate varied widely by time, place, and type of runner. The Confederacy could have had huge successes in 1861-62, before the blockade really got ramped up, but at that stage there were relatively few attempts compared to later on.

I always love the way Craig Symonds put it... I need to look up the original quote sometime, since I love citing this; paraphrased: "Three-quarters of blockade-running attempts were successful. Three-quarters of ships running the blockade were captured. Both of these statements are true."
 
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