Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/652

 620 Results of the blockade. [isei- Europe doubled before the end of 1861, quadrupled by the end of 1862, and during the last two years of the war reached five and six times the figure at which it had stood in 1860. This divergence between North and South in respect of the price of cotton and tobacco put a great premium upon attempts to export these two articles, produced in large amounts in the South and urgently demanded in the North and in Europe. On the other hand, large profits rewarded the efforts of the venturesome merchant who exchanged these exports for foreign goods, such as coffee, bacon, and war materials, imported these, and sold them in the South where, as we have seen, the prices were driven up to exorbitant heights. The efficiency of the Federal blockade prevented such trade from reaching any large dimensions. The blockade of the Southern ports was declared in April, 1861, and was at once carried out by the United States navy. Exports and imports were soon cut down to an insignificant figure ; but, small as was the quantity of goods imported and exported, the profits of the trade that eluded the watchful blockading fleet were enormous, and enriched a considerable number of merchants. Fast vessels of light draught were equipped to carry cotton, especially from Charleston and Wilmington, to some port in the West Indies, for instance to Nassau or Havana, where the cargoes were transshipped to larger vessels, reached England, and were exchanged for so-called blockade goods which returned to the Southern ports. The frequent captures by the Federal fleet did not wipe out the large profits of such transactions. The Confederate government itself was drawn into these ventures. During the first two years of the war it shipped 31,000 bales of cotton to Liverpool. It engaged steamships for the purpose, and joined with individual speculators in trading ventures exactly as the Continental Congress had done nearly a century before. The individual States, too, engaged in blockade-running, especially North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Texas. This practice led to inevitable conflicts between the central and State governments, and between the governments and the individual traders. The profitable nature of this contraband trade acted also as a stimulus to extensive commercial relations with the North. Along the borders of the Confederate States, in Virginia and Louisiana, and on the Mississippi, such an exchange of cotton and tobacco for salt, coffee, and similar articles from the North was at times quite brisk, and had to be winked at by the military authorities, although in law it constituted a treasonable act. In fact, there was a constant conflict of motives throughout the war, one favouring free commercial intercourse with other countries, another leaning to restrictions on it. At the outset a free-trade policy was pursued, on the theory that the South had every- thing to gain and nothing to lose by attempting to get its supplies from abroad. Subsequently the government policy played into the hands of the Federal blockaders by restricting the exportation of cotton and the