Scott’s plan for a blockade was given official sanction on April 19, 1861,when President Abraham Lincoln issued his Proclamation of Blockade Against Southern Ports. The game would be much different this time around. Scott was a military hero and wise in the ways of war, but his plan for a blockade harkened back to the war against Mexico, when the American Navy had faced a preindustrial enemy with a long, largely empty coastline. The plan called for a variety of land operations in addition to strangling the Confederacy by cutting off or capturing the South’s dozen or so largest ports. The naval blockade was part of the Anaconda Plan, developed at the beginning of the war by Maj. DuPont wrote to Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles in August 1862, commenting on the blockade at Charleston.“I think it probable that some two million sterling of arms and merchandise have gone in the last ten days.” “I am fairly oppressed by the insufficiency of the blockade,” Rear Adm. The sievelike naval picket line was a constant source of embarrassment to members of the Lincoln administration.

Official war records and many other sources suggest that wartime traffic in and out of many Southern ports actually equaled or surpassed prewar volumes. “There has not been a night for the last two weeks that steamers have not run in and out, not one of which have been captured and so it will probably go to the end.” West was correct in that assessment, for while Confederate commerce did suffer from maritime seizures and restrictions, but the Southern economy did not collapse from the Union naval blockade. “The blockade is much the same as it always was,” he groused in a letter home. One year later, when he was serving off Charleston on USS Lodona in the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, his attitude hadn’t changed a bit.

In August 1861, while on duty at Alexandria,Virginia, he complained that Rebel privateers could “come and go as they please” with little interference from Union vessels. The Civil War was only four months old, but Union Navy officer Lewis H.West was quite sure the Federal blockade of Southern ports was inadequate.

The Union blockade of Rebel ports was porous, inadequate and easily penetrated throughout the entire war. How the Union Failed to Successfully Blockade the South Close

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