Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog

Riverboats at the cotton docks at Mobile, c. 1900. The scene in 1863 would not have been much different, when boats like these were pressed into service as blockade runners. LoC image.

In the comments on my recent post about the river steamboat William Bagaley attempting to run the blockade, a regular reader asks:

That’s a great question, and it underscores that in the last post I neglected to explain very well why Bagaley would be considered an unlikely candidate for a runner in the first place. Let me see if I can do that now.

Riverboats like William Bagaley were, by the 1850s, a very distinct and specialized type of vessel, optimized for work on the Western Rivers   (i.e., the Mississippi, Ohio, Missouri and their tributaries). In the arrangement of their machinery, and particularly their hull construction, they were very ill-suited to make long passages on open water. They were generally of very shallow draft, and their hulls were of light construction, braced with wooden trusses and iron rods. The main deck of a fully-loaded riverboat was often barely above the level of the water. Western Rivers boats were generally built without external keels and, having lots of superstructure, would be prone to drift off to leeward in a strong wind. They could manage well enough on a calm day with a flat sea, but anything more unsettled than that could be a serious problem.

Not that riverboats didn’t ever make a passage in the open Gulf of Mexico; many of them did make relatively short runs along the coast. The large majority of the 200+ steamboats that operated in Texas on the Sabine, Neches, Trinity, Brazos and Rio Grande had been built on the Ohio or Mississippi, and made the transit to Texas from the mouth of the Mississippi through the Gulf of Mexico. But those were relatively short runs, and generally in sight of land. It’s a whole different thing, in my view, to set out on a three- or four-day passage across the Gulf from Mobile to Havana or another port in Cuba.

Fuel is another problem. Riverboats in the Deep South generally burned cordwood, which is enormously bulky. Boats generally stopped to wood at least daily, if not more frequently. Boats sometimes towed wood barges along behind them, or lashed alongside, but that would severely limit their speed, and doesn’t seem to have been done in this case. Carrying four days’ fuel would have taken up a LOT of space that otherwise might have been used for an outbound cargo. And it had to be enough fuel for the whole trip, since (unlike more conventional, seagoing steamers), these riverboats didn’t carry a rudimentary sail plan that could be used to help them get by when the wood started running low.

So, yeah, it’s just a little bit nuts to try something like this with a riverboat. But the fact that there was a fairly large-scale, coordinated effort to use riverboats in this way speaks both to the urgency of Confederate government officials in wanting to establish a viable blockade-running system out of Mobile, and a willingness on the part of boat owners, whose vessels had been largely idled by the war and the near-elimination of maritime trade in the Gulf of Mexico, to try just about anything to turn their fortunes around.

Here’s how Stephen Wise describes this effort in Lifeline of the Confederacy (170-72):

We know what became of Wiliam Bagaley and James Battle; they were captured on their first run out of Mobile for Havana. What about the others?

Alice Vivian was a 175-foot-long Alabama River sidewheel packet, built at New Albany, Indiana in 1856. In 1859 she was running a regular mail packet service between New Orleans and Memphis (right). She ran out of Mobile the first time around June 12, 1863, and returned safely from Havana around July 15. She was captured on her second run out of Mobile on August 16, 1863, by U.S.S De Soto and sold at Key West for $237,300.83 — almost all of which must have been for her cargo. Three attempts at the blockade, two successful.

Crescent was a 146-foot sidewheel steamer renamed Nita for the purposes of blockade-running. She made two successful runs out of Mobile to Havana, in April and June 1863, but was captured by De Soto on August 17, 1863 while on her second return voyage to Mobile. Four attempts at the blockade, three successful.

Planter — not to be confused with the steamboat Planter stolen by pilot Robert Smalls at Charleston in 1862 — was a 156-foot sidewheeler built at Wheeling, (West) Virginia in 1860. She ran out of Mobile in mid-July 1863, and was captured on July 15 by U.S.S. Lackawana. She was sold by the prize court to the U.S.  Quartermaster Department, and sold again to civilian interests in 1866.One attempt, captured.

 Warrior was a 130-foor-long sidewheeler built at Mobile in 1857. She was captured by U.S.S. Gertrude on her first attempt to run out of Mobile, on August 17, 1863.One attempt, captured.

So out of these seven vessels (including Wiliam Bagaley and James Battle), only two — Alice Vivian and Crescent — successfully made a complete, round voyage (one each), Mobile-Havana-Mobile. Five were captured on their first run out. It’s a terrible record, particularly for that period of the war. The seven ships together made twelve one-way attempts to pass through the Yankee blockade, only five of which were successful (about 42%). Marcus Price, the historian who tallied up attempts by blockade runners throughout the war, calculated that during 1863 in the Gulf of Mexico, steamers made 99 attempts at the blockade, of which 73 were successful. On any given run, three out of four typically got through. In fact, the actual odds were probably better than that for the others, given that Price’s totals include these sad-sack cases out of Mobile.

The lesson, I suppose, is that riverboats make terrible blockade runners. Make a note.

___________