Showing posts with label William H. C. Whiting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label William H. C. Whiting. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 11, 2025

Nassau Bacon – from Ohio

 

      “We are eating new beautiful onions from Nassau,” Charles Blackford wrote in June 1864. Blackford was Longstreet’s assistant judge advocate.  Blackford’s letter home about the onions is a little more revealing concerning foodstuffs in the ANV in the spring and summer of 1864. He continues: “With our onions we have bacon cured in Ohio and shipped to Nassau to be sent to us by blockade runners.” It is well known that by 1864, most foodstuffs for the Army of Northern Virginia were coming from Nassau on blockade runners and into the port at Wilmington.[1]

   Almost everyone is familiar with the role of the blockade in supplying the Confederate armies. Agents from various states and the Confederate government worked out trade deals – either cotton, or promises of future cotton – in exchange for munitions of war, medicines, and foodstuffs. These items were then loaded onto ships, making their way to the ports in the Bahamas, largely Nassau. The items were then transferred to shallow-draft blockade runners and steamed into various Southern ports. By 1864, it was really only the port of Wilmington that was still open and supplying Lee’s army in Virginia. 

The Advance, a North Carolina blockade runner.

   “Nassau bacon is a term frequently used during the war. James C. Elliott, 56th North Carolina, recalled that in 1864 “Our food was miserable—musty meal and rancid Nassau bacon. Our bread was cooked at the wagon yard on canal, west side of Petersburg.”[2] Another Tar Heel reminisced that “old soldiers will all remember Nassau bacon, a very gross, fat, porky substance which ran the blockade at Wilmington and was distributed among Lee’s veterans as bacon.”[3] Moxley Sorrel, also on Longstreet’s staff before being promoted to brigadier general in the fall of 1864, thought that some “bacon from Nassau was coming through the blockade, and it would not be incredible for the blockading fleet to allow it to come through in hope of poisoning us.”[4]

   But what of Blackford’s claim – that his bacon had been cured in Ohio and sent to Nassau? Hamilton Cochran, writing in Blockade Runners of the Confederacy  in 1958, explains how the process worked. Brokers, or “bacon buyers,” would visit hog farms in New York and other states “and offer hog raisers far more per pound for their hams and bacon than the United States government or civilian merchants were offering.” After the brokers bought large quantities of hog meat, it was  “salted and shipped out of New York or Philadelphia to Bermuda or Nassau. . .  Upon arrival in the islands, the hams and bacon were sold at quadruple their cost to agents of the Confederate States Quartermaster Corps, then shipped to hungry soldiers on the firing line.”[5] Eugene R. Dattel notes that at times, the meat shipped out of Boston or New York was sent to Canada first, then on to Bermuda or Nassau. The meat was also sent to Liverpool, unloaded and then reshipped to the Caribbean.  By January 1865, over eight million pounds of meat had arrived in the port of Wilmington alone. “This was extremely good business for Northern farmers whose sons were dying on Southern battlefields,” Dattel notes.[6]

   This round-about way of importing bacon (and other items) produced in the North to feed Confederate armies was not really a secret. Major General W.H.C. Whiting wrote in June 1863 that many of the blockade runners in Wilmington were “mostly filled with Yankee goods.” Whiting arrested the crew of one steamer, the Arabian, which had bypassed Nassau and sailed directly from New York.[7] War Clerk John Jones noted in October 1864 that Beverly Tucker was in Canada, contracting with a New York firm, to trade bacon for cotton “pound for pound.” The Secretary of the War had authorized the negotiations.[8] Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, James Seddon and others all knew about this operation. And it was not just limited to Wilmington. The trade was so heavy in eastern North Carolina and eastern Virginia that in January 1864 the Subsistence Department needed 600 to 800 bales of cotton each week, delivered to Weldon.[9] Writing after the war, Robert Tannahill told former Commissary General Lucius B. Northrop that “there is no telling the amount of supplies we could have gotten from the North in the way of exchange for cotton.”[10]

   Even Northern officials knew of the trade, much of which originated in New York. The American consul at St. George’s Bermuda, wrote to Secretary of State William H. Seward in June 1863: “I beg to apprise you that large quantities of mdse [merchandise] are shipped from N. Yk  [New York] to these islds and transshipped o/board steamers for blockaded ports. There is no doubt that Major Walker who styles himself Confederate States Agent, is receiving goods ex N. Yk by almost every vessel under various marks. A large portion of the goods shipped from here to Wilmington are from N. Yk.”[11] The trade continued, even after the capture of the Cape Fear River and Wilmington. On March 8, 1865, U.S. Grant telegraphed Secretary of War Edwin Stanton that “We have supplies going out by Norfolk to the rebel army stopped, but information received shows that large amounts still go by way of the Blackwater.” In another telegraph, Grant told Stanton that spies or informants in Richmond “send word that Tobacco is being exchanged for Bacon…” Lincoln gave Grant the authority on March 10 to suspend all trade permits and licenses, regardless of whoever issued them, within the state of Virginia, with a few exceptions.[12]

   If you would like to learn more about food and the Confederate Army in Virginia, check out my book, Feeding Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, here.

 

[1] Blackford & Blackford, Letters from Lee's Army, 252.

[2] Elliott,  The Southern Soldier Boy, 26.

[3] Clark, ed., Histories of the Several Regiments and Battalions, 4:53.

[4] Sorrel, Recollections of a Confederate Staff Officer, 281.

[5] Cochran, Blockade Runners of the Confederacy, 47.

[6] Dattel, Cotton and Race in the Making of America, 198.

[7] Jones, A Rebel War Clerk, 1:319, 321.

[8] Jones,  A Rebel War Clerk, 2:290.

[9] OR, Series 1, XLVI, pt. 2, 1104; Goff, Confederate Supply, 167.

[10] quoted in Goff, Confederate Supply, 168.

[11] “American Consular Records-Civil War Period.” Pt. 1, Bermuda Historical Quarterly, 17 (Summer 1961) 66.

[12] Basler, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 8:342-4.

Thursday, July 25, 2019

Purging the Army of Northern Virginia


   A couple of weeks ago, while filming a short interview with Chris Mackowski of Emerging Civil War (we were at the American Battlefield Trust's Teacher's Institute), I made a comment about the purging of officers from the Army of Northern Virginia after Robert E. Lee was assigned command in June 1862. I had never really counted until today, but fifteen men who were brigade or division commanders during the Seven Days battles were not with the Army of Northern Virginia when it surrendered at Appomattox Court House in April 1865 (this excludes those who died or were killed in action). Did Lee have these officers transferred on purpose? A good question.

Here are the fifteen and what became of them:

John B. Magruder - sent to Trans-Mississippi Department after the Seven Days.

William H. C. Whiting - reassigned to the Military District of Wilmington. Died as a prisoner of war in New York on March 10, 1865.

Richard Taylor - transferred to the Trans-Mississippi Department July 1862.

Bradley Johnson - with the Army of Northern Virginia until 1864, when consolidation removed him from command. Finished the war as commander at Salisbury Prison.

D. H. Hill - shuffled back to North Carolina in February 1863. Commanded a corps in the Army of Tennessee during the Chickamauga-Chattanooga Campaign. Had further run-ins with high command, but finished the war commanding a corps at Bentonville.

Boswell Ripley - bounced around between South Carolina and the Army of Northern Virginia. Commanded a division in the Army of Tennessee during the battle of Bentonville.

Robert Toombs - resigned March 4, 1863, after not getting the promotion he thought he deserved. Later served in the Georgia militia.

Howell Cobb - in November 1862, transferred in November 1862 to the District of Middle Florida. Later in the Georgia Militia.

Stephen D. Lee - November-December of 1862 transferred to Department of Mississippi and East Louisiana. In mid-1864 was a corps commander in the Army of Tennessee.

Roger Pryor - brigade was broken apart in the spring of 1863 and Pryor resigned.

William S. Featherston - transferred to Vicksburg in early 1863, and later commanded a brigade in the Army of Tennessee

Ambrose R. Wright - wounded in 1864, and transferred to Department of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.

John G. Walker - transferred to the Trans-Mississippi department after the Maryland campaign.

Benjamin Hunger - relieved of field duty July 12, 1862, and spent most of the war as an inspector of artillery in the Trans-Mississippi department.

Theophilus Holmes - transferred to Trans-Mississippi department July 30, 1862.

Did Lee have some of these men transferred to get them out of his hair? All four most senior major generals in the army when Lee took command were soon elsewhere. While Margruder did an outstanding job fooling McClellan at Yorktown, there were numerous complaints leveled at him following the Seven Days battles, mostly for being drunk. He was very quickly assigned to the Trans-Mississippi Department, but on returning to Richmond to answer the rumors against him, he leveled charges against Lt. Col. R.H. Chilton of Robert E. Lee's staff. That surely did not help his cause.

William Whiting's feud was with Jefferson Davis They had butted heads in late 1861, declining command of a Mississippi brigade. Whiting was gone on sick leave, and when he returned, found his division under the command of John B. Hood.

Benjamin Huger feuded with Joseph E. Johnston over the Seven Pines battle. Johnston claimed that Huger was not ready to attack when ordered. Huger wanted charges preferred. Richard Taylor wrote that "Magruder is charged with incompetency and loss of head, and much blame attached to both his and Huger's slowness." (Davis, The Confederate General, vol. 3, 129)

Lee might have been trying to get rid of Theophilus Holmes prior to the Seven Days battles. There is a letter from Lee to the Secretary of War, dated June 19, 1862, stating that Lee "recommended General Huger's orders to be issued from the Adjutant and Inspector General's Office." (OR 1, vol. 11, pt. 3, 609.)

Lee, of course, was remaking the Army of Northern Virginia. He wanted younger,  more aggressive commanders to take charge of his divisions.