“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.
