Blockade-Running

During the Civil War, steam-powered blockade-runners, usually British, made 1,300 attempts to enter Southern ports with vital supplies, and more than 1,000 trips succeeded. The most successful vessels were specially built for the trade as stealthy, steam-powered, shallow-draft, low-profile, camouflaged gray phantoms. Entering the Cape Fear below Wilmington was difficult because U.S. Navy blockaders, dangerous coastal waters, and shoals thwarted many attempts, and wrecks of 34 blockade-runners remain underwater around the greater Wilmington coastal area. The 268-foot steamship Robert E. Lee, built in Scotland in 1860, made at least seven round trips into Wilmington before being captured off North Carolina and joining the Union Navy as a blockader. The steel-hulled Colonel Lamb, built in Liverpool, England, in 1864 and 280 feet long, was one of the largest blockade-runners of the war but made only two trips into Wilmington before Fort Fisher fell. In October 1864, the brand-new Condor, commanded by a disguised British naval captain, reached New Inlet; drawing only 7 feet of water, it ran toward Fort Fisher at the edge of the surf before turning to avoid the remains of a wrecked blockade-runner and running hard aground. Confederate spy Rose O’Neal Greenhow was aboard the Condor with her daughter, and when she insisted on being put ashore with several thousand dollars in gold coins, some allegedly sewn into her dress, the small lifeboat capsized in high seas and heavy surf and she drowned; her body was buried in Wilmington.

North Carolina · United States