Benjamnin F. Butler, Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin Butler

[965] at an enormous cost, and maintain for four years, blockading fleets whose business was simply to prevent the running in and out of Confederate ports of vessels loaded with arms, ammunition, provisions, and every class of smuggled goods. As I have stated before, Southern cotton had advanced from ten cents a pound at the beginning of the war to a dollar a pound. It must be had in England or the laborers of her cotton manufactories would starve. The steamship builders of Scotland and England supplied large numbers of blockade runners of the finest construction, and of the greatest speed, so as to elude and escape our slower, old-fashioned naval vessels.

All these smuggled supplies substantially were paid for in cotton, and one half of all the cotton shipped abroad was by the act of the Confederate Congress to be devoted to the purchase of Confederate governmental supplies.

There is a curious fact that I desire to state in regard to blockade running and the capture of blockade runners: An examination of the captures will show a much larger number of the higher class blockade runners captured when coming out again from blockaded ports than when running in. A Scotch runner could be loaded up with supplies of various sorts and run in, we will say at Wilmington, eluding our blockaders by its swiftness. Because of the necessities of the South the cargo of supplies was sold to them at enormous prices and paid for in cotton at ten or fifteen cents a pound, with which the vessel was then loaded to its utmost capacity. That cotton if brought to Europe or a Northern port would bring a dollar a pound, so that the cargo was exceedingly valuable — very much more valuable than the cargo brought in. Every ton would be worth say $2,000, or a hundred tons $200,000, and proportionally more for larger vessels, and that would be the worth of the capture in proportion if the blockade runner was caught coming out and sent as prize to New York. Now one half of the proceeds was always paid to the capturing crew and fleet. But vessels captured when they were running in with an ordinary cargo on board, and sent to New York, would pay not much more, when sold at auction, than the legal costs and expenses of the transaction. Thus our system of prize money was in fact a bribe to every one of our blockading vessels of many, many dollars to let all blockade runners in with their supplies and catch them when they came out with their cargo of cotton.