Come with Cotton, Leave with Cannon? The Bahamas & the Blockade During the Civil War

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Kevin C. Donovan

Scene looking towards the Pennsylvania Monument from Little Round Top, Gettysburg Battlefield

Come with Cotton, Leave with Cannon?

The Bahamas & the Blockade During the Civil War

Dr. Meade: “We have with us tonight, that most daring of all blockade runners whose fleet schooners, slipping past the Yankee guns have brought us here the very woolens and laces we wear tonight. I refer ladies and gentlemen, to that will-o'-the-wisp of the bounding main, none other than our friend from Charleston, Captain Rhett Butler.”

Gone with the Wind, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uKptBQ50cc at 1:07 – 1:36.

Viewers of the movie Gone with the Wind may remember the scene when, during a fancy-dress ball in Atlanta, Dr. Meade’s effusive praise for Rhett Butler reflected that scoundrel’s transformation of himself into a heroic blockade runner. Butler’s base for launching his efforts to slip “past the Yankee guns” was probably the Bahamas. Only 50 miles off the Florida coast, the then-British colony was ideally suited to play a key role in Confederate efforts to run the United States blockade of its own coast established during the Civil War.

The War brought enormous changes to the island. Fortune-seeking entrepreneurs or their agents descended to set up shop including one, future Confederate Treasury Secretary George Trenholm, who is purported to be the real-life inspiration for Rhett Butler. Hundreds came to sail the ships and otherwise share in the bounty. Confederate agents arrived to coordinate shipments. U.S. officials came to try and stop them. Local British imperial officers cast a wary eye on all.

Unprecedented amounts of gold flooded the local economy, bringing both benefits and ills. While business boomed, crime soared, to the extent that the island turned to importing additional police officers from London.

Amidst all this war-time activity, profit competed with patriotism, at least on the Confederate side. The obvious export coming out of the beleaguered South was that “white gold”—cotton, upon which the mills of Great Britan depended. Yet what would cotton be used to buy? The Confederacy needed weapons and other material of war, not “woolens and lace,” yet many blockade runners chose to ship what made the most money, and that might not be bullets, but bodices. It is no historical fiction that in the movie, Captain Butler is praised for bringing through the blockade “woolens and lace,” not cannon and rifles.

The story of the Bahamas and the Blockade is intriguing. To tell it, on October 8 the Roanoke Civil War Round Table will present Dr. Charles D. Ross, a Longwood University Professor, who is the author of Breaking the Blockade: The Bahamas during the Civil War (Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2021). In his presentation, “Breaking the Blockade: The Civil War in the Bahamas” Dr. Ross will explore with the audience how a tiny island had an outsized impact on a mighty war, and how that war impacted the island and its people. He might even discuss Captain Butler.

Date, Time & Location: Tuesday, October 8 (7:00 pm). Chapel of the Residents’ Center at Friendship, 397 Hershberger Road, Roanoke, VA. Admission is free (but becoming a Round Table member welcome).