Question- How did northern manufactures make extra profits from supplying the union army ?
Answer- Lincoln’s cabinet was divided about whether to send provisions to the garrison. William Seward, the U.S. Secretary of State, favored withdrawal, as did Simon P. Cameron, the Secretary of War, and Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy. Relieving the fort, they argued, would require an army and a navy that the United States just did not have. Others disagreed. Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, and Montgomery Blair, the Postmaster General, thought that surrendering the fort would be treason, and any such action would dampen the morale of the many Unionists who lived in the slave-holding states. Others feared that withdrawal would be tantamount to official recognition of the Confederacy.
Lincoln concluded that if the Union troops evacuated Fort Sumter, the nation would be irrevocably split in two. At a cabinet meeting on March 28, 1861, he made the decision to send provisions to the Union garrison at the fort. A small flotilla of vessels loaded with supplies left Northern ports on April 5. When the ships arrived off the coast of South Carolina six days later, Beauregard gave Anderson a choice of immediately surrendering or facing bombardment. Anderson declined to surrender, and at 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, batteries fired on the fort.2 The cannonade continued through the following day, until Anderson agreed to a cease-fire. On April 14, Anderson and his men lowered the American flag, boarded the ships that had come to supply the fort, and headed north. Thus ended the first military engagement of the Civil War.
Even before the Confederate artillery fired the first shots of the Civil War, various proposals were circulating in Washington on how best to encourage the South to return to the Union. Winfield Scott, the General-in-Chief of the U.S. Army and a Virginian by birth, is credited with the proposal to blockade the Confederacy’s Atlantic and Gulf ports and then to take control of the Mississippi River. Such actions would prevent war materiel from coming into the Confederacy from abroad and would split the Confederacy in two. After the South stagnated commercially, it would then peacefully rejoin the Union, or so proponents believed. The plan was leaked to the press, where it was disparagingly referred to as the “boa-constrictor,” the “anaconda,” or “Scott’s Great Snake.”3 The press and the public wanted no part of it. Northern newspapers demanded the immediate conquest of Richmond and a speedy end to secession.
On April 15—one day after Fort Sumter surrendered—Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for the mobilization of 75,000 volunteers to suppress the rebellion. In the North, the proclamation generated widespread support and unity. In the South, four states responded to Lincoln’s call by seceding from the Union, and strong secession movements pressed the remaining four slave-holding states to follow their example.
Within the Lincoln Administration, debate ensued about whether to declare a blockade of the Confederacy. It was Jefferson Davis’s action that tipped the debate in favor of doing so. Two days after Lincoln’s call for volunteers to suppress the rebellion, Davis invited applications for “Letters of Marque” authorizing Confederate agents to seize and destroy American merchant ships. On April 19, Lincoln responded by declaring a blockade of Southern ports with the intent of preventing cotton, tobacco, and sugar from being exported and military equipment and supplies from coming into the South from abroad.4
Declaring a blockade was easy; enforcing it was another matter. The South had nine major ports and more than 3,500 miles of coastline, and it would be impossible for the North to prevent small ships from landing goods along thousands of bays, inlets, rivers, and islands. The Federal navy had only ninety ships at the beginning of the war, and more than half of these were outmoded sailing ships, many of them unseaworthy. As soon as Lincoln declared the blockade, the Navy Department recalled naval ships from foreign waters, purchased merchant ships, which were quickly converted into gunboats, and launched a major shipbuilding program. Within weeks, the United States had 150 ships ready for duty, and construction had begun on another 50 ships.
