Little noticed in the Union press at the time, an unknown number of ships in the South also flagged out. Indeed, that aspect of the topic has not been widely discussed in the voluminous historical literature regarding the Civil War and life in the Confederacy. In New Orleans, a cooperative marketing arrangement led by Texas shipowner Charles Morgan established a scheme in which ships would sail halfway to France under the Confederate flag and then would be reflagged and enter French ports under the FrenchTricolor.17 Thereafter, they remained under the French flag. The blockade-running steamer Tennessee, when captured in the New Orleans harbor, “had a French flag flying.”18
When Union forces took New Orleans, they discovered a number of French-flagged ships at the dock. Some were no doubt legitimately French-owned and -registered ships, but an unknown number may have been reflagged Confederate-owned ships. Moving up the Mississippi River, Union forces often found French flags flying on ships, which “from build and register they were not entitled to.” From the scattered accounts, it was unclear how many of the schooners and other vessels flying French flags on the river had been officially transferred to French registry and how many were simply flying the flag in hopes that their vessel might escape destruction or confiscation.19
In Louisiana, along the Mississippi River, Union officers sometimes reported French flags even over churches and homes along the shore. Although Union officers thought such flags might have been intended for protection, it is possible that the Tricolor was adopted by some Confederates as an emblem of their rebellion, echoing the French revolutionary flag, or that local French-descended families sought to stress their continuing affiliation with their ancestral home.
The French Tricolor’s resemblance when furled to the three-striped Confederate flag led to several episodes in which Union officers ordered their men to fire on a locale and then later apologized for the action upon discovering the flag was French, not Confederate. One officer noted that it was inappropriate to fly a foreign national flag over private property on land, although he admitted that had he known the flag was French, he would have refrained from attack.20
Many blockade-runner ships owned by Confederate entrepreneurs, mostly built in Britain, were legitimately and originally flagged in the United Kingdom and thus were not part of the flagging-out story. However, when U.S.-registered ships sought to engage in blockade-running into the Confederacy, they would sometimes adopt new flags. Even though records are fragmentary, it appears that some, perhaps numerous, Confederate ships reflagged under the British flag to avoid capture on the high seas.
However, whatever their flag, all ships would be subject to detention at the blockade line. In July 1863 a Union officer detained four “secession vessels,” three of which had been reflagged through the British consul in Galveston. The ships were the three-masted Ponchartrain and the Joseph Buckhart, Cecilia, and Lena. According to another report, a Charleston shipowner reflagged his whole fleet in Britain.21
Lasting Effect of Civil War Transfers
In 1866 Secretary of the Treasury Hugh McCulloch clearly did not include the flagging-out of numerous ships from the South to French and British flags in his tally of 1,061 ships transferred to other registries.22 Not only was the information from the Confederacy difficult to obtain, but in the immediate postwar period, Congress and the administration were more concerned with the decline in U.S. shipping engaged in international commerce than in the coastwise vessels that had previously dominated Southern fleets. Before the war began, the vast majority of sailing ships and steamers engaged in transatlantic trade were home-ported in the North, while the numerous shallow-draft steamers and small schooners based in Southern ports most often engaged in riverine and coastal transport. Thus, many of the transfers of Southern vessels to French or British registry probably had little impact on the postwar position of the United States in the competition for the international carrying trade.
On the other hand, even as the flagging-out of Northern commercial ships to avoid cruiser depredation flourished, some Northern observers feared that the practice would result in a lasting decline in the U.S. merchant marine, removing U.S. ships from the lucrative transatlantic trade and the commercial carrying trade between foreign ports. Even before the war ended, some maritime writers had predicted that the effect would be lasting and deleterious. One Journal of Commerce commentator noted, “It must be evident that the fear of depredations on our commerce, by the Confederates and privateers, has driven a large part of our foreign trade to neutral vessels.”23
Some accused the British of perfidious conduct. After all, several of the Confederate cruisers, in particular the Alabama, Rappahanock, Shenandoah, and Georgia, had been built in British yards, and most of the merchant ships transferred out were transferred to British registry. If it had not been for U.S. representatives, including U.S. minister to Britain Charles Francis Adams, still other, more powerful British-built ships, the Laird Rams, would have entered Confederate service. These ships were planned not to be blockade-runners or high-seas cruisers but rather to provide the weaponry to break the blockade. The British maritime support of the Confederacy via provision of warships and a thriving trade with blockade-runners only heightened the Union government’s resentment of the British. In this context, the permanent transfer of numerous previously U.S.-registered merchant ships could readily be viewed as part of a British scheme to dominate the world’s ocean trade.
In the war’s immediate aftermath, some Republican leaders saw the British construction of raiders and the transfer of American merchant ships to British flags as part of a larger British plan to destroy the U.S. fleet in the long term. President Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor, who was noted for making impolitic remarks, made such an accusation in his 1865 State of the Union address:
The materials of war for the insurgent States were furnished, in a great measure, from the workshops of Great Britain, and British ships, manned by British subjects and prepared for receiving British armaments, sallied from the ports of Great Britain to make war on American commerce under the shelter of a commission from the insurgent States. These ships, having once escaped from British ports, ever afterwards entered them in every part of the world to refit, and so to renew their depredations. The consequences of this conduct were most disastrous to the States then in rebellion, increasing their desolation and misery by the prolongation of our civil contest. It had, moreover, the effect, to a great extent, to drive the American flag from the sea, and to transfer much of our shipping and our commerce to the very power whose subjects had created the necessity for such a change.24
In the immediate postwar period, the matter of interpretation soon surfaced. On the one hand, some political leaders, like Andrew Johnson, continued to blame the American merchant fleet’s decline on both the British outfitting of cruisers and the practice of flagging-out. Under the law, a U.S. ship that had transferred to another flag was ineligible to reregister under the U.S. flag. When individual shipowners sought permission to reflag their vessels in the United States by special act of Congress, opponents voted down such measures. For example, in 1869, when the owners of the Agra sought congressional dispensation, Senator James Warren Nye of Nevada strongly opposed the measure. The Boston Daily Advertiser, however, thought such re-registry would be a good idea, even though transfer-out had “a bad taste.” After all, the editorialist opined, the problem grew out of the Union’s failure to protect its shipping.25
Together with the restriction on reflagging in the United States once registered abroad, only U.S.-built ships could register in the United States. Both of these legal factors—the prohibition on return from foreign registry and the requirement of U.S. construction—no doubt contributed to U.S. shipping’s inability to recover after the Civil War.26 The raw statistics suggested that something had happened in the 1860s to reverse the growth of the U.S. merchant marine and send it into decline, as shown in Table 1.