Rebellion

1861

Those engaged in trade understood well enough that the matter reached beyond speeches and elections. Cotton, shipping, insurance, credit, tariffs, and foreign markets all stood tied to the question. A disruption of Southern ports would not fall upon the South alone, and it was decided that we would not risk a ship as valuable as the Pathfinder in Gulf hostilities, and so she sailed to Cuba early January.^⁠[1]

Cuba had become rich upon sugar in much the same way the Southern states had upon cotton. The island’s harbors were crowded with shipping from every maritime nation, and fortunes were made, as sugar moved outward with molasses and rum, feeding markets across Europe and the Americas.^⁠[2] 

Twelve days out the Pathfinder met the Brig Boomerang of Dundee. The Boomerang had met a succession of gales out of Newcastle, losing her stove bulwarks, and boats, stanchions and foretop sail, and many sails were split. Captain Sleeper supplied the ship, that was bound for New York with badly needed provisions and carried on toward Havana.^⁠[3]

Portland Press Herald, February 1, 1861: Arrived Havana January 20, Barque Pathfinder, Sleeper, Boston, 22 days.

Portland Press Herald, February 22: Pathfinder, 450 hogsheads capacity, to load sugars at Sagua for a port north of Hatteras at $5 per hogshead.

Portland Press Herald, February 26, 1861: Cleared Havana February 16, barque Pathfinder, Sleeper, Sagua, New York

On her return voyage, sailing in company with the schooner Abby Brackett, battled heavy Northeastern gales off Hatteras for seven days, putting her in New York on April 9th.

Come spring there wasn’t an epidemic of flu and Mercy let me in on a little secret she’d been carrying for some months. Another child would join our family come summer.

On the twelfth of April, the national crisis came to a head at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, when a small Federal garrison refused to surrender the fort to South Carolina authorities. When the rebels opened fire upon the fort, the question ceased to be one of speeches and resolutions. The country had entered into war.

Lincoln’s immediate call for troops made plain that the Government intended to preserve the Union by force, and with that, additional Southern states went out in turn. Ports upon which Northern merchants and shipowners had long depended suddenly stood upon uncertain footing, while the boys of Maine signed up for service in droves.^⁠[4]

One of the Union’s earliest wartime measures was the establishment of a naval blockade upon the Southern coast. Federal warships were stationed off the principal Confederate ports from Virginia to Texas with the intention of preventing cotton, tobacco, and other Southern exports from reaching foreign markets, while likewise restricting the importation of arms, manufactured goods, and supplies into the rebellious states.

To many inland, the blockade appeared a military operation, but those engaged in trade understood at once that it would alter the ordinary course of Atlantic commerce for an unforeseeable future. Ports long familiar to Northern captains suddenly stood closed. Freight rates shifted sharply, marine insurance rose, and vessels sailing near Southern waters did so with increased caution.

With the Southern states newly separated from the Union and possessing only the bare beginnings of a navy, the Confederate government turned quickly to privateering as a means of striking at Northern commerce upon the sea. Letters of marque were issued authorizing privately owned vessels to capture Union merchant ships and cargoes in the name of the Confederacy, with profits to be divided among owners, officers and crews. To men who made their living upon the water, the prospect carried echoes of an older age, when governments relied upon private ships in wartime.

Feeding Lincoln’s Army and the citizens of the north brought new demand for food. Prices rose, and  government contracts found their way into many a farmer’s purse.

Another baby girl joined our household when Mercy brought Edna into the world on June 25, 1861.

While sailing through the Bahama Channel upon her return from Cuba earlier that spring, the Pathfinder saw the signal lantern of a distressed ship, came alongside, and took off part of her deck load. In July, testimony given in a Federal court concerning the aftermath of a wrecking dispute involving the brig A.B. Moore suggested that the Pathfinder had been expected to assist in removing part of the stranded vessel’s cargo. Precisely what understanding had existed between the captains remained uncertain, though readers of the Bangor Weekly Courier were left with little doubt where suspicion had settled. Yet such matters at sea were often murkier than landsmen supposed. Upon dangerous coasts, especially among the reefs and shoals of the Bahamas, vessels in distress might accept aid from whatever ship first came near, and the line between lawful salvage, opportunistic wrecking, and outright plunder was not always clearly drawn in the moment. Much depended upon weather, urgency, verbal agreements made between captains, and later testimony given safely ashore long after the sea itself had swallowed the evidence.^⁠[5]

The early months of the rebellion were lived in a strange mixture of excitement, fear, and patriotism, together with a widespread belief that the uprising might soon be put down. Early enthusiasm dimmed after the disastrous Union defeat at Bull Run in July. Expectations of a brief campaign were dashed and replaced with the dread of a long, bloody war. Families began to understand that sons who had marched away would not return quickly—if they returned at all.

The Confederate use of privateers and commerce raiders became increasingly troublesome. A vessel built at great expense in Maine, and laden with the season’s trade, could in a matter of hours pass entirely into other hands. To those of us whose fortunes were tied to ships and cargoes, it was an unsettling thought that a voyage begun honestly enough might end with one’s property sold beneath another flag.

The crew and captain commonly found themselves prisoners as well, at least for a time. Sometimes they were paroled and set ashore; sometimes carried into a Southern port until exchanged.

By the autumn of ’61 it seemed scarcely a week passed without another report of some Northern merchantman taken, burned, or carried into a Southern port. Though the actual number was not large beside the vast trade of the coast, the effect upon men engaged in shipping was considerable, for ambiguity itself is costly at sea. Owners paid dearer insurance, captains sailed warier courses, and every strange sail sighted upon the horizon gave rise to uneasy speculation as to whether she came peaceably or under a letter of marque.

Along the Maine coast, waterfront talk turned increasingly toward blockade, privateering, and the dangers facing merchant shipping. Yet for every vessel taken, another must be built. The sound of ship carpenters’ mallets still rang steadily from the yards of the Maine coast. Though the Navy itself was beginning to turn toward iron and steam, Maine’s shipbuilders remained busy turning out wooden merchantmen for the nation’s trade, as they had done for generations.^⁠[6]

The Pathfinder sailed to South Thomaston in autumn. The Bahama channels and Caribbean passages, once regarded chiefly as ordinary commercial routes for sugar, molasses, and coffee, had taken on a different character. We decided to set the Pathfinders’ next voyage east so as to keep her out of confederate or privateering sights and Captain Snow took command of her.^⁠[7] She sailed from Thomaston to New York with ballast in her hold — something unheard of before the war.^⁠[8]

From New York she would carry almost any respectable freight that promised profit—flour, provisions, staves, tobacco, manufactured goods, or such mixed cargo as merchants could assemble as commerce adjusted itself to war. Many accustomed channels of trade had been disturbed, and owners were less particular than formerly so long as the freight paid reasonably and the ship kept moving. She was cleared to sail on October 18^th for Oporto, a major seaport in northern Portugal at the mouth of the Douro River on the Atlantic coast.^⁠[9]

It was an old commercial route tying New England to Europe and the Mediterranean world.

On the thirty-first of October the Pathfinder was spoken in latitude 42°20′, longitude 55°50′, well out upon the Atlantic crossings eastward of the Banks.^⁠[10] Such notices were closely watched, for once beyond the coast a ship might vanish from all knowledge until reaching her destination. A single spoken report at sea could quiet many anxious thoughts.

Two days later she was again spoken considerably farther to the northeastward, showing she had made good progress across the Atlantic. Such reports allowed us to judge not only a ship’s safety, but whether she was meeting favorable winds and making a proper passage.^⁠[11]

Through the autumn and winter the newspapers carried accounts of smaller but bitter fighting in places we had scarcely heard named before the war—Wilson’s Creek in Missouri, where General Lyon was killed; Ball’s Bluff upon the Potomac, where Union troops were driven against the river banks in confusion and many drowned attempting escape; and the hard fighting in the mountains of western Virginia and Kentucky, where both sides struggled for the railroads, rivers, and mountain passes that might decide control of the border country.

By the close of 1861, much of the early privateering had already begun to wane. Neutral ports grew less willing to receive captured prizes, the Federal blockade tightened steadily along the Southern coast, and Union warships hunted privateers with increasing vigor. Many who had first entered the trade in hopes of quick profit found the risks greater and the returns less certain than expected. Yet there was little to celebrate as more commissioned cruisers expressly built in secret in British yards to prey upon Northern State’s commerce took their place—swift raiders such as the Sumter, and later the Alabama,^⁠[12] whose depredations upon American shipping would be felt far beyond the close of the first year of the rebellion.

1862

In those war years a vessel might wander half the coast of Iberia before turning homeward again, gathering freight piecemeal where merchants offered it. Aye, my most profitable ship had sailed safely to Oporto, then Vigo Spain, giving me some satisfaction in a worrisome time. Our winter was unusually cold and snowy, making life harder than it ought to be.

When reports arrived in mid-February that our Federal forces under Grant had taken Fort Henry, on the eastern bank of the Tennessee river, and Fort Donelson upon the Cumberland River, our hopes renewed. Fighting at Fort Donelson was fierce and lasted for two horrible days. The surrender of an entire Confederate army in the region there, and Grant’s demand for “unconditional surrender” was repeated in nearly every paper. The rebellion had spread across a vast country, and too many men were already buried beneath it.

On February 24^th a gale slammed into all of New England leaving us in three feet of snow. Further south along the Georges Bank thirteen fishing schooners at anchor went down, killing 120 fisherman, leaving seventy widows and 140 fatherless children.

Meanwhile in the Far West great floods that began last December continued to wreak havoc. News of weather and war filled the newspapers and sometimes a mention of the Pathfinder. She had made port at Oporto for wine and fruit, then to the Bay of St. Ubes for salt, arriving in New York with her hold full on April 8^th.

When New Orleans fell in the spring of 1862, it changed more than the military map. Any man engaged in trade understood at once what it meant. The Mississippi was the great funnel of the continent, and New Orleans its gate. Cotton, sugar, flour, pork, lumber, and a thousand lesser cargoes moved through that city. Whoever held it held one of the chief arteries of American commerce.

News of Farragut running the forts spread quickly through the northern papers. Sailors and merchants followed it closely because it was as much a naval and commercial triumph as a military one. The Confederacy had depended upon the river system and Gulf trade, then suddenly the Union flag flew over the South’s largest port.

The church bells were still ringing along the Maine coast, when men involved in merchant shipping began thinking of trade reopening. With New Orleans again under Federal control, many hoped the mills might soon begin running more steadily once more, yet no one imagined matters had would quickly return to normal. The Mississippi river would remain dangerous and so, when the Pathfinder sailed again, with Captain Robinson, master, in early May, she sailed to Aspinwall. Panama—the very place that I had sailed from when I’d returned from California almost ten years before.^⁠[13]

Spring gave us little respite from winter, so much so that we had to hold off planting. A June frost wiped out most of those crops. I had to pin my hopes on the Pathfinder, and with relief early July, read that she arrived in Aspinwall and sailed for Cienfuegos on the Island of Cuba by the middle of June.

Through the spring and summer of 1862, the papers carried daily reports from Virginia. First came news that the Federal army had advanced upon Yorktown and driven the Rebels steadily back toward Richmond. There followed reports from Williamsburg and Fair Oaks, each battle spoken of at first as though the war might soon be brought to a conclusion. Maine regiments bore their part in the campaign, and many families followed the dispatches anxiously, searching casualty lists and letters for familiar names. Yet as the army moved into the low country along the Chickahominy River, the accounts from soldiers grew darker in tone. Men wrote of mud deep enough to mire wagons to their axles, fever-ridden camps, flooded roads, and long marches beneath suffocating heat. Then came the terrible fighting of the Seven Days around Richmond, and in the end the Federal army failed to wrest the Confederate capital from Southern control.

The Pathfinder arrived in Cuba June 27^th and then New York on July 29^th—another journey completed.^⁠[14]

On August 14^th, Mercy bore us a son, the first God had seen fit to give us. I snuggled that little fellow on my chest  in the evening, imaging all the adventures that lay ahead of us. When he sighed, I sighed and when he squeaked like newborn babies do, I smiled.

The hard frost came early that autumn. Farmers, and those who depended upon them for food, were hard-pressed—especially at a time when our soldiers needed provisions.

In the first days of autumn the Portland Press Herald’s shipping list included news of the Pathfinder—she was moving up the Mississippi River toward New Orleans, arriving there on September 23^rd.^⁠[15]

Our tiny baby boy died before the autumn frosts had settled hard upon the fields.^⁠[16] It was Annie Crie’s first close brush with grief. She was seven years old when baby Harvey came into the world and passed from it again—old enough to understand the finality of death when his little casket was carried out and laid into the ground. Millie, only five, cried because Annie did, while Edna, still a babe herself, offered some comfort to Mercy simply by being held close. The house remained subdued for many weeks afterward.

While we saw no battles in Maine, we felt the weight of the war all the same. Our womenfolk did what they could for the boys of Maine—sewing quilts and blankets, rolling bandages, knitting socks and mittens, gathering lint for hospitals, and holding church fairs and collections to send comforts southward to the camps.

I think many Northern men who had first enlisted to preserve the Union now found themselves confronting larger questions than they had expected when the war began. Mr. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation,^⁠[17] made plain what had already been growing evident for some time—that slavery itself could not remain untouched by so vast a conflict. Some welcomed the measure wholeheartedly, while others feared the consequences. Yet after all the blood already shed, it had become difficult to believe the country could ever again return wholly to the old order of things. If slavery was left intact, there could be no lasting peace.

Early December, a cold front sweeping eastward from the Great Lakes struck our soldiers in Virginia with icy rain that turned to snow before nightfall. The storm fell with such fury that the 5th Maine Infantry Regiment wrote home joking that Maine weather had followed them to Dixie—though it was no laughing matter.

By the close of 1862, Maine regiments were scattered across the war—some recovering from the slaughter at Antietam that September, others enduring miserable winter camps in Virginia after the disastrous Union defeat at Fredericksburg in December. Thousands of men froze through bitter nights amid mud, snow, and inadequate shelter. Back home, families followed the casualty lists anxiously, reading each new report from the Army of the Potomac with dread.

Confidence no longer came so easily as it had at the beginning of the war. Men still spoke boldly in newspapers and public meetings, yet beneath it lingered an uneasiness difficult to ignore. Southern armies had not collapsed as many first imagined, and the casualty lists arriving northward grew longer with each passing month. There remained no shortage of patriotism in Maine, but by winter it had become tempered by grief and apprehension. Too many families had now buried sons or waited anxiously upon letters from hospitals and camps for anyone to speak lightly of the war any longer.

NOTES

¹ Boston Eventing Transcript, January 3, 1861: Sailed yesterday afternoon, wind W, Barques Pathfinder, Grace, Hannah Thornton; Brig New World

² Conditions on many Cuban sugar plantations in the mid-19th century were notoriously brutal. Enslaved laborers worked long hours cutting cane and tending mills in extreme heat under harsh discipline. Mortality rates were high, particularly among Africans recently trafficked to Cuba. Historians have noted that plantation owners often calculated labor in terms of replacement through the Atlantic slave trade rather than long-term survival. Exact life expectancy figures varied widely by region, age, and plantation conditions, but due to overwork, disease, malnutrition, and physical punishment, the average life expectancy was 7-8 years after arrival. Cuba wouldn’t abolish slavery until 1886.

³ New York Daily Herald, January 25, 1861: Bark Pathfinder (of Thomaston), Sleeper, Sagua, 11 days, with sugar to Snow & Burgess, sailed in company with schr "Abby Brackett," for New York. Has been 7 days N of Hatteras, with heavy NE gales; Boston Evening Transcript, April 11, 1861: Bark Pathfinder, Sleeper, Sagus, 11 days, with sugar to Snow & Burgess sailed in company with Abby Brackett: Arrived New York April 9th, barque Pathfinder, Sleeper, Sagua.

⁴ Maine contributed more than 70,000 soldiers to the Union cause during the Civil War—one of the highest enlistment rates per capita of any Northern state.

⁵ Bangor Daily Whig and Courier, July 1; July 2, 1861 p. 2; Bangor Weekly Courier, July 9, 1861, p 1

⁶ During the war Maine became the second-largest shipbuilding state in the United States, surpassed only by Massachusetts. Along the central Maine coast. Cyrus Eaton recorded that more than forty vessels were launched at Thomaston alone between 1861 and 1865, with many additional ships built in nearby Rockland yards. See Cyrus Eaton's History of Thomaston, Rockland, and South Thomaston, Maine (1865).

⁷ Shipping notices in late 1861 identify the Pathfinder under the command of “Snow,” though the master’s given name is not specified. This was likely Captain Isaac Snow (1821–1900) of Thomaston and South Thomaston, an active merchant captain of the appropriate age and region. Another possibility is the older and more widely known Captain Israel Snow (1801–1875) of Rockland, who later was the founder of Snow’s Point Shipyard.

⁸ The New York Times, October 5, 1861: Bark Pathfinder, Sleeper, Thomaston 4 days, in ballast to master.

⁹ New York Daily Herald, October, 19, 1861: Cleared New York, October 18, bark Pathfinder, Snow, Oporto, RW Trundy.

¹⁰ New York Daily Herald, November 12, 1861: Spoken: Bark Pathfinder, hence for Oporto, October 31, lat 42 20, lon 55 50]

¹¹ Philadelphia Inquirer, November 15, 1861: Arrived ship Westmorland, 28 days from Liverpool, Nov 2, lat 46 20 lon 51 50 hailed bark Pathfinder steering East; Portland Press Herald, November 18, 1861: Spoken—November 2, lat 45 20, lon 51 50, barque Pathfinder from New York to Oporto]

¹² The Confederate commerce raider CSS Alabama, commanded by Captain Raphael Semmes, captured or destroyed more than sixty Union merchant vessels between 1862 and 1864, contributing to the decline of the American merchant fleet and increasing demand for new ships in Northern shipyards.

¹³ Boston Evening Transcript, May 13, 1862: Cleared at Elizabethport,  May 9^th, barque Pathfinder, Robinson, Aspinwall

¹⁴ Portland Press Herald,  July 15, 1862: Ar at Cienfuegos June 27th, Pathfinder, Robinson, Aspinwall; Portland Press Herald, July 30, 1862: Port of New York—Ar July 28, Barque Pathfinder, Robinson, Cienfuegos.]

¹⁵ Portland Press Herald, September 30, 1862: New Orleans—In the river 20th, bound up, barques Gen Warren, Hinks, from Boston; Pathfinder, Robinson from do; October 1, 1862: New Orleans—Going up the Mississippi barques Pathfinder, and Mary Bentley from New York; The Era, October 5, 1862: List of Vessels in Port—Barks—Pathfinder, Robinson; Portland Press Herald, October, 7, 1862: New Orleans— arrived September 23, Pathfinder, Robinson, N York; Times Picayune, October 18, 1862: Advertisement: New York. For New York—Orleans Line—The A1 fast sailing bark PATHFINDER, Robinson, master, is now loading and will have quick dispatch. For balance of freight apply to GEO A. FOSDICK 48 Naches St.]

¹⁶ Harvey Graves, born August 14 and died October 10, 1862. While no town or newspaper record of his death has been found, the dates were preserved in family records.

¹⁷ Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, announced preliminarily in September 1862 and taking effect January 1, 1863, declared enslaved people in Confederate-held territory to be free. Though limited in immediate practical effect, it reshaped the Civil War politically and morally, while also discouraging Britain and France from openly supporting the Confederacy.]