Running the Blockade A Personal Narrative of Adventures, Risks, and Escapes During the American Civil War — A Closer Reading

A Community of Risk-Takers

The excerpts paint a picture of a tight-knit circle of blockade runners based in Nassau. Taylor names numerous companions—Hobart Pasha, Hugh Burgoyne, Hewett, Arthur Doering—and recounts their fates with a mixture of fondness and melancholy. Doering, one of his pursers, is described as having “persistently bad luck,” captured twice, wrecked once, and chased back once. Taylor’s black major-domo, Frankston, provides a moment of comic relief when he explains that other men have taken all of Taylor’s shirts. These details ground the narrative in a specific social world, where personal belongings become communal property and where the line between work and friendship blurs. The author’s memory of “jovial but hard-working days of 'camaraderie'” is tempered by the acknowledgment that many of those friends have since died, some in the war, others later in life.

The Mechanics of Evasion

Taylor’s account includes technical details about the vessels used for blockade running. He notes that Hobart Pasha commanded a “smart little twin screw-steamer called the Don,” one of the first twin propeller steamers ever built. The Don made several successful runs under the assumed name “Captain Roberts” before being captured after a long chase. Taylor also mentions that Burgoyne, though brave, was not a successful runner, making only two or three trips. These observations suggest that the narrative contains specific information about ship design, speed, and the cat-and-mouse tactics employed to evade Union patrols. The introduction by Corbett underscores the strategic value of such firsthand knowledge, arguing that Taylor’s record is “perhaps the fullest contribution to the subject that as yet exists.”

Loss and Retrospection

A recurring note in the excerpts is the author’s awareness of mortality. Taylor lists friends who have died—Vizitelly, whose bones lie in the Soudan; Burgoyne, who drowned commanding the Captain; Hewett, who recently died after commanding the Channel Fleet. He reflects that he “could count on my fingers those remaining” of his old circle. This elegiac tone is not merely sentimental; it gives the narrative a historical depth, as Taylor connects his personal losses to broader events—the Turko-Russian war, the Cretan rebellion, the Abyssinian expedition. The reader is left with the sense that the blockade-running years were a formative episode in the lives of men who later played roles in imperial conflicts. Taylor’s closing remark that only two of his old friends are still living reinforces the distance between the events described and the moment of writing.

Readers approaching Taylor’s narrative should be aware that the excerpts provide only a partial view of the full work. The introduction by Julian Corbett suggests that the book contains detailed operational accounts of blockade running, but the available passages focus more on personal relationships and retrospective commentary. The catalog subjects list “Blockades” and “Taylor, Thomas E.” as primary topics, which aligns with the memoir’s content, though the excerpts emphasize the social and emotional dimensions of the experience rather than tactical analysis. Those interested in the technical aspects of Civil War blockade running may find the full text valuable, but the excerpts alone offer a poignant portrait of a vanished community.

Sitting with that blockade-runner’s tense nights, I kept thinking of the quiet dirt roads back home. His fear of open water felt oddly like the dread those Carolina settlers knew, watching for redcoats through the pines. There’s a loneliness in both—waiting, listening. I found myself returning to the old Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical Illustrating Principally the Revolutionary Period of Mecklenburg, Rowan, Lincoln and Adjoining Counties — Reading Notes afterwards, just to feel that same hush.