22. About 1,400 blockade runners were lost over the course of the war
1,400 ships engaged as blockade runners were lost during the American Civil War, the majority of them built in British ports and operated by British crews. By late 1864, nearly all of the blockade running was directed toward the port of Wilmington. Over 8.5 million pounds of salt pork and beef entered the port, bound for Lee’s army in Virginia. The port also provided tons of lead, saltpeter for making gunpowder, hundreds of thousands of pairs of shoes, Enfield rifles, artillery pieces and other badly needed supplies. By January 1865, Wilmington was the last major port open to the South, and Richmond on the navigable James River was connected to it tenuously by railroad.
Of the 1,400 blockade runners lost, about three hundred of them were sunk, run aground by pursuing Union ships, or lost at sea in storms. Cape Hatteras, known darkly as the graveyard of ships, claimed many of them. Still, ships continued to get through the Union fleet assembled to reduce Fort Fisher and capture the port and city of Wilmington. Blockade runners upriver escaped to the open sea during the Navy’s massive bombardment of Fort Fisher on January 13-14, simply outrunning their pursuers as they raced to the sea. They never returned. Wilmington fell to Union forces on January 15.