The Confederate Mystery Ship and the Dangerous World of Civil War Blockade Runners
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 13 March 2026
⏱️ 8 minutes
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Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, The Confederacy entered the Civil War with a serious problem. It didn’t have the industrial strength to build the navy it needed. To keep the war effort alive, Southern leaders turned to something they still had plenty of: cash crops and international trade.
That’s where blockade runners came in. Fast ships slipped through the Union blockade carrying cotton out and weapons and supplies back in. Some of those vessels became legends of Civil War naval history. Others disappeared almost as quickly as they appeared. John Freeman of the South Carolina Military Museum shares the story of a mystery 'blockade runner' and how it met its demise.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.6 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:14.2 | This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, |
| 0:18.7 | the show where America is the star and the American people. To search for the Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. |
| 0:22.5 | To search for The Our American Stories podcast, go to the Iheart Radio app or wherever you get your podcast. |
| 0:29.3 | Up next, a story from the South Carolina Military Museum in Columbia, South Carolina, the state's |
| 0:35.8 | capital, about a little bit of maritime history. |
| 0:39.3 | In particular, one ship called the Georgiana. |
| 0:43.0 | Here's John Freeman with the story. |
| 0:50.0 | It's called the SS Georgiana, not the CSS as confederate ships were sometimes called, |
| 0:55.0 | but the SS because technically at the time, technically it was a civilian ship. |
| 1:00.0 | So Georgiana started getting made in Glasgow, actually in Scotland, because it's a neutral territory. |
| 1:09.0 | And when the South went to war, in the Civil War, |
| 1:11.6 | they didn't really have the industrial base |
| 1:14.6 | to build a navy that could rival the United States. |
| 1:17.6 | I mean, that's a tall feat. |
| 1:21.6 | So what they did have, though, was money from selling their cash crops overseas. |
| 1:25.6 | And so they would get some of these ports to build them ships that they couldn't. |
| 1:30.4 | So this boat started getting made and there was an interesting spy game that happened between |
| 1:35.6 | United States spies were over there watching the development of this boat because they had |
| 1:40.4 | suspicions this boat was going to get sent to the south. |
| 1:43.6 | And it was a decent boat. So it was an iron-hold, ironclad steamship that still had two mass. And it was fairly large. It was supposed to be pretty fast. And they were a little concerned about it. And they kept an eye on it. And sure enough, before they could actually go and seize it, claiming that it was actually going to be delivered to the south. It had set sail with a crew from Britain or the Scottish Isles, and it actually was captain by an ex-World Navy officer. |
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