Robert E Lee Clydebuilt: The Ships That Made The Commonwealth

The river Clyde, Scotland's most iconic waterway.

Today, it's a bustling commercial hub.

But 150 years ago,

this was the beating heart of an industrial revolution.

And fuelling it were its shipyards.

I'm David Hayman, and I grew up surrounded by those yards

and the magnificent ships they produced.

But it's where they went, what they did

and the lives they touched that's always fascinated me.

In this series I'm going to uncover the secrets of the great ships

that laid the foundations of today's Commonwealth of nations.

It's a journey that's going to take me around the world

to tell incredible stories and unearth extraordinary characters.

If you want to know why Britannia ruled the waves

and where the Commonwealth was born,

look no further than here.

Fire!

The year is 1861...

..the United States of America is no longer united.

President Abraham Lincoln has called up troops

to crush rebellion in the Confederate South.

Lincoln represented the Union States in the North.

Led by Jefferson Davis,

the Confederate South knew the North was hostile to slavery.

And slavery was fundamental to the South's way of life and economy.

So the Southern states wanted to protect slavery at all costs.

When they tried to become independent, war was the result.

The American Civil War was to be the bloodiest

and most devastating conflict in US history.

And its shockwaves were felt around the world.

It could have led to war between Britain and the United States.

It could have even cost Britain Canada -

one of the biggest jewels in the Commonwealth.

And central to this war was Glasgow,

one of the greatest shipbuilding ports in the world.

I've lived in Glasgow all my life

and I like to think I know a fair bit about its glorious history,

but throughout the years there have always been hints and suspicions

about a darker story waiting to be told

and I believe this murky episode is it.

The North's strategy in the American Civil War

was to isolate the Confederate South and cut off its foreign supplies.

The way they'd go about this was to blockade the Southern ports with gunboats.

Known as the Anaconda Plan, it involved 500 Union warships

patrolling 3,000 miles of Confederate coastline.

One month after the conflict began,

Queen Victoria proclaimed that Britain would be neutral in this war.

In reality, nothing would be further from the truth.

This war was a golden opportunity for enterprising Glasgow shipbuilders.

The Confederate South needed ships fast enough to outrun

the North's blockading patrols and bring supplies in.

The Clyde shipyards provided just the solution -

custom-built ocean-going paddle steamers.

And because of their superior speed,

these boats could break through the cordon

of the Union warships that Lincoln had ordered

to surround the Southern ports.

Hence their nickname - the blockade runners.

A blockade running ship had to be fast and its crew fearless.

The stakes were high

but so were the rewards.

Run the blockade with a ship full of supplies into

the Southern ports and you could make yourself a fortune.

For many Scottish businessmen,

it mattered little that they were fuelling a war.

This was about greed, pure and simple.

I have to admit, I don't know much about Glasgow paddle steamers,

so this is going to be a fascinating journey for me.

To unearth the part the Clyde played in the American Civil War,

I'm going to investigate one ship.

Named after the general of the Confederate army,

she's probably the most famous blockade runner of them all.

She's called The Robert E Lee.

The Robert E Lee paddle steamer was built in 1860

on the Clyde for the shipping company G&J Burns.

She was their flagship vessel,

but she didn't start life with such an illustrious title.

Her original name was The Giraffe.

Despite her gangly namesake, this boat was sleek and state of the art.

She was the fastest passenger steamer on the Clyde.

And her speed made for the perfect craft for blockade running.

Today you don't have to go too far to find

a real-life equivalent to the Robert E Lee.

The iconic Waverley passenger steamer is a familiar sight on the Clyde.

She's the closest working ship we have to the Robert E Lee

and the last surviving ocean-going paddle steamer in the world.

I'm meeting maritime historian Dr Eric Graham

to learn more about blockade running ships.

Eric, what exactly was the job of a blockade runner?

It's a ship that's going to run the contraband of war -

guns, munitions - into the ports of the Confederacy.

And all of this was illegal?

From the British point of view we shouldn't be there - we are neutral.

Being on board the Waverley I get a real sense of what it must have been

like to flout the law and power a blockade runner through enemy lines.

Every part of the boat must have been pushed to the limit.

You are racing these steamers,

you are firing up the boilers with cotton soaked in turpentine.

You're tying down the safety valves with the captain sitting with

a loaded revolver at the chief engineer

to make sure that he doesn't undo the rope,

cos you're going to blow up the boiler at this rate.

Everything for that dash of speed to get you through the blockade.

Now, that's madness or desperation, isn't it?

Well, one blockade runner mentions the plates of his deck

were warping with the heat from the boilers

and he burns the soles of his feet,

in fact, he has to stick them out the window

and one cheeky Southern lady tickles his bare feet as she goes past.

Blockade running captains really had to have nerves of steel.

To run the blockade, a ship would have to pass through the patrols of Union gunboats undetected.

If she was spotted, she could be fired on

but she couldn't fire back.

This was because Britain was neutral and so were its ships.

If the crew fired back they would be classed as stateless pirates

and could be hanged.

Not getting caught was vital

and the best way to do that was to be fast.

The secret to the Giraffe's speed lay in her construction.

To keep her stable in rough seas, her widest point was over 26 feet.

And for swiftness her very long hull was made shallow and streamlined.

And she could sprint.

She could rip through the water at a constant 13 knots,

which was considered a very high speed in the 1860s.

She could achieve this because she was driven by

twin oscillating engines, served by six boilers,

which delivered a combined thrust of 180 horsepower.

Another key to her speed lay in the design of her paddle wheels.

These were automatic feathering,

which kept the position of each paddle blade vertical in the water,

maximising the power that could be delivered with every stroke.

Their speed, agility and the need for secrecy meant blockade runners

like the Giraffe epitomised adventure, glamour and excitement.

It must have been an extraordinary life.

Well, William Watson of Skelmerly said

he made so much money he didn't drink water for three years -

champagne, champagne, champagne.

The thrilling lifestyle of the blockade runner

was immortalised in the film Gone With The Wind.

I've loved you more than I've ever loved any woman

and I've waited longer for you than I've ever waited for any woman.

Most fans of the film would be hard-pushed

to tell you how hero Rhett Butler made his money.

He was a courageous, roguish blockade-running captain.

And Rhett Butler's fictional fortune mirrored reality.

The profits that could be made running the blockade were colossal.

Blockade runners would take in guns and ammunition to sell to the Confederate South,

but they also carried out of the Confederacy an extraordinarily profitable cargo.

The prize that could make you a very rich man

during the American Civil War was this stuff -

cotton.

There's one place I wanted to visit to find out more about cotton.

I'm at New Lanark,

an 18th century cotton mill in the south Lanarkshire valley.

I want to learn more about the role cotton played in the Civil War

so I'm meeting up with historian Dr Adam Smith.

Cotton was immensely important to the British economy

in the middle of the 19th century.

Probably a fifth - one in five - of all people in Britain

were in some way dependent on the cotton industry.

About 10% of all British capital was invested in cotton

and Britain totally dominated the export of cotton cloth.

About 98% of the world export of cotton cloth

was British in the 1850s.

It was massively important to the British economy.

So lucrative was the cotton trade for the American Southern states

that they believed it would be enough to win them support in the Civil War.

It must have given them an extraordinary amount of power to wield.

When first of all seven, then eventually 11, slave states

seceded from the American Union in 1860/61.

They didn't have an army, they had to create one from scratch,

they didn't have a navy, they didn't have a government,

they had hardly any munitions factories,

they had an inadequate railroad network -

they faced all these obstacles but what they did have was cotton.

That was their trump card.

They called it King Cotton because they believed

that their domination of the world cotton market

was going to be so important that Britain would be forced to intervene

in support of the Confederacy

in order to keep open their supply of raw cotton.

Early on, the South deliberately restricted the amount of cotton going to Europe

to force Britain and France to join the war on their side.

But this master plan didn't work, did it?

It backfired, didn't it, because we never entered the war.

No, we didn't and I don't think actually in the end

Britain was ever likely to intervene because it would have meant

war with the United States and there was an awful lot of British capital

also invested in the Northern states, especially in railroads.

But as Lincoln's grip on the Southern ports intensified,

the export of cotton to Britain dried up.

It must have had a devastating effect on the workforce

-and the population in this country.

-It did.

In Scotland there were 40,000 people directly employed in cotton mills.

By 1862 most of them were unemployed or on very short hours.

With such a shortage of cotton in Britain, there were fortunes

to be made for anyone brave enough to run the blockade

and bring back cotton from the Confederate South.

One blockade runner, taking in the supplies of war

and bringing out supplies of cotton,

could make £60,000 in one round trip.

Today's equivalent is about four million.

That's a staggering amount of money.

With the chance of that sort of wealth, ship builders and captains

were clambering over each other to grab a piece of the action.

It was the perfect relationship -

Confederate leaders needed as many blockade running ships and crews

as they could lay their hands on.

And Clydeside shipbuilders were only too happy to oblige.

There was a problem.

Britain had declared herself neutral in the civil war.

The Confederates needed to keep their operations hidden

from spies in Britain hired by the United States.

So they had to meet in secret.

In out of the way places,

far away from prying eyes.

Nestled in the Stirlingshire countryside, far from the River Clyde,

is the town of Bridge of Allan.

It may look perfectly ordinary,

but this quiet town concealed an international spy ring

run by the Confederate South.

In the 1860s, this was a guest house.

But, inside, Confederate naval agent James D Bulloch

and his shipping contacts would meet in secret.

They were there to order warships

and blockade runners from Clyde shipbuilders.

I've asked Dr Eric Graham to join me to shed light on these murky goings on.

At one time up to seven of them of them would have been at this house

under the direction of James Dunwoody Bulloch.

He was the sole agent, to start with, for the Confederacy -

to acquire the means to deliver the guns, the munitions,

the medicines and towards the end, food,

to keep the Confederacy in the war.

But why here? Why Bridge of Allan?

The railway.

From here you could clandestinely make your way to Edinburgh,

or to Glasgow and the Clyde,

so this is the perfect spot for them, out of sight

of the Federal-employed detectives who are looking to find them.

Now, when this explosion of contracts arrived in the Clyde,

it must have been a genuine heyday for all the shipbuilders,

at what rate were we turning out one of these ships?

Eventually, possibly at least 100 Clyde steamers

would go off to the blockade, of which half will be custom-built

during the war years to do just blockade running.

As well as blockade runners,

the Confederates secretly bought larger vessels

to be converted to armed warships.

It's incredible to think that the decisions made in this house

would lengthen a devastating war.

Hundreds of thousands of people would die as a result.

It's estimated the number of soldiers who died in the Civil war is 750,000.

Even today, the American Civil War remains the deadliest in US history.

With help provided by James D Bulloch,

Confederate agents purchased the Clyde-built steamer the Giraffe

as a regular blockade runner for the Southern states.

Now they had their prize ship, the Confederates brought over

one of the most courageous men in their navy to sail her -

Captain John Wilkinson.

Captain Wilkinson made his way to Glasgow where the Giraffe was waiting.

Glasgow may have been the second city of the Empire

but the poverty on its streets shocked him deeply.

In his diary he wrote...

"We were painfully struck by the number of paupers

"and intoxicated females in the streets,

"and some of our party saw, for the first time in their lives,

"white women, shoeless and shivering in scanty rags

"which scarcely concealed their nakedness

"with the thermometer at the freezing point."

In November 1862, Wilkinson would board the Giraffe, berthed on the Clyde,

and sail her to the port of Wilmington in North Carolina.

She was re-registered as a Confederate vessel

and renamed the Robert E Lee,

in honour of the famous Confederate general.

The Robert E Lee went on to become one of the most successful

Confederate blockade runners in the American Civil War.

She broke through union blockades 14 times in just 11 months.

It's really hard to over-emphasise just how vitally important

these blockade running steamships were to the Confederate cause -

simply everything needed for war was brought in by these ships.

Although Britain used a variety of ports to build ships

in the Civil War, Glasgow built the most blockade runners.

Ships like the Robert E Lee were now supplying a huge range of goods to the South...

..from clothes to food,

from buttons to weapons.

In fact, 30% of all lead used to make bullets for the Confederacy,

and 75% of all the ingredients needed to make it gunpowder,

arrived on blockade running ships.

Fire!

Scottish shipbuilders knew the risks of running the blockade

but they could also see the money to be made.

If you owned a ship

and made two successful runs,

you'd paid for the ship and her cargoes.

After that, everything was pure profit.

The ship owners were only risking their cash on blockade runs.

But the captains and engineers

were gambling with their lives.

They often had to run the blockade at night,

as it was vital they weren't seen.

Their ships were unarmed and if they were spotted they would be fired at.

The challenge for Clyde shipbuilders was to adapt blockade runners

to be as invisible as possible.

Some ships were painted off-white or grey

so they would blend in with their surroundings.

Others had collapsible funnels,

so they could keep a low profile on the horizon.

On the final approach, the fire boxes were damped down

to reduce smoke and tell-tale red cinders.

Another trick involved redirecting the spent puff of steam

away from the funnel and instead underwater,

so there would be no smoke trail in the sky.

But the real skills of blockade running lay with the men in charge.

Glasgow, apart from building

some of the best and most advanced ships in the world,

also produced some of the best and most fearless captains.

One very successful blockade running sailor was Dundee man

Captain David Leslie.

I've come to meet his descendants, Christine and Norman Leslie,

to find out what kind of man he was.

Good to meet you.

Lovely to meet you.

Norman, you're the great grandson of that adventurer

Captain David Leslie, tell me about him.

Well, he was, er... I think he was a chancer.

He was, according to the family, he was very disciplined,

he was very full of himself, a difficult person.

Even the family found him difficult,

he was a renowned toughie as a sea captain.

Ooh, yes, aye, he was very severe. Severe man.

So when your great grandfather went to sea as an apprentice

-he must have been about, what, 15, 16?

-15.

And we have a description of him

when he first went to sea as an apprentice.

He was four foot eleven and three quarters,

fair hair, grey eyes

and no distinguishing marks.

Good lord, so this little smout of 15 turns into one of

the most formidable sea captains of all time?

Well, it looks like that, yes.

Leslie's luck ran out when his ship, the Columbia,

was seized by a union gunboat and taken to New York.

Her illicit cargo of war supplies destined for the South

was laid out on the quay for all the world to see.

Captain Leslie was imprisoned,

but after only a few months he was freed

and could resume making a very good living from blockade running.

What did Leslie do with all his money?

He must have made a fortune.

He bought a strip of land and he built villas in it in Dunoon.

The villas have names all to do with the South - Dixie, Wilmington,

Bermuda, Charleston, and he invested some of his money that way.

A few of Captain Leslie's possessions remain in the family,

including one of his weapons.

It's a finely weighted cutlass, isn't it?

-It's quite well balanced.

-It feels good in the hand.

And this here's his Bible, he took that everywhere with him.

We used to be able to open it and it would fall open

at certain pages, like Daniel into the lion's den,

and the burial service, it used to open at as well.

So a Bible in one hand and a cutlass in the other -

Yeah, yeah. Very much so.

-There's a moral conundrum for you, isn't it?

-Yeah, yeah.

Leslie retired from blockade running

and became a local police commissioner.

This is him with his wife and children on the steps of his beloved Bermuda villa in Dunoon.

He died here, a comfortably well-off family man in 1905.

But even the famous Captain Leslie couldn't sail from Glasgow

to the Confederate ports in a single journey.

Blockade runners couldn't carry enough coal to travel that distance

without having to refuel.

So they stopped to rest and restock at the neutral British port

of St George's in Bermuda

before sailing to the South.

They could also take on other cargo from larger ships

to sell inside the Confederacy.

I'm here to meet historian Dr Stephen Wise,

who's an expert on Bermuda's role during the American Civil War.

Bermuda was really the main depot

for the Confederacy for their blockade runners.

The Confederacy very early on is going to realise it needs a port

from which they can offload goods from Great Britain

onto these fast specialised blockade runners

and run it into the South.

And what makes Bermuda so important is

it's 800 miles from any United States Naval station so

US naval vessels aren't constantly patrolling off the islands,

and Bermuda for at least about a year and a half of the war

is almost an exclusive Confederate port.

Obviously they brought in guns and ammunition

and the machines of war, what else did they bring in?

They're going to bring in a number of things for the commercial markets.

Toothbrushes do quite well, corsets.

They would bring in billiard tables,

champagne and Madeira.

The upper class of the Confederacy kept their lifestyle going

because if you had the money you could bring anything in -

even at one time it was proposed to bring in a glass greenhouse

with an English gardener,

just to prove you could bring anything through the blockade.

This manifest of the Robert E Lee shows she was carrying everything

from Austrian rifles

to horse blankets

to cartridge paper.

With two thirds of Confederate military supplies coming through St George's,

life in this port changed dramatically.

During the American Civil War this harbour would have been filled with vessels.

There would have been ocean-going ships offloading the equipment from Europe,

then they would be placed on these sleek blockade runners

tied up to the wharf.

You could have 20 to 30 of these blockade runners in this harbour at one time.

Blockade running from Bermuda could be dangerous

and many runners didn't escape unscathed.

Despite these risks,

ships from all over Europe converged on these islands

before attempting to sail to the Confederate South.

It must have been an extraordinary melting pot at that time

of nationalities and personalities all in a highly competitive environment,

at the end of the day, all driven by greed.

This was a bawdy, wide-open town.

You would have here sailors who'd be lucky to make £24 a year,

making £80 to £100 in a single run through the blockade,

captains who made maybe £20 a month

would be making £500 to £1,000 for a run through the blockade.

These captains had so much money to amuse themselves

they would throw bags of shillings out their hotel window

and watch the locals scramble for them.

You could find every diversion that you could imagine.

One person described it as an orgy of eating, drinking and merriment,

and I'll let you think what merriment might possibly mean.

But under the surface there was tension.

The threat of war between Britain and the United States was never far away.

This time it reared its head because of the actions of

one aggressive Unionist captain called Charles Wilkes.

In 1862 he moored his warship, the Wachusett, in St George's harbour.

According to Britain's rules of neutrality,

both Union and Confederate ships were only supposed to stay in St George's one day.

Wilkes stayed nearly a week

and used his gunboats to maintain a blockade of the island.

It was a gesture designed to provoke the British authorities in Bermuda.

The Governor of Bermuda ordered this vessel to be moved,

and a British warship actually loaded its cannon

and might have fired on the US vessel.

It could have led to something.

I mean, there was a fuse burning that could have gone off.

People feared these tensions could spill over into fighting on the island itself.

During this time, the Unionist north had their own man on the island -

US consul Charles M Allen.

He felt very isolated being the sole ambassador for the United States in St George's.

He wrote,

"Everybody here thinks there is no escape from war between Britain and the United States.

"The present state of things makes it very unpleasant for me here

"just now, as there is a very bitter feeling against everything

"and everybody belonging to the United States,

"and many here seem to go on the supposition that

"I am responsible for the whole difficulty."

With so much cash sloshing around,

it was only a matter of time before things got out of hand.

You had brawls and fights.

By the end of the war there were somewhat of 67 bars in Bermuda

and only two policemen.

The potent mix of money, alcohol and bravado

was always going to end badly.

On the evening of July 21st 1863,

three sailors from the Robert E Lee got into a fight.

They wounded a British soldier who'd been sent from the garrison to sort them out.

As is the way with these things,

some Confederate sailors decided they wanted a piece of the action too.

Before long the town had a full-scale riot on its hands.

This time it wasn't just a single flare-up.

The whole of St George's joined in.

Bars emptied, everyone took to the streets.

There were scores of fistfights and knifings.

This extraordinary battle lasted almost a day and a half

until peace was finally restored,

and that was only achieved because they shut down all 67 pubs.

But the unionists were about to call time on the Robert E Lee.

She made her last voyage from Bermuda in November 1863.

As she ran the blockade,

she was spotted by a Union gunboat which opened fire.

The Robert E Lee surrendered.

Having started life as the passenger paddle steamer the Giraffe in Glasgow,

then the successful Confederate blockade runner the Robert E Lee,

this ship was to change again.

Her new name was the USS Fort Donelson.

She had swapped sides.

She was now a Union patrol ship

and her job was to stop blockade runners.

A classic case of poacher turned gamekeeper.

Some Clyde-built paddle steamers suffered even worse fates than being captured by the enemy.

Bermuda's submerged reefs have claimed many vessels.

Today, some 150 to 300 wrecks are thought to lie beneath its waters.

Give it a good heave.

Taking me to see some of those lost ships

is Philippe Rouja, Bermuda's custodian of historic wrecks.

It's his job to catalogue and preserve Bermuda's underwater cultural heritage.

One of those wrecks is the Nola.

A 236-foot Clyde-built paddle steamer.

No image of her exists, but this is her sister ship, the Old Dominion.

In December, 1863, she was sailing from London to North Carolina

with a cargo destined for the Confederacy.

The Nola tried to refuel in Bermuda but was wrecked on the reef.

Her cargo and crew were saved

but she lies to this day in 30 feet of water.

I've got the chance to discover what she looks like after 150 years.

So here is the Nola's final resting place.

3,000 miles from home are the remains of the only known

Clyde-built steamer that sank on a run to the Confederate South.

The thing about these ships is no-one expected them to last.

Built in secret, they were disposable.

Those that avoided capture ended their days in distant destinations

like South America or New Zealand

or wrecked on the seabed.

Not one of the Clyde-built paddle steamers ever came home to Glasgow after the war.

That was one of the most surreal...

..and actually quite moving experiences ever.

It's remarkably well preserved.

That was quite special and very eerie,

very serene.

That was a treat.

Philippe has been exploring these wrecks for many years,

preserving and cataloguing marine treasures for Bermuda's museums.

You must have found some beauts,

some little treasures over the years.

Well, actually, this piece here I actually think is pretty special.

This is a deck light, or a prism,

that came out of the hull of the Nola.

And it would have been recessed into the deck

and that through which, in your forward holds, you would have gotten

-the only light you could get...

-Natural light, daylight, you mean?

Natural daylight. So it would have been turned this way,

that's why it's scratched, because this is where men would

have been walking, gear would have been travelling over the top

and recessed into her decks is this light and literally,

if you hold it up you can see that it would refract the light out,

so if you're someone who's forced to go into those forward holds

this allows you to see what's going on down there.

This was the only source of light that they had.

There's absolutely no question that this piece was sitting

in the decks of the Nola when she was built in Glasgow,

and now has come to rest here in Bermuda.

Did you ever imagine you'd be in Bermuda holding a piece of Glasgow?

No, not at all. 150 years old, no way.

The Civil War began as an attempt to prevent

the separation of the Southern states from the Union...

..but at its heart was something far more fundamental.

Slavery.

The Confederate states had the largest

and most powerful system of slavery in the modern world.

Slavery was so important it was enshrined in the Confederate constitution.

It defined the South's economics, politics and society.

Its entire culture was bound up in it.

Other countries, including Britain,

had ended slavery decades before, in the 1830s.

Bermuda, being a British territory,

had freed its slaves in 1834.

A register of slaves is kept here in the National Archive.

What's unusual about the slaves of Bermuda is that

most of them weren't brought from Africa,

they were bought from the Caribbean.

They had been resold.

And the only reason there is a record of them is because

in the lead up to the abolition of slavery...

..the slave owners negotiated vast sums of money

for each slave they had to give up.

It's not to record the history of this wonderful people...

..it is purely for profit.

The slave owners received compensation.

The slaves received nothing.

Although slavery had been abolished in Bermuda,

it was still the cornerstone of society in the South.

As a result, Bermuda was seen as a refuge by slaves

fleeing their Southern masters.

The blockade runners who made it back to Bermuda,

they often returned with more than just bales of cotton.

Very often you would find that slaves would stow themselves away

on the ships in the hope of being granted their freedom

once they reached here.

One man who could grant those slaves a new life in the United States

was US Consul Charles Allen.

In 1863, he wrote to the Secretary of State in Washington...

"I have sent to New York, at my own expense,

"three men from the Cornubia and five from the Robert E Lee...

"The contrabands stowed themselves away

"until after they had passed the blockade."

Most slaves headed for New York but others remained here in Bermuda.

I want to find out more about what happened to those slaves

so I've arranged to meet local historian Lance Furbert.

He's keen to show me this house where a man called Joseph Rainey worked.

He was born a slave in Georgetown, South Carolina.

His father worked very hard to buy his family's freedom.

They moved to Charleston. His father worked as a barber

in a very exclusive hotel called the Mills Hotel in Charleston.

With the beginning of the civil war,

Joseph Rainey was then conscripted

to work on the fortifications around Charleston,

and also on a blockade runner,

and managed to get himself and his wife to Bermuda,

we think, on a blockade runner.

Came to Bermuda and set up a barber's shop,

and we believe it was actually in this kitchen.

So it's possible that he cut the hair of blockade runners?

Oh ,definitely, he would have had the captains

and the sailors come into his barber shop,

and I suspect it was a way of keeping in contact

with what was going on back home.

He was getting news from all over.

Getting the news and getting educated.

He was a man who seemed to have a real thirst for education.

He talked to all his customers

and, in fact, some of his customers would correct his work.

After the civil war, Joseph Rainey returned to Charleston

and entered politics.

He became the first African American to serve

the United States House of Representatives,

and also the first African American to be directly elected to Congress.

That is a truly, truly remarkable rags-to-riches story.

It is, it's an incredible story.

We'd like to think, as Bermudians,

that a lot of the things that he learned in Bermuda,

and certainly the money that he made while he was here,

stood him in good stead when he got back to South Carolina.

While Joseph Rainey could build a new life in Bermuda,

slaves in the American South endured dreadful conditions

with little chance of escape.

Their release might have come sooner,

and the war could have ended earlier,

had the South not been supplied with goods and weapons

by blockade runners.

This is the terrible irony at the centre of Bermuda in the Civil War.

Slaves from the South were trying to escape on the same blockade runners

that were keeping that slavery going.

And at the heart of it all, and vital to its success,

were the hundreds of blockade running ships built on Clydeside.

Back home in Glasgow, the issue of slavery

in the American Civil War was being hotly debated.

The release of all slaves in the British Empire

had taken place in 1833.

But the outbreak of the Civil War reignited interest

in the plight of slaves in the Southern states.

Many Glasgow industrialists were supporters of the Confederate South,

and of its slavery.

But there were also a number of very active anti-slavery groups.

They called themselves emancipation societies.

And they believed they were part of a moral crusade

to secure freedom for slaves in the American South.

The press thought otherwise.

Newspaper reports of emancipation society meetings

would play down the turnout

and mock the speakers for their moral pretensions.

Even when a large gathering took place in Edinburgh,

the report in the Scotsman focused solely on the hecklers

and rabble-rousers in the debate.

The broadsheet newspapers largely sided with the South.

Their readers supported the Confederacy

and were making money out of this war.

By contrast, some of the anti-slavery campaigners were textile workers

who had lost their jobs in the cotton famine created by the blockade.

Even though this Unionist policy had caused them terrible hardship,

they still sided with the Union against slavery.

They fought tirelessly to expose Confederate shipbuilding projects

on the Clyde and to promote the abolition of slavery.

One of these groups was the Newmilns Anti-Slavery Society.

Their meetings were held on Friday evenings in the back room

of the Black Bull Inn, in the main street of their Ayrshire village.

This tiny pressure group which met in a local pub

was drawn from a close-knit community of weavers.

But despite its size, of all the anti-slavery groups,

Newmilns stood out from the rest.

Eric, tell me the significance of this Newmilns anti-slavery group?

Well, there were a lot of them in Scotland at the time,

but the rest didn't leave any records that we could make use of

to know much about what they were doing.

In Newmilns, we do have records of them,

they did attract the press interest.

One of the ways the Newmilns group gained publicity

was by choosing imaginative ways

to get their message across to the public.

Probably the best they had was to bring a black gentleman onto the platform.

His name is John Brooks, he was born in Barbados,

had been in slavery, and he was eloquent.

He is kind of the vision for the audience

of what slavery is all about in the South.

Now that, for a wee place like Newmilns, is quite a radical import.

They wrote many letters in support of President Lincoln throughout the war.

In recognition, Lincoln sent them the Stars and Stripes flag.

This didn't impress the pro-South Glasgow Herald newspaper,

which was very keen to rain on their parade.

"The Newmilns anti-slavery society

"had a great gala day a few months ago

"on the occasion of being presented with an American flag.

"The society rose up as one

"or perhaps half a dozen altogether

"and planted the Yankee banner either on the church steeple

"or on the lock-up house - we forget which."

In fact, those broadsheets were out of touch.

The North was winning,

and soon the abolition of slavery would be a certainty in the South.

The final defeat of the Confederacy took place at Fort Fisher

in North Carolina.

In January 1865, it came under sustained bombardment

from union warships.

And who was providing support to the Union fleet?

The Robert E Lee, now known as the USS Fort Donelson.

She was there in the early days of the Civil War

and she would be there for its final gasp.

Many didn't disguise their pleasure that the fall of Fort Fisher

also meant the end of the blockade running supply chain

that had kept the Southern states in the war for so long.

Unionist Rear Admiral David Porter wrote,

"The gate through which the rebels obtained their supplies is closed for ever

"and we can sit here quietly and watch the traitors starve."

The war ended in May 1865.

The 13th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in December.

It declared all remaining slaves free.

America had two presidents during the course of the war,

Abraham Lincoln in the North

and Jefferson Davis, representing the Confederates in the South.

Once the war was over Jefferson Davis was charged with treason,

and incarcerated in Fort Monroe for two years before being released.

Just imagine it.

You're the President of the Confederate States of America...

..and you've just lost a war,

which, had you won,

would have made you the most powerful man on the planet.

Now nobody wants to know you.

So where do you go to get away from it all?

Well, you come to Glasgow, of course.

And the deposed Confederate president Jefferson Davis

did just that. He came to the place that would offer him refuge.

Many Glaswegian industrialists had supported his politics.

So I've come to Glasgow's West End to meet Rosalind Jarvis

who used to live in this house.

Her late husband Geoffrey made a fascinating discovery

while researching its background.

He was interested in history, and he went to his neighbours

and asked them if there was anything interesting about the house,

and they produced this photograph.

Geoffrey had lived in the United States for some time

and recognised it immediately as Jefferson Davis.

-Who was the Confederate president of the United States.

-He was.

Isn't that quite, quite extraordinary?

It turned out this house was originally lived in by

local iron foundry owner James Smith.

A second photograph was discovered,

showing Jefferson Davis seated outside the house

with Smith and his family in 1869.

Smith met Jefferson Davis

when he went to the South to promote his iron foundry business.

Before coming to Glasgow Jefferson Davis wrote to him,

"I have the very strong desire to see you and your family at home.

"Hoping, while in Great Britain, to pull your latch string.

"I am truly and respectfully your friend, Jefferson Davis."

Even though many backed the losing side,

Glasgow benefited from the Civil War,

as did other major cities in Britain.

The economic benefits for Scotland

of the blockade were simply enormous.

A lot of people made a lot of money.

The US consuls at the time reckoned that Glasgow had 27 shipyards

employing around 25,000 men,

all actively engaged in building blockade runners

or warships for the Confederacy.

Glasgow entered its golden period as a world leader in marine engineering.

And it was a direct result of the profits of the war.

Fortunes made from blockade running were funnelled into other respectable businesses.

The city was transformed as the cash poured in.

But success came at a price.

Though blockade running was a commercial enterprise,

independent of any regulations by the British government,

their use had greatly angered the United States.

America demanded that Great Britain be held responsible,

not only for the damage done by British-built warships

but also for allowing blockade runners to supply armaments

that prolonged an already bloody war.

It was suggested a fair price would be 2 billion.

Alternatively, Britain should simply hand over Canada to the United States.

However, Britain was not prepared to lose a treasure like Canada...

..and the matter went to an international tribunal.

In the end, Britain paid 8 million dollars.

For the British cabinet, it was a small price to pay

to resolve all the disputes,

avoid a war and protect Canada from invasion.

Even for some of those on the winning side,

the glory days were over.

After the war, the Clyde-built steamer that had started life

as the Giraffe, then the Confederate Robert E Lee,

and finally the Union USS Fort Donelson,

was purchased by the Chilean navy.

Two years later she was sold.

Her fate is unknown.

There's no doubt the Robert E Lee represents two sides of Scotland.

On the one hand she epitomises all the creativity

and engineering brilliance of the Clyde.

On the other, she, and hundreds of other blockade runners,

were used over and over again to run in cargoes

that enriched their owners and prolonged slavery and war.

At the heart of this murky story is moral corruption.

It's money versus morality, greed versus goodness.

Because a number of Scots actively supported the Confederate states

and their pro-slavery policies

simply in order to get stinking rich.

Man's inhumanity to man lost them no sleep.

Quite simply, if we hadn't been as good at building ships,

this war would have been over two years earlier

and hundreds of thousands of lives, both black and white,

would have been saved.

Next time:

I'll be exploring the story of HMS Hood.

For over 20 years, the largest warship in the Royal Navy.

I'll discover how the mighty Hood served Britain and the Empire

during peacetime as well as war.

And try my hand at what used to be

one of shipbuilding's most iconic jobs.

No!