regularized, and extensive
form of commerce-destruction known to war. Commercial blockade is not
to be confounded with the military measure of confining a body of
hostile ships of war to their harbor, by stationing before it a
competent force. It is directed against merchant vessels, and is not
a military operation in the narrowest sense, in that it does not
necessarily involve fighting, nor propose the capture of the blockaded
harbor. It is not usually directed against military ports, unless
these happen to be also centres of commerce. Its object, which was the
paramount function of the United States Navy during the Civil War,
dealing probably the most decisive blow inflicted upon the
Confederacy, is the destruction of commerce by closing the ports of
egress and ingress. Incidental to that, all ships, neutrals included,
attempting to enter or depart, after public notification through
customary channels, are captured and confiscated as remorselessly as
could be done by the most greedy privateer. Thus constituted, the
operation receives far wider scope than commerce-destruction on the
high seas; for this is confined to merchantmen of belligerents, while
commercial blockade, by universal consent, subjects to capture
neutrals who attempt to infringe it, because, by attempting to defeat
the efforts of one belligerent, they make themselves parties to the
war.

In fact, commercial blockade, though most effective as a military
measure in broad results, is so distinctly commerce-destructive in
essence, that those who censure the one form must logically proceed to
denounce the other. This, as has been seen,[389] Napoleon did;
alleging in his Berlin Decree, in 1806, that war cannot be extended to
any private property whatever, and that the right of blockade is
restricted to _fortified_ places, actually invested by competent
forces. This he had the face to assert, at the very moment when he was
compelling every vanquished state to extract, from the private means
of its subjects, coin running up to hundreds of millions to replenish
his military chest for further extension of hostilities. Had this
dictum been accepted international law in 1861, the United States
could not have closed the ports of the Confederacy, the commerce of
which would have proceeded unmolested; and hostile measures being
consequently directed against men's persons instead of their trade,
victory, if accomplished at all, would have cost three lives for every