The first time Scarlett saw Rhett Butler, the other girls were taking their afternoon nap, while the men—or rather, boys old enough to be considered adults—had gathered together, smoking and talking grandly about the war.
Rhett Butler viewed the war differently from the other Southern gentlemen, but his opinions were not accepted by the other men. Uninterested in the conversation in the smoking room, Rhett Butler slipped out of that smoke-filled room. He had not meant to "overhear" Scarlett confessing her feelings to Ashley.
The book described him as a businessman who profited by running the blockade. That brought up Abraham Lincoln's proclamation of 1861, which formally declared a blockade of Southern ports. Any Confederate ships and personnel would be treated as pirates. In other words, if Rhett Butler's ship were caught by the federal government, he and his crew would be hanged, with no chance of receiving prisoner-of-war treatment as privateers.
Blockading the ports meant being unable to obtain the imported weapons and supplies needed to sustain the fighting. Yet so long as the president still acknowledged that the Southern ports were part of America, the blockade was illegal.
The difference between a blockade and a port closure seemed like the sort of word game only lawyers cared about. Lincoln had indeed once been a lawyer, but he had worked mainly in the West and had rarely dealt with "international law."
Blockades were a principle recognized on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Britain had created them while resisting the Napoleonic Wars. Disputes arising from blockades would be decided by prize courts, rather than under American criminal law by juries made up of passionate American citizens. The European envoys stationed in George Washington raised no objections, partly because they doubted whether the weak United States Navy could carry out