For the first two years of the Civil War, most of the fighting happened outside of Georgia.

But that didn't mean Georgia wasn't an active participant.

While many of the state soldiers were away at war, Georgia became one of the main places that supplied goods and materials for the Confederate Army.

Because Georgia had more factories and businesses than any other southern state, it produced a huge amount of military supplies.

Confederate soldiers depended on Georgia for things like ammunition, wagons, tools, and even clothing.

And weapons factories called arsenals, popped up in cities across the state, including Augusta, Atlanta, Macon, Columbus, and Savannah.

Because of its wealth and resources, Georgia, especially its Port of Savannah, would soon become a key target during the Civil War.

(paper rustling) To weaken the Confederacy, Union leaders came up with a strategy to stop the South from sending supplies to its troops.

This was called the Anaconda Plan, because it aimed to slowly squeeze the Confederacy until it could no longer fight.

A major part of the Anaconda Plan was the Union blockade.

Here's how it worked.

The US Navy lined up ships off the coast of key Confederate ports in an effort to block the South from trading with other countries.

In Georgia, the Union's main target was Savannah, the state's most significant port city.

The goal was to prevent Georgia and other southern states from selling their cash crops, like cotton, to Great Britain and France.

Without access to trade, the Confederacy would have little money to buy and sell goods or food.

But the blockade wasn't just meant to punish the South.

It was about control.

Whoever controlled the ports controlled the flow of goods, money, and power, and that could decide the outcome of the war.

So what did the Union blockade look like in action, and was it a success for the North?

Let's take a closer look at the strategy and how it played out along the coast.

[Narrator] During a war, one side blocks enemy ports, preventing ships and their cargoes from going in or out.

Early in the Civil War, the Union naval blockade of southern ports, including Savannah, was not very effective.

Of the ships that attempted to run the blockade in 1861, only about 10% were ever captured or sunk.

Most southern ships made it through.

- But if you were a boat owner, and you could get your boat in and have the goods sold and out again with cotton, you could make substantial fortunes.

Boat owners made a boatload of money.

[Narrator] Blockade running could be profitable for the captain, his crew, and especially the ship's owners.

They shipped cotton to England, for example, and came back with guns and other critical military supplies.

If a blockade runner made it through, everyone involved received a percentage of the profits, the largest amount going to the boat owner.

- The blockade runners, the boats themselves, were just like entrepreneurs, private entities.

They were funded by usually English businessmen who were trying to make a buck on the blockade.

The crews had no allegiances whatsoever.

They were, in effect, mercenaries.

As long as they got paid, they didn't care who they sailed for.

[Narrator] As the war progressed, 2/3 of the blockade runners were still able to sneak past the cannon and the warships.

But when the Union Navy captured Savannah in late 1862, blockade running for Georgia, at least, was over.

Georgia was cut off from foreign shipping, cut off from cloth, food, cannons, rifles that came from Europe as well as other southern ports.

But what was bad for Savannah was good for Atlanta.

- Atlanta grew during the war, partly because the Port of Savannah was closed.

Savannah had always been the place where people shipped goods, and it was always the center of this financial life, and so forth and so on.

But with the port closed, Savannah wasn't as important as it had been in the years before the war.

And Atlanta got to be more important than it had been before the war.

[Narrator] Four different railroads converged in Atlanta, making it the railroad hub for troops and supplies.

So because of transportation, Atlanta became an economic boom town.

- Transportation is very, very important.

If you've got a ton of food sitting in a train station and a hungry army out in the field, and the food can't get to the army, you're outta luck.

- So you have them having all kinds of munitions were being made in Atlanta.

And the quartermaster had himself a headquarters here in Atlanta, and he was hiring hundreds of seamstresses to make shirts and trousers and so forth for the soldiers.

You had all kinds of military supplies that were being manufactured in Atlanta in order to supply the troops.

(footsteps clacking) [Narrator] An army needs food, uniforms, weapons, wagons.

Without supplies, an army stops.

A soldier cannot fight.

- I remember one soldier, a cousin of my ancestor, who wrote home and said that he wasn't taking any part in the campaign at the moment 'cause he didn't have any shoes.

[Narrator] Making things an army needs, transporting them to the soldiers on the battlefield.

That's the way money was made in the Civil War.

That's the way it is in every war.

But because of the Union blockade and the closing of the Port of Savannah, there was a terrible shortage of supplies late in the war.

And to stay in business, merchants had to be resourceful.

During the Civil War, Georgia's coastline became an economic battleground.

With its ports sealed, the South had difficulty accessing essential goods and struggled to stay afloat financially.

The Union's control of southern ports, including those in Georgia, proved that dominance of the seas would be a key part of victory on land.

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