Statistics on the Civil War blockade say that about 1,500 Confederate blockade runners were captured or sunk -- would those not have mostly been Southern owned & operated?
Great question.
According to Wikipedia, some of the blockade runners belonged to the Confederate government, and were bought or taken or commissioned by the government, but most were in private hands.
The Charleston and Liverpool firm of Fraser, Trenholm & Co. was heavily involved in blockade running, and new firms like the Importing and Exporting Company of Georgia or the Charleston Importing and Exporting Company or the Crenshaw Company were created to run the blockade.
The Confederate Navy and the private firms commissioned ships to be built in England and Scotland during the war.
The example of Fraser, Trenholm & Co. may be worth considering. If a Southern firm got big enough, it might find itself becoming a New York or a British firm.
That seems to be what happened with Fraser, Trenholm (originally John Fraser & Co.), but I don't know if there were other examples.
Most of the companies I was able to find out about were only started after the war had already begun.
x:
"The Confederate Navy and the private firms commissioned ships to be built in England and Scotland during the war." A mere handful of custom built especially fast, and therefore expensive, blockade runners.
But blockade runner statistics suggest there were thousands of ships in Southern ports in 1861, and we have to suppose most or all owned by Southerners.
You would think any owned by Northerners would quickly depart the region.
Or, we could hypothesize those thousands of Confederate ships were not there in early 1861, that all Northern owned ships withdrew leaving Confederate ports without shipping, so Confederates themselves in just months built up the thousands of ships which were later captured or sunk by the Union blockade.
That even more suggests any pre-war shortage of Southern ship building was a matter of choice, not necessity, a choice quickly reversed when need arose.
Special built blockade runner, about 900 tons and one of only a few, CSS Vance:
CSS Vance was captured in September 1864 when high-quality anthracite coal was used by CSS Tallahassee, a commerce raider, leaving only lower grade bituminous coal for Vance:
CSS Tallahassee about 700 tons, a commerce raider:
Both of these ships were custom built in England and sold to the state of North Carolina.