This is one of the things that clued me into believing something was very wrong with the way we have been taught the history of the Civil War. It's the things that they didn't teach us that first aroused my suspicions.
Decades ago, when I was in Junior High, we were studying this era of history. I asked the teacher what I thought was a relevant question at the time, and I didn't get what I considered a sensible answer.
I said: "Since all the battles were fought on land, and since you have to have soldiers to take and hold land, what was the purpose of the blockade? Why did they think it was so important?"
He said they instituted it to give the Navy something to do. They had ships, and they weren't going to turn sailors into soldiers, so they stationed them off the Southern coasts to disrupt Southern traffic, perhaps to keep them from getting guns from Europe."
I said that "it didn't look like they were successful at keeping guns out of the hands of the Confederates, because they fought plenty of battles with guns."
But it always seemed his answer about "giving the navy something to do" was silly.
Later, when I better understood the economics of the situation, I realized that the blockade was the most important thing they could do during the war.
And then I found out they didn't mention how the war actually started. They left out all the parts about Lincoln sending a fleet of warships to threaten the Confederates.
And then I found out the Northern controlled congress passed a permanent slavery amendment. That was never mentioned in school.
And then I found out "expansion of slavery" was just lie.
The deeper into it I looked, the more coverup I saw. I finally realized we had been sold a narrative that makes the winners look good, but it isn't the truth of what happened.
My law professors were very squirrely about laying out exactly what happened after the war and the constitutionality of it. Everybody agreed to the 13th amendment to abolish slavery. The Southern elected representatives took up their seats again and voted for it and Southern states ratified it. Everybody well understood slavery was abolished and gone and that had been decided - and everybody accepted that.
Then I was taught that Radical Republicans "laid a trap" in the proposed 14th and 15th amendments basically annihilating the rights of the states and making them little more than administrative conveniences for the federal government AND dictating who each state could elect as a representative. The Southern states refused to pass these. THEN the Radical Republicans using raw military force declared the elected Southern representatives were somehow not valid and imposed military occupation on the Southern states. They also disenfranchised the vast majority of the voters in the Southern States.
They prosecuted the war on the argument that the Southern states had never lawfully left the union.....then turned right around 180 degrees and said the Southern states were "out" and had to agree to the 14th and 15th amendments to get back "in"....even though they were never out. Somehow.
I asked what article of the Constitution allowed ANY OF THIS and they hemmed and hawed and never gave a straight answer. Basically their answer amounted to "Well.....it was done so we have to accept it now". Not one bit of any of it was even remotely constitutional. Those amendments were never lawfully passed. The federal government does not get to disenfranchise voters in a state nor dictate whom they may elect nor set terms under which unconstitutional tyrannical conditions imposed on them will be lifted.
This is why I say the original constitution died at Appomattox. It did.