Quarterdeck and Bridge

by Warren F. Spencer

U.S. NAVY

DURING THE CIVIL WAR, CONFEDERATE ADMIRAL RAPHAEL SEMMES was the most successful practitioner of the traditional American naval strategy of commerce raiding. At sea for a total of twenty-five months on board the CSS Sumter and the CSS Alabama, Semmes destroyed or bonded seventy-six U.S. commercial ships.¹ As early as November 1862 cargo owners began to ship by neutral vessels, and this “flight from the flag” as it continued throughout the war crippled the U.S. merchant fleet permanently.²

Semmes’s wide-ranging cruises—from the West Indies into the North and South Atlantic Oceans, across the Indian Ocean to the China Sea and back—made him world renowned. Newspapers in the Americas, London, Paris, Cape Town, and Singapore traced his movements and reported his victims. He became a romantic figure to millions throughout the world and a national hero to Southerners, but, in the United States, he was castigated as a pirate and a beast.

Aware of his fame and infamy, Semmes nonetheless was only fulfilling instructions from his superior, Confederate Secretary of the Navy Stephen R. Mallory. To compensate for the superior Northern naval power, Mallory developed a twofold policy: draw Union ships from blockade duty by striking at Northern commercial ships with privateers and regularly commissioned naval vessels, then force the weakened blockade by warships purchased or built in Europe. His strategy anticipated cooperation of the European maritime powers, but in the spring and early summer of 1861, a series of international proclamations appeared from both sides of the ocean that affected both Mallory’s naval strategy and Semmes’s career as a commerce raider.³

On 17 April 1861, Confederate President Jefferson Davis announced that in “accordance with international law” his government would issue letters of marque for privateers to prey on Northern commercial shipping; two days later, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a blockade of Southern ports and further stipulated that if any person should molest a U.S. vessel or a cargo on board her, he would be held under U.S. laws of piracy. The European maritime powers accepted Lincoln’s threat against possible Confederate privateers because, in the Declaration of Paris (1856), they had outlawed privateers. If Lincoln simply had closed Southern ports as a sovereign act, other governments could have accepted that also without response. But a blockade of a port is an act that affects other nations, and the same Declaration of Paris had established international law concerning blockades. The British and French governments had already adopted a common policy to pursue toward the American secession crisis, and Lincoln’s blockade proclamation elicited from them proclamations of neutrality, the British on 14 May 1861 and the French on 10 June 1861. Other European nations soon issued similar proclamations.

The neutrality proclamations forbade belligerents from recruiting neutral subjects, equipping or arming warships on neutral territory or in neutral territorial waters, or in any way enhancing the war-making powers of such vessels. Belligerent use of neutral dock facilities was limited to repairing damage that resulted from “acts of God.” To discourage privateering, the domestic laws also forbade subjects from adjudicating belligerent prizes.4

These proclamations both enhanced and hindered the South’s war-making efforts. The neutrality proclamations gave de facto recognition to the Confederate States as a belligerent engaged in legitimate warfare and extended to them the same belligerent rights enjoyed by the United States. Confederate warships, but not privateers, could purchase coal and food in neutral ports and use neutral shipyards to repair damage to their ships caused by nature. Neither belligerent, however, could purchase warships from the neutrals, as Mallory had expected to do, or take prizes for adjudication into a neutral port, as Mallory had expected his commerce raiders to do.⁵ This latter provision forced Semmes to remain at sea for more than two years and to destroy his captures, an act he regretted.

The U.S. government, maintaining that the Civil War was a rebellion and not legitimate warfare, never officially accepted the neutrality proclamations. That is why Northern officials constantly referred to Semmes as a pirate or privateer.⁶

Thus, before the first battle was fought at Manassas, Virginia—21 July 1861—the Southern secession, based primarily on anticipated naval activities, had become a worldwide event. Before Appomattox, people in the West Indies, Brazil, Australia, South Africa, and Indochina, as well as Europe, would be drawn into the American conflict because ships flying the Confederate flag would sail in their adjoining waters. The man whose ships touched most of these people was Raphael Semmes, commander (1861), captain (1862), then admiral (1865) of the Confederate States Navy. What kind of man was he?

The circumstances of his youth foreshadowed the introspective and self-reliant captain of the Alabama. Born in Piscataway (Charles County), Maryland, on 27 September 1809, into a Roman Catholic family, Semmes descended on his father’s side from an early (1640) French settler and on his mother’s side from a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Arthur Middleton of South Carolina. Orphaned at an early age, he grew up in the Georgetown (District of Columbia) home of his uncle, Raphael Semmes. He had some formal education in private schools and with tutors, where he learned Latin and natural history.

When he was about fifteen years old, young Raphael decided to pursue two careers, those of lawyer and naval officer. The influence to study law undoubtedly came from his brother and intense family discussions on the nature of the U.S. Constitution. The reasons for his attraction to a naval career are not so clear, but perhaps he viewed it as one of travel, excitement, and learning. At any rate, his congressman uncle obtained for him an appointment as midshipman in the U.S. Navy from President John Quincy Adams, dated 1 April 1826.

A second career was almost a necessity in the pre-Civil War navy because there were more officers than officer slots. A young officer could expect many enforced and long leaves of absence during his slow rise through the ranks. For five years, Raphael Semmes served as a trainee-officer in five different ships, sailing the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Mediterranean Sea. He spent much time studying navigation and naval regulations and developing an appreciation for the varieties of tropical nature—different plants, sunsets, and sudden storms. Finally, on 28 April 1832, having passed at the head of his class, he was promoted to passed midshipman and placed on extended leave.7

Interspersed with the long leaves, Semmes’s naval career developed slowly during the years prior to the Mexican War. For eighteen months he was acting mate on board the USS Constellation, a ship that decades later would pursue the CSS Alabama. He was promoted to lieutenant on 9 February 1837, eleven years after his appointment as midshipman. His longest continuous duty was from May 1841 to April 1845 as a surveyor of the Gulf Coast while based at the Pensacola Navy Yard in Florida. In performance of that duty, he sailed in the USS Warren and commanded the USS Poinsett (1843–1845), one of the few steamers in the U.S. Navy. Survey duty was not demanding, and the Navy used officers and ships for occasional duties such as transporting diplomats. On one such journey to Mexico, Semmes navigated the treacherous waters of the approaches to Vera Cruz and accompanied his passenger to the Mexican capital, thereby gaining two types of knowledge that he would use during the Mexican War.8

Semmes’s personal life developed more rapidly than his military career. During a two-and-a-half-year leave after his promotion to passed midshipman, he read law in his brother’s office, and he passed the Maryland bar examination in early 1835. Later, he established a law practice in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he met and married Ann Elizabeth Spencer in 1837. She was Protestant and of New Jersey origins, “a stately, handsome woman with regular chiseled features, brilliant brunette complexion and hazel eyes.”⁹ In a move indicative of their strong mutual bonds, or perhaps Raphael Semmes’s strong personality, or both, Ann Spencer joined the Catholic Church prior to the wedding, and later she adopted Semmes’s ardent Southern sentiments. Their marriage, marred only by his absences at sea, was a happy and long one, blessed with three sons and three daughters.

Raphael Semmes moved his family to be near him while he served at Pensacola Navy Yard and rented property just across the Perdido River in the state of Alabama. It was a symbol of passing because, afterward, he considered himself a citizen of Alabama, and Ann followed him. His commitment to the Southern cause was both intellectual and emotional.

Semmes’s experiences in the Mexican War seem almost to have been a dress rehearsal for his later duties during the Civil War. As flag-lieutenant to the commander of the Home Squadron, he was privy to the U.S. government’s policies and close to the fleet commander’s interpretations and applications of the government’s directives. Later, as commander of the USS Somers on blockade assignment of Vera Cruz harbor, he experienced firsthand the intricacies of neutral and belligerent rights, as well as the boredom, frustrations, and dangers of blockade duty. More important, he learned how a blockader must think and exploited that knowledge later during the Civil War when he escaped two federal blockades on board the CSS Sumter. He dealt with problems, both real and potential, of Mexican privateers, whom he condemned as nothing more “than licensed pirates.”¹⁰

The few months of blockade duty led Semmes to complain that the conflict had become “a war, for the navy, of toils and vigils, without the prospect of either excitement or glory.”¹¹ But, excitement seemed to attract Raphael Semmes, and it inspired in him an eloquence that characterized his writing ever after.

As commanding officer of the brig Somers, on blockade duty, which he so detested, he lost his ship to a gale. Semmes’s report to his superior officer candidly recounted the loss of thirty-nine men and re-created as well the excitement of the life-and-death struggle, the necessity of making split-second decisions to save lives, and the ability to discern the moment when nature had won and man had lost: “I gave the order ‘Every man save himself who can!’” His report, so filled with heroic imagery, completely overshadowed any question that Semmes might have contributed to the fate of his ship by failing to provide proper ballast or to order the correct sails carried. Semmes was not simply “rather lucky,” as another officer put it, that the court of inquiry found for him; he had, unconsciously, manipulated it by the force of rhetoric.12 He would later, in June 1864, swim off from another sinking ship under his command and be promoted to admiral.

Semmes was reassigned as flag-lieutenant to the fleet commander, a duty he considered boring. But within six months—after General Winfield Scott’s successful landing at Vera Cruz and march to Jalapa on the road to Mexico City—excitement once again beckoned. Semmes was assigned to take a message from Washington through the military lines to the Mexican government. He was delighted. “There was romance in the idea!” On 28 April 1847, he left the Home Squadron to spend the remainder of the war with the Army.¹³ His account of the journey is spiced with vivid word pictures of the Mexican landscape and of the plant and animal life.¹⁴

General Scott was jealous of civilian interference in the war and took out his resentment on Semmes. Only after a sharp exchange of letters did the general finally permit the persistent Semmes, who could write more convincingly, to remain with the Army.¹⁵ When his mission “was suddenly brought to a close,” Semmes “had no thought of returning to the squadron” because the Army was “on the eve of commencing our glorious campaign.”¹⁶ To fight with the Army was much more exciting than blockade duty.

Semmes was, as he said, an onlooker. He observed, he took notes—his memoirs are based more on these notes than on memory—and ever inquisitive, he described and characterized all that he saw. As a Catholic, Semmes was drawn to the Cathedral in Puebla, and his description reveals a clear understanding of architecture and its symbolism. In Mexico, he seemed to discern social inequities more clearly than he did in Alabama, and he deplored the squalor of Mexican poverty, which he blamed on the government and the country’s socioracial history.

But his favorite topic was people—beautiful women, leaders of men, and even the common sailor and soldier. A product of the age of romanticism and nationalism, Semmes firmly believed in the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race and the great-man theory of history.¹⁷ From all these observations, Semmes developed a view of history and of man’s role in it based on a concept of the proper order of things, in which the higher element had the responsibility to protect and nourish the lower element, but not the power to coerce it. By the end of the Mexican War his mind-set had matured; he was the man who in thought and action would become the world-renowned captain of the CSS Sumter and the CSS Alabama. Although his was not a unique attitude in the mid-nineteenth century—he shared it with English aristocrats, French notables, and thousands of Americans, North and South—his age of preparation was complete, and the stage for greatness was set.

In 1849, the peacetime Navy placed Lieutenant Raphael Semmes on extended leave. He moved his family to Mobile, Alabama, and settled into a quiet practice of law and reflection upon his Mexican experiences. Using his wartime notes, and adding long digressions that grew from his reflections, he published Service Afloat and Ashore during the Mexican War in 1851. It became a best seller, as much perhaps because of its flowing and flowery language as for its revelations of Americans at war.

The U.S. Navy seemed to have forgotten Semmes. But his name gradually rose on the promotion list. On 8 October 1855, he was promoted to commander, effective 14 September 1855.18 Recalled to duty the following month, Semmes began the longest continuous stretch of active naval service of his career. For ten months he commanded the mail steamer Illinois, the last U.S. ship to which he was assigned. In December 1856, Commander Semmes became lighthouse inspector of the 3d District, conveniently based in Mobile. From 1858 into 1861, Semmes served as secretary to the Lighthouse Board in Washington, D.C.¹⁹

Viewing the developing secession crisis from the nation’s capital as it moved to its climax, Semmes rejected the arguments of early advocates of secession. Although he considered the tariff to be economic suppression of the South and the abolition movement a violation of states’ rights, he expected a solution to be reached, and he believed that Stephen A. Douglas’s popular sovereignty theory was the best possible solution. A Douglas man in the election of 1860, he regarded the election of Abraham Lincoln as President as the final blow to the Union. Semmes thus became a secessionist; his “Alabama” mind-set was complete.

If his change of mind about secession was difficult, his personal break with the U.S. Navy was even more soul wrenching. “Civil war,” he wrote, “is a terrible crucible through which to pass character.”²⁰ Loyalty to the flag, love of country, old friendships, career advancement and security, care of family—all of these practical factors shouted for Semmes to remain in the U.S. Navy and loyal to the United States, but his personal psychology demanded allegiance to his state. During the congressional session of 1860–1861, Semmes informed members from Alabama of his “intention of retiring from the Federal Navy, and of taking service with the South” should the state of Alabama join other Southern states in secession. Although the Alabama secession vote passed on 11 January 1861, Semmes waited for more than a month to resign his position.

During that interlude, Semmes was promoted from secretary of the Lighthouse Board to membership on the board, which he accepted on 12 February 1861. Only two days later, he received a telegram from the Committee on Naval Affairs of the Provisional Government in Montgomery, Alabama, requesting him to “repair to this place at your earliest convenience.” Semmes replied on the same day, “I will be with you immediately.” The next day, he resigned his commission in the U.S. Navy and informed the new secretary of the Lighthouse Board that because of that resignation he was “no longer a member” of the board. All official commitment to the U.S. government thus dissolved, Mr. Raphael Semmes took a sorrowful leave from his wife and children on 16 February and embarked by train for Montgomery.

Semmes arrived in the provisional capital on 19 February 1861, consulted with the chairman of the Committee on Naval Affairs and with provisional President Jefferson Davis, and departed for New York on 21 February. His first duty for the Confederacy, on Davis’s request, was a shopping trip in the North. En route, he stopped in Washington to inspect machinery in the U.S. Arsenal and to recruit skilled machinists, so scarce in the South. In New York City, where he arrived on 5 March, he purchased “large quantities of percussions caps,” which he sent without disguise to Montgomery, “made contracts for batteries of light artillery, powder, and other munitions,” and purchased a complete set of machinery for rifling cannon. Although he found no ships suitable for conversion to warships, he did manage to visit his eldest son, who was a cadet at West Point.21

Semmes returned by ship to Savannah, Georgia, and thence by train to Montgomery, where he arrived on 4 April 1861, just eight days prior to the firing on Fort Sumter, South Carolina. It had been a whirlwind trip and more successful than those of other Southern agents sent on similar missions.²²

In Montgomery, Semmes found the Confederate government to be organized on a regular basis. Stephen R. Mallory, a former chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Naval Affairs, was Secretary of the Navy. He was one of only two of the original Davis cabinet appointees to serve throughout the war, and he directed the Confederacy’s Navy and naval policy with a firm hand.²³ He and Semmes worked well together, and Mallory had the good sense to allow Semmes complete freedom during the cruises of the Sumter and Alabama. Mallory immediately appointed Semmes a commander in the Confederate States Navy and chief of the Lighthouse Bureau.

With the firing on Fort Sumter on 12 April 1861, Semmes realized it was “time to leave the things of peace to the future.” He went immediately to Mallory and urged the use of privateers to strike at the enemy’s commerce. Semmes saw no contradiction in recommending the use of “licensed pirates,” as he had called privateers early in the Mexican War, because now his country was the weak naval power fighting an enemy with an established navy. Mallory agreed fully with the commander, and, on 17 April, President Davis announced his intentions to issue letters of marque.

But Semmes did not intend to serve as a privateer; he asked Mallory at the same time for command of a regularly commissioned Confederate naval vessel suitable for commerce raiding. Mallory despondently showed him a file on a ship examined by a naval board in New Orleans, Louisiana, and condemned as unfit for commerce raiding. Examining the file, Semmes saw that, with modifications, the ship could be converted into a suitable raider. “Give me that ship,” he said to the secretary. “I think I can make her answer the purpose.” Thus was conceived the CSS Sumter, the first war vessel of the Confederate States Navy.24

Semmes arrived in New Orleans on 22 April and immediately took possession of his new ship. He found her to be “as unlike a ship of war as possible. . . . Still, . . . her lines were easy and graceful, and she had a sort of saucy air about her.”²⁵ It took two months of hard work to convert the ship. Semmes removed the superstructure, provided crew and officer quarters, acquired ordnance from as far away as the Norfolk Navy Yard, designed new gun carriages, bought clothing, and recruited a crew.

The officers, all natives of Confederate states, received their assignments to the Sumter from Mallory’s office, and all except the marine officer had experience in the U.S. Navy. The enlisted crew consisted of seventy-two seamen and twenty marines. The seamen, as was the custom in most navies, were recruited from among sailors who were between voyages and happened to be in the New Orleans port. Only about half a dozen were native Southerners, a situation that reflected the scarcity of seafaring men in the South and imposed upon Semmes special problems of discipline and constant recruiting in neutral ports. Most of those recruited in New Orleans were English and Irish, whom Semmes considered generally to be good sailors.²⁶

Finally, on 3 June 1861, Semmes formally commissioned the converted packet as the CSS Sumter, named after the fort in Charleston harbor. She was a small screw steamer of 499 tons, length only 152 feet, beam 27 feet, and draft 12 feet. She had a coal capacity for only eight days; her propeller was stationary and therefore a drag when she was under sail only; her top speed under sail and steam was from ten to twelve knots.

After some trial runs, Semmes dropped the Sumter downriver, where he put the crew through training exercises and awaited an opportune moment to run the Union blockade. Drawing on his own blockading experiences, he knew the Union blockader had large stretches of water to watch. Given a few miles distance, Semmes calculated that the Sumter could make a fairly safe run for the open waters, so he stationed a small boat just beyond Pass à I’Outre to signal the location of the blockader. On 30 June 1861, with a little luck and superior seamanship, he narrowly escaped the faster and larger USS Brooklyn.

In the evening, as the sun was setting, Semmes stood on the poop deck and mused about the past few months—how “hurried and confused” they had been, how “family ties were severed,” and how war was “arraying a household against itself.” He thought of the American flag flying on board the Brooklyn and was startled to realize how he “now hated that flag!”27 Nonetheless, he slept soundly that night.

Free of the USS Brooklyn, Semmes was beginning a new naval career for which his previous naval experience had little prepared him. He knew that destruction of the enemy’s merchant fleet was common naval duty, and he knew the glory that it had brought to his predecessors during the American Revolution and the War of 1812; he also knew that he had no open home ports where he could take his prizes for adjudication and that neutral nations prohibited the adjudication of prizes taken by either belligerent. That was a problem he would have to solve in his own way. There were other problems: to develop a technique of prize taking, to finance and provision his own ships and crew, to deal with neutral port authorities, and to sail in strange seas. He was fully aware of the dangers implicit in Mallory’s twofold strategy. If he succeeded in destroying Northern merchant ships and in luring federal vessels from blockade duty, he risked his own destruction by those faster and larger warships. The success of his mission and the safety of his ship and crew depended more on Semmes’s seamanship, cunning, and innovation than it did on his naval experiences.

The study of law was Semmes’s most useful prewar experience for his career as a commerce raider. It enabled him to master the intricacies of international law concerning belligerent and neutral maritime rights and obligations. At sea during the war, he consulted his ever handy copy of 3Phillimore, Commentaries upon International Law, and presented legal briefs to neutral port authorities. He successfully argued that as a belligerent he had rights to buy coal and provisions and to repair his vessel. Otherwise, he never could have kept constantly at sea for over two years.

Legal knowledge, however, was not enough. Semmes was also an excellent naval strategist who possessed the nautical knowledge necessary to execute that strategy. He knew that prevailing winds and currents created crossroads at sea for merchantmen carrying goods between certain markets and the fishing and whaling grounds where other ships congregated. The crossroads-at-sea just off the south end of Cuba served Semmes in the same strategic sense that Marye’s Heights above the Rappahannock River in Fredericksburg, Virginia, served General Robert E. Lee in December 1862. In two days off Cuba in the CSS Sumter, Semmes captured seven Northern merchantmen. When Semmes commissioned the Alabama off the Azores in September 1862, he immediately sought out the New England whaling fleet, whose Azores season ended about 1 October. Within three weeks, he destroyed eight whalers that sat low in the water, heavy with the season’s catch. Then he changed his hunting grounds to the Newfoundland fishing banks. He followed the strategy of sea-position throughout his career as a commerce raider.

Semmes’s successful strategy was adopted by other Confederate commerce raiders. The total number of Northern merchant vessels destroyed by Confederate ships was about two hundred.28 On board the Sumter and the Alabama, Semmes captured eighty-seven ships, of which he burned sixty-two, converted one into a Confederate raider (the Conrad into the Tuscaloosa, in June 1863), and sold another (the Sea Bride, in August 1863).

Semmes accounted for about 32 percent of all Union commercial ships lost during the war; however, that is not the full story. He captured 85 percent of his total prizes during the first year of his twenty-two-month cruise in the Alabama²⁹; the Florida’s thirty-three and the Georgia’s five prizes after August 1863 were mostly coastal ships. Thus, by early fall in 1863, Semmes had driven the bulk of the U.S. merchant ships from the busiest sea-lanes. Many that he did not capture were sold to neutrals, and those still flying the Stars and Stripes were old or worthless craft used in coastal service.³⁰

Marine insurance rates increased by a factor of three between 1861 and 1863. Cargo owners naturally shipped by neutral vessels, so much so that in November 1862, only 20 of 150 vessels loading in New York for European ports were under the U.S. flag; by 1864 neutral flags were “almost monopolizing European trade.” More than half of the U.S. merchant fleet was lost during the Civil War, either directly to Confederate raiders (one hundred thousand tons) or indirectly by sale to neutrals (eight hundred thousand tons).³¹ Semmes was mostly responsible for the success of one part of Mallory’s strategy—to drive the Northern merchant fleet from the seas.

For the other half of that same strategy—to lure Union naval vessels from their blockading stations—Semmes was notably less successful. Counting both the Sumter and the Alabama voyages, records reveal that, from July 1861 to June 1864, Semmes encountered at most only ten to fifteen U.S. naval vessels, and none of these was from the blockading fleet. This was true partly because Semmes’s mission was to sink commercial ships, not to fight naval battles. Despite these orders, Semmes did challenge and sink the USS Hatteras in January 1863. He searched for the USS Wyoming, which was seeking him in the China Seas in October 1863, but the two never met.³²

Finally, in a kind of death wish, he sailed from Cherbourg, France, on 21 June 1864, precisely to fight the Kearsarge, but none of the Northern naval vessels was on blockade duty. Semmes’s failure to help lift the Union blockade was more a failure of Mallory’s strategy and of Confederate diplomacy, and particularly of Union naval policies, than of Semmes. Rapid expansion permitted the U.S. Navy, without weakening the blockade, to create the West Indies Fleet that guarded the Gulf area and occasionally sent ships to search the Brazilian coast for Confederate raiders; individual ships were dispatched to foreign stations such as the China Sea and, especially, to European waters. Union strategy against Confederate raiders, however, was to chase and destroy them, not to escort or defend Northern merchant ships, and this strategy failed as completely as did Mallory’s. The Union Navy did not capture even one Confederate raider on the open high seas. Civil War naval strategy concerning commerce raiders was a failure on both sides because the North did not protect its commerce, nor did the South lure the blockaders away from the Confederacy.

The cruises of the Sumter and Alabama are detailed completely,33 but no account explains how Semmes—a naval officer with much more sea time on coastal waters than on the high seas—could convert himself into the most proficient of commerce-destroying sea captains. In fact, his experiences on board the Sumter served as training for his much longer and more varied Alabama cruise.

Semmes had to develop a method of disposing of his prizes. Despite restraints imposed on him by the Union blockade of Southern ports and the refusal of neutrals to adjudicate belligerent prizes, Semmes did not want to destroy his captures. His first victim was the Golden Rocket, taken off the southeastern tip of Cuba on 3 July 1861 and burned. In the log he recorded simply that “she made a beautiful bonfire,” but the moment was so etched in his mind that, seven years later, he recounted every vivid detail. Despite the thrill of his first capture, he found his duty “a painful one to destroy so noble a ship,” and his officers felt badly enough about the burning ship to take up a collection for the Golden Rocket’s captain.³⁴

Semmes refused to destroy any of his next ten captures. Instead, he tested the neutrality prohibitions against adjudicating prizes. He took six into a Cuban harbor in the hope that the Spanish colonial officials would intern them until a Confederate court of admiralty could adjudicate them, and he took one to Venezuela in an effort to impose his will on a weak neutral. In both places, he submitted a lawyer’s brief claiming that the neutral’s position was, in fact, unneutral because Confederate captains had no ports to take their prizes to, whereas the federal captains had their own open ports. His pleas, however, fell on deaf ears, and he claimed the United States “not only bullied the little South American republics, but the whole world besides.”³⁵

Semmes had learned his lesson. Thereafter, he constituted himself to be a Confederate court of admiralty, and he tried, condemned, bonded, or released all merchant ships he hailed, in accordance with the rules established by the Declaration of Paris in 1856: neutral cargo, except contraband, is free from seizure even when in an enemy ship; and enemy cargo, except contraband, is free from seizure when in a neutral ship. Of course, not all cases were as clear-cut as the Paris declaration would have them be—cargoes of mixed ownership and falsified papers gave Semmes difficulty. Without the leisure of contemplative time, Semmes made some debatable decisions, but he never again took a captured vessel into a neutral port. Although he regretted the necessity of burning ships, he performed his duty unhesitatingly, and his officers never took up a collection for another victim’s captain.

In order to bring cases before his floating court of admiralty, Semmes developed his own techniques of capture. Seagoing merchant and war vessels were unmarked and similar in configuration. Only the flag indicated nationality. When Semmes sighted a sail, he gave chase under a British, French, or U.S. flag. If the merchantman did not haul to, Semmes fired a round or two across her bow, then hailed her captain to ask the ship’s name and nationality. Only then did he raise the Confederate flag and order the ship to receive a boarding party. The boarding officer, usually a lieutenant, was ordered to bring the merchant captain with his ship’s papers to Semmes’s cabin. After an examination of the papers, Semmes questioned the captain and rendered his decision. If he condemned the ship, the crew and passengers, if any, were transferred to the Sumter, as were any usable supplies, such as food, fuel, clothing, and rigging. For all condemned ships, Semmes meticulously wrote a legal decision setting forth the evidence and the law.

Semmes’s very success created problems of adjudication. Out of fear of the Sumter and the Alabama, shippers began to use false papers of registry or of cargo ownership. In such a case Semmes consulted legal references such as Phillimore, carefully detailed the circumstances, and then recorded his decision. Here is an excerpt from Semmes’s Alabama journal, dated 6 July 1863: “ . . . at 3:30 A.M. hove to a ship with a shot, she having disregarded two blank cartridges. She proves to be the Express, of Boston, from Callao to Antwerp. . . . Captured her . . . fired her at about 10:30 A.M. and filled away on our course.” Noting that the French chargé d’affaires at Lima had certified the cargo to be neutral property, Semmes wrote the following legal justification for having destroyed the cargo:

This certificate fails to be of any value as proof, for two reasons: First it is not sworn to, and secondly, it simply avers the property to be neutral . . . instead of pointing out the owner or owners. First, a consul may authenticate evidence by his seal, but when he departs from the usual functions of a consul and becomes a witness he must give his testimony under oath like other witnesses. . . . Now, the presumption of law being that goods found in an enemy’s ship belong to the enemy, unless a distinct neutral character be given to them by pointing out the real owner by proper documentary proof, and as neither the bill of lading nor the certificate . . . amounts to proper documentary proof, the ship and cargo are both condemned . . . as a distinct neutral character is not impressed upon the property by proper evidence. I must act under the presumption of law. (See 3d Phillimore, 596.)36

This tactic of enforcing international law strictly, even in the face of cleverly falsified documents, led Northern shipowners to sell their vessels legitimately to neutral nationals, thus reducing Union commercial shipping.

Not all cases were as easily accepted by the victims as was the case of the Express. Later, on his return trip from Singapore, just off the Strait of Malacca on 24 December 1864, Semmes hove to “an American-looking bark, under English colors, with the name Martaban.”³⁷ Semmes ordered Master’s Mate George Fullam, an Englishman, to board her. Fullam considered the bark to be “suspicious looking” and soon ascertained that she was originally the Texan Star out of Houston. The captain, Samuel B. Pike, who spoke with a Maine accent, refused to board the Alabama because he claimed to be a British subject.

So, for the first and only time, Semmes boarded a victim. From all appearances—freshly repainted name; ship’s design; American captain, officers, and even “a black, greasy cook”—the transfer was recent and probably fraudulent. Although Captain Pike claimed the cargo to be neutral owned, there was no bill of sale and only the ordinary cargo bill of lading. The ship’s papers were freshly written in the same handwriting, even to the crews’ signatures. That was enough for Semmes. “I had no doubt,” he noted in the log, “that the transfer was fraudulent and captured and burned her.”

Semmes must have had some lingering doubt, however, especially because of the claim that the cargo was British owned. So he called Captain Pike into his cabin (Semmes typically getting in the last word on a cabin visit), placed him under oath, and asked if the transfer of the ship were bona fide. Pike then admitted that, out of fear of the Alabama, he had arranged “a sham sale in hopes of saving” his ship. Upon the “answer being recorded,” Semmes wrote, “the court adjourned.” Because the ship was American and there existed no legal evidence that the cargo was British owned, then, as in the Express case, Semmes had not violated a neutral’s rights. But, although Semmes had closed the case by adjourning the court, British public and official opinion was not satisfied.

The Martaban incident aroused adverse feelings among the English in Singapore.³⁸ The Chamber of Commerce of the Straits Settlement put the issue clearly when it petitioned the governor and asked “whether the capture and destruction of a vessel possessed of a certificate of British Registry is legal or justified because suspicions may be entertained that she is not bona fide the property of a British subject.”³⁹ This outcry from the commercial circles of Singapore, despite the U.S. consul’s belief that the registry transfer was “a ‘bogus’ sale,” reflected their concern for the safety of investments in merchant ships acquired by transferring the registry from the United States to Great Britain. Captain David McDougal of the USS Wyoming wrote to Washington that “nearly all of the American vessels in the China Seas have changed flags.” When the Alabama had approached the Eastern waters, “fourteen American ships were sold in Calcutta in short order.”40

British concern spread from Singapore to England and on to Sir James Hope, vice-admiral of the English Atlantic Fleet. Citing the case of the Martaban, Sir James instructed officers under his command “to capture and send to England for adjudication in the admiralty court every vessel by which a British vessel, i.e., with legal British papers, is burned at sea.”⁴¹

This naval interpretation of the British Proclamation of Neutrality, according to the records, was never applied, but it reflected growing British concern over the Alabama’s destruction of ships on the high seas and, perhaps, the South’s failing fortunes of war as well. The fact that Semmes was legally correct in the Martaban case, as he had been in the Express incident, illustrates the difference between dealing with a weak neutral state (Belgian ownership of the Express cargo) and a strong one.

Semmes seems never to have known of Sir James Hope’s instruction because he never mentioned it in the Alabama’s log or in his memoirs. He did, however, know the difference between dealing with a weak as opposed to a strong neutral state—he learned it at the end of the Sumter cruise. After a rough and long Atlantic crossing, the little Sumter was leaking badly, food and provisions were low, and Semmes had only one thousand of his ten-thousand-dollar cruising fund left. She limped into the harbor of Cádiz, Spain, on 4 January 1862, to seek repair facilities, food and provisions, and time to receive funds from Confederate Commissioner William L. Yancy in London. The harbor officials received him coolly, forced him to justify every request by legal brief, and delayed responses while they consulted Madrid. Finally, after allowing him to repair the Sumter’s hull in a government-owned dry dock, they refused to allow him to remain in the harbor while awaiting funds from London. Disgusted with the Spanish treatment, Semmes blamed it on their fear of the United States and later noted “that all of the weak powers were timid, and henceforth, I rarely entered any but an English or French port.”⁴²

The Spanish officials’ delays in responding to Semmes’s request allowed him time to read and write. In January in Cádiz he read a copy of U.S. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles’s report to Congress, which prompted him, on 9 January 1862, to write a long letter to the Times of London.⁴³ In it, he identified Welles as “the Secretary of the Northern fragment of what was formerly known as the United States of America,” and noted that Welles wrote that the Sumter and Confederate privateers were engaged in “piratical warfare.” Rejecting Welles’s accusation of piracy, the Sumter commander refuted the charges. In his letter he employed logic and a style designed to appeal to English readers of the Times.

Mr. Welles . . . calls me a privateer. He knows better than this. Privateers sail under a letter of marque, but he knows that I have been regularly commissioned as a ship of war of the Confederate States. If Welles insists on calling all Confederates rebels, then he might criticize me as a rebel man of war. But, if I am this, so were all the ships of the American colonies commissioned by that Virginian, George Washington.

In referring to the Sumter, Welles listed those U.S. ships assigned to search for her. Among them was the USS San Jacinto, which violated English neutral rights by stopping HMS Trent on the high seas and forcibly removing John Slidell and James Mason. European pressure and British preparation for war forced the federal government to release the two Confederate diplomatic commissioners, and news of their release had reached Europe just days before Semmes was writing. “I feel honored,” Semmes wrote, “to have been pursued by six frigates, and one of them caught Messrs. Mason and Slidell instead of catching me.” This was an effective stroke of Semmes’s pen because it placed him and the English on the same side against the United States.

Also at Cádiz, twelve enlisted seamen deserted the Sumter, seduced, Semmes claimed, by the “agents, spies, and pimps” of the U.S. consul, but such problems were common to most ships in his day. Seamen signed on for a particular voyage, and most of them left the ship on completion of their contracts. At any given time, unemployed seamen in port cities throughout the world were ready to sign on board any ship. They had no allegiance to any flag. Semmes had a constant problem with his foreign seamen.

Although the Sumter’s crew were mostly non-Americans, they were homogeneous compared with the crew of the Alabama. By mid-cruise there were English, Irish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Oriental sailors on board the Alabama, and they were controlled only by strict discipline. Semmes read the Confederate Articles of War to the full crew every Sunday morning. Even so, he had to suppress a mutiny on 19 November 1862 while at Fort de France in Martinique.44 Semmes nevertheless developed a strong attachment to his crew and often moderated discipline with mercy. His crew, in return, respected the captain and affectionately referred to him as “Old Beeswax.” Semmes was particularly proud of the fact that of the twenty-five hundred men—officers, seamen, and prisoners—under his command from time to time, on board both ships, he “had not lost a single man by disease.”⁴⁵

On 17 January 1862, after the Cádiz governor, “a bull-head, stupid official,” refused to allow him to stay any longer, Semmes sailed out of the port and turned the Sumter’s bow toward the British base at Gibraltar. En route, the Sumter made her last captures, bonding one and burning the other,46 and she anchored in Gibraltar Bay early the next evening. This was the effective end of the Sumter cruise. From 30 June 1861 to 18 January 1862, she had captured eighteen enemy merchant vessels—seven burned, two bonded, eight lost to Cuban internment, and one recaptured by the enemy—and had overhauled thirty-four neutral ships. Unable to procure coal or repair the Sumter’s boilers, and blockaded variously by three or four U.S. warships, including the Kearsarge, Semmes finally abandoned the ship. In mid-April 1862, Semmes and several officers boarded a passenger steamer for England.

Semmes and John Macintosh Kell, his first lieutenant, took rooms together in Euston Square, London, where they remained through May. Semmes appreciated the “relaxation and ease” of London living compared with that of the past six months on board ship. Through James Mason, Semmes met many distinguished men—cotton brokers, shippers, shipbuilders—who had an economic interest in the Confederate cause. Normally a sharp judge of character, he misread their genial entertainment, flattery, and expressions of support for the Confederacy as reflecting British government policy. More important, he also conferred with James D. Bulloch and James North, Confederate naval purchasing agents, and learned of the recent sailing of the CSS Florida and the near readiness of the future CSS Alabama. Persuaded that no ship was available to him, however, Semmes decided to return immediately to the Confederate States and arrived at Nassau on 8 June 1862.⁴⁷

By pure coincidence, Semmes met another officer fresh from Richmond with copies of letters from Secretary Mallory, who thought Semmes was still in England. From the letters he learned that Mallory had nominated him for promotion to captain and appointed him to command the Alabama.⁴⁸ Fearful that the British would seize the ship before he could return to England, Semmes wrote to Bulloch and suggested that the Alabama be sent to some rendezvous point to await her newly assigned captain. Not knowing whether Bulloch received his letter, Semmes spent “several very anxious weeks” before securing passage back to England.

Meanwhile, Captain Bulloch received the letters of Mallory and Semmes at the same time and put into effect a plan to evade British neutrality laws. He sent the Alabama under British colors and a British captain to the Azores to await her captain, crew, munitions, and supplies. Both Bulloch and Semmes expended great effort to prove that the building, equipping, arming, and manning of the Alabama were done within the boundaries of the British neutrality laws. But neither ever understood that England had adopted a strict policy of neutrality, found her own domestic laws inadequate, and acted thereafter on policy and not on law. Semmes devoted thirty-two pages of a tightly written and logical argument in his Memoirs to prove that the Alabama was a legitimate warship of the Confederate States Navy and operated in an accepted mode of naval warfare.

The postwar negotiations between London and Washington, however, concerned not the ship herself, but her origins and the British obligation to prevent a ship intended for war use—regardless of how or where she might later be armed, manned, and equipped—from leaving British territory. As a matter of principle, the British government accepted in 1861 its own responsibility for preventing a ship from leaving British territory if it were built in England by a belligerent power and intended to war on an enemy. That principle, incorporated into the Treaty of Washington (1871), served as the basis for the 1873 Geneva Tribunal’s decision that Great Britain must pay an indemnity of $15,500,000 to the United States.49

Semmes, writing in 1867–1868, could not have known of the diplomatic principle accepted by England or that Great Britain, not the Alabama, was to be put on trial. Unfortunately, the writings of Semmes and Bulloch have influenced many scholars and still serve to cloud the origins and nature of the ship on whose decks Semmes would rise to greatness.

The Alabama sailed from England on 30 July 1862, several days before Semmes returned from Nassau (8 August 1862). He spent about a week gathering his Sumter officers and making financial arrangements for a cruise fund. Recalling his embarrassments in Cadiz, Semmes obtained a cruising fund, and there is evidence that he also had a “considerable sum of gold” in the ship throughout the cruise.⁵⁰ At no time while on board the Alabama did Semmes ever mention the need for money.

Bulloch had designed the ship, nursed her to completion, and now turned her over to Semmes, who saw her afloat for the first time on 20 August 1862 when he, his officers, and Bulloch arrived in the Azores. Semmes paid his great debt to Bulloch when he described the ship in words that convey across a hundred years his thrill and excitement: “Her model was of the most perfect symmetry, and she sat upon the water with the lightness and grace of a swan. She was barkentine rigged, with long lower masts, which enabled her to carry large fore- and aft-sails. . . . Her sticks were of the best yellow pine, that would bend in the gale like a willow wand, without breaking, and her rigging was of the best Swedish iron wire.” She had a lifting device to raise her propeller out of water to prevent drag when under sail. “She was a perfect steamer and a perfect sailing ship at the same time.”⁵¹

Semmes saw the Alabama as a love-partner, a home, and, once he took possession of her, he was pleased and legitimatized their affair. “I had surveyed my new ship as we approached with no little interest, as she was to be not only my home, but my bride, as it were, for the next few years, and I was quite satisfied with her external appearance.” Once on board, Semmes “was as much pleased with her internal appearance, and arrangements, as . . . with her externally.”52 The union was complete between man and ship, for that night Semmes slept in her bosom—a sound, restful, and peaceful sleep. It was a union that over the next twenty-two months would become ever more intimate as each learned more about the other, and they responded to each other’s demands.

By Saturday night, 23 August 1862, all supplies were transferred to the Alabama. On Sunday, in international waters where no nation had jurisdiction, Semmes commissioned the Alabama as a regular warship of the Confederate States Navy. He read to the assembled officers and seamen his commission as a captain and his orders. The seamen who had signed on as merchant seamen had no obligation to the Alabama, so Semmes spoke to them in terms of fighting the “battles of the oppressed” and a cruise of “excitement and adventure.” Then he offered them contracts at twice the going wage and “lots of prize money.” Aroused by the ceremony they had just witnessed and greedy for the double wages and prize money, eighty of the assembled ninety sailors—English, Dutch, Irish, French, Italian, and Spanish—signed on. Semmes “felt much relieved in consequence.”⁵³

During the next few days Semmes exercised his crew and gave them gunnery practice. He then turned to his task. On 5 September 1862, the Alabama made her first capture, a whaling vessel off the Azores. This was the first of the 54 ships that she would capture and of the 447 that she would speak or board.⁵⁴ Thus, the Alabama began her career as the most destructive commerce raider in history.

Her captain, however, had greater ambitions for her. Even on board the Sumter, Semmes had resented the reputation that he “never fights, only plunders.” When he first had seen the Alabama in England, still in the shipyard, he thought her to be “quite equal to encounter any of the enemy’s steam sloops.” Four months into the cruise he deliberately sought a battle with an enemy war vessel. Having learned from captured Northern papers that the United States was planning a combined operation under General N. P. Banks against Galveston, Texas, Semmes decided “to strike a blow” against the expedition in the Gulf of Mexico.

Accordingly, after recoaling and resting his crew at an island one hundred miles east of Vera Cruz—waters familiar to him from his Mexican War days—Semmes approached the Texas coast. On 11 January 1863, as he timed his speed to arrive before Galveston after dusk, the Alabama, turned huntress, flushed the enemy. Semmes soon realized that he had come upon three warships, not the Banks expedition. He tacked off, and, when one of the enemy ships got up steam to investigate, he tried to lure the enemy vessel away from her sister ships and to gain time for darkness to arrive.

Semmes had an advantage because he knew the ship was an enemy, but his antagonist proved to be the USS Hatteras, an eighteen-month-old iron steamer of eleven hundred tons, with airtight compartments. Still, the Alabama met her captain’s demands as the two ships, standing from thirty to one hundred yards apart, exchanged fire. The close distance offset the effect of the Hatteras’s light cannon; but the Alabama’s shells “entered the Hatteras at the waterline tearing off entire sheets of iron.” The water rushed in, and the Hatteras struck her flag. Within forty-five minutes, the first battle on the high seas between Confederate and Union warships was a victory for Semmes and his ship.55

Neither Semmes nor Homer C. Blake, captain of the Hatteras, made special comment on the fact that the Alabama’s shells tore off “sheets of iron” at the waterline of the Hatteras. Yet, the impact of the new ironclad ships on naval warfare was a constant topic among maritime people, especially after March 1862, when the ironclad CSS Virginia inflicted destruction on the Union’s wooden warships in Hampton Roads and then fought the ironclad USS Monitor to a draw. Eleven months later, the wooden Alabama destroyed a Union iron warship in an exchange of shots at close range! It was a remarkable feat, yet Semmes made no remark on it. Why not? His omission is a mystery unless one suspects that he did not want to cloud his later argument that the Kearsarge’s captain surreptitiously armored his ship by covering the vertical chains that hung from deck to waterline.

After the battle with the Hatteras, Semmes could find no prey in American waters, so, in compliance with Mallory’s suggestion, he decided to head for the East Indies. The life of a commerce raider was not easy. The loneliness of a sea captain, the strains of imposing discipline on a motley crew of several nationalities who depended on him for food and clothing, the challenges of rough seas, the thrills of the chase, and the climax of the capture all had a psychological effect on the introspective Semmes. He never confided in his men but wrote in his ship’s journal. In June 1863, frustrated by bad weather, Semmes noted that his two years afloat had “produced a constant tension of the nervous system, and a wear and tear of body that . . , no doubt, would be quite obvious to my friends at home.”

The introspection continued. On 8 September 1863, as he complained of the rolling and pitching in the sea, he confessed to his journal: “I am supremely disgusted with the sea and all its belongings. The fact is, I am past the age when men ought to be subjected to the hardships and discomforts of the sea.”⁵⁶

The man and the ship both needed rest and refurbishing. On 16 September 1863, they entered the anchorage at Simon’s Town, South Africa, where they spent eight days. The Alabama took on a full provision of coal, repaired her copper hull sheathings, and refitted her fore-topmast. Semmes strolled into the countryside beyond Simon’s Town, attended mass in the small Catholic church, and dined with British officers. Thus refreshed, ship, captain, and crew sailed from Simon’s Town on 24 September, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and headed into the Indian Ocean.⁵⁷ Semmes chose the southern route to avoid U.S. warships. The constant rainsqualls and gale winds imposed a dull routine on the man that tested his spirit and a stress on the ship that tested her timbers.

On the return voyage from the Far East, the chase that led to his last capture momentarily lifted the spirit of the still-despondent captain. The weather was good: the moon bright, the breeze gentle, and the sea smooth. “The Yankee worked like a good fellow to get away, piling clouds of canvas upon his ship . . . , but it was no use,” Semmes wrote. “When the day dawned we were within a couple of miles of him. It was the old spectacle of the panting, breathless fawn, and the inexorable stag-hound.” The thrill of the kill soon turned to despair, however, as Semmes read of Northern victories in recent New York newspapers that he had captured. “Might it not be,” Semmes mused, “that after all our trials and sacrifices, the cause for which we were struggling would be lost? . . . The thought was hard to bear.”

The ugly mood persisted. As he recrossed the equator northward toward Cherbourg, Semmes fell into a deep depression. Detached, he referred to himself in the third person—no longer the bright-eyed seaman who “gloated upon the spectacle” of the burning Golden Rocket—his first victim, thirty months earlier—and saw in those leaping flames the bright promise of a war easily won, but now only a man upon whom stress and strain “had laid, in the three years of war he had been afloat, a load of a dozen years on his shoulders.” And he saw his ship just as clearly. She was no longer the “inexorable stag-hound,” but only a “wearied foxhound, limping back after a long chase, footsore and longing for quiet and repose.” Above his visions of man and ship, he saw “shadows of a sorrowful future,” and knew that his cruise on board the Alabama was “drawing to a close” in defeat. The man and ship were beaten not by the enemy on the high seas, but by the seas themselves and by the enemy armies on land.58

The bent and beaten seaman had pushed his ship, his sea bride, too hard for too long. Answering his every demand, she had fought and defeated a U.S. war vessel; she had braved the storms of the Antarctic; she had survived the tropical waters of the East Indies. She had not been in dry dock since her launching into the River Mersey that fifteenth of May so many nautical miles ago in 1862. As she approached Cherbourg on 10 June 1864, she complained that her boilers were rusted and leaky, her copper sheathing was broken and dragging in the water, and her timbers—so tested by raging seas infested with icebergs—were wearied by her long journeys. Her captain, too, was exhausted, not only from the “vigils by night and by day,” but even more by a new mental attitude: the lost cause for which he had “so struggled, . . . the shadows of a sorrowful future,” his beloved Alabama’s cruise “drawing to a close.”

It was in this depth of depression that, on 11 June 1864, Semmes in his well-worn ship dropped anchor in Cherbourg. Two days later, he learned that Commodore Samuel Barron was in Paris. He immediately wrote to his superior officer: “My health has suffered so much from a constant and harassing service of three years almost continuously at sea, that I shall have to ask for relief [from command of the Alabama]”59 Semmes makes no mention of this request in any of his writings because the USS Kearsarge’s arrival in Cherbourg harbor on 14 June 1864 changed the situation. He had to reassess the Alabama’s role in the new circumstances and, having done so, realized the necessity for quick action. His depression left him as he prepared for the task at hand.

The Kearsarge, he knew, had been guarding Calais, France, where the CSS Rappahannock, held by the French government, was slowly rotting away.⁶⁰ Semmes could not permit his gallant staghound, tail between her legs, to be bottled up in Cherbourg while the Rappahannock was in Calais. What an inglorious end to a glorious cruise that would be! No, better that, once again, she ride the waves. She might win against the Kearsarge: the U.S. vessel possessed no obvious overwhelming advantage over the Alabama; and if she failed, she would die as she had lived—gloriously.

But Semmes was a realist as well as a romantic. He knew other U.S. warships would soon appear and confine him to Cherbourg harbor, as they had done at Gibraltar Bay. The Alabama’s only chance to get to sea ever again was to risk battle with the Kearsarge before the other ships arrived. It was a naval captain’s decision to take the proper action at the proper moment in order to keep his ship afloat and in service against the enemy.

Departing from custom, Semmes summoned his first lieutenant and announced: “Kell, I’m going to fight the Kearsarge. What do you think of it?” Kell dutifully reminded his captain that in target practice a few weeks earlier the gunpowder appeared to be weak and that one in three shells had failed to explode because of the defective fuses. Semmes replied, “I will take my chances of one in three.”⁶¹

Semmes required four days to take on 150 tons of coal. Sailors holystoned the Alabama’s decks, polished brass, and repaired or replaced the sails and riggings. In the meantime, word of the impending battle spread, and the curious and concerned took the train from Paris to Cherbourg. The artist Edouard Manet came and painted the Alabama in her death throes; photographers and newspaper reporters arrived to record the event. Confederate naval officers from Paris tried to join the crew but were denied by the French officials who were enforcing their neutrality obligations.

On Sunday morning, 19 June 1864, the Alabama, with her officers and crew in dress uniform, sailed out of Cherbourg harbor as if en route to a gala naval review. The crowds on quays, housetops, hills, boats, and even the breakwater cheered as the proud ship steamed toward the waiting Kearsarge. The Alabama, responding to the occasion, once again rode the water with the grace of a swan.

About three miles out of Cherbourg, Semmes called his crew together to hear a rousing speech, reminiscent of Napoleon’s First Order to his army in Italy. “The name of your ship has become a household word wherever civilization extends. Shall that name be tarnished by defeat? The thing is impossible.” And the sailors, aroused, at the word “defeat” answered, “Never! Never!” But Semmes himself was not so sure. Just earlier, he had asked his fifth lieutenant, “How do you think it will turn out today, Mr. Sinclair?” Surprised to be asked his opinion, the lieutenant replied, “I cannot answer the question, Sir, but can assure you the crew will do their full duty, and follow you to the death.” Turning away, Semmes responded, “Yes, that’s true.” Did Semmes mean that the crew would literally, that day, “follow him to the death”?62

The story of the battle has been repeated often, from that day to this, by eyewitnesses, participants, popular writers, and scholars.⁶³ The plain facts—the “whats” of the battle—are clear: the two ships met about seven miles at sea, still in view of the spectators. Semmes opened fire about a mile from the Kearsarge, and the force of the fight threw the two ships into a circular pattern. After about sixty-five minutes of intense and continuous firing, the Alabama was foundering, and she sank stern first at 12:24 P.M. The “whys” of the battle are disputed still because eyewitnesses and participants recounted the events from their own scope of vision, personal allegiance, and mental conditions.

Depression struck Semmes early in the battle because he could see that the Alabama’s shot and shell did little damage to the Kearsarge. He ordered his gunners to aim low so the shots would ricochet off the water into the enemy hull. Finally, about thirty minutes into the fight, a lucky shot embedded a shell into the Kearsarge’s sternpost. A cheer went up from the Alabama’s crew, but the shell failed to explode. As Semmes later wrote, that shell “was the only trophy they ever got of the Alabama! We fought her until she could no longer swim, and then we gave her to the waves.” As the ship began to settle stern first and the water engulfed the taffrails, Semmes and Kell prepared to abandon ship. Once again, Semmes identified with his ship. At almost the last moment, in a gesture of defiance against the Yankee victor, Semmes cast his sword—symbol of command—into the sea. Then he and Kell jumped and, side by side, swam away to avoid the vortex of the waters.

It was an emotional moment for the two men as they swam in the water and saw their ship go down. Gallant losers often gain more renown than the winners. Whose name do we remember from the Battle of Thermopylae? And whose name comes to mind when we hear the word “Waterloo”? Who remembers the name of the Kearsarge’s captain? It is from such stuff that legends grow.

Semmes later blamed his defeat on weak gunpowder and faulty percussion caps. But a sailor on board the Kearsarge claimed that the Alabama’s shells failed to explode because the gunners had not removed the lead caps, which exposed the time fuses that, in turn, would cause the shells to explode.64 If that were true, then the blame should be placed on the gunners, not the gunpowder. Only about 8.5 percent of the 370 shots fired by the Alabama’s gunners even touched the Kearsarge, and of those, more hit the rigging than the hull. Commander Bulloch, analyzing the loss, wrote that the Alabama crew had not been trained at judging distance nor had they practiced “firing at a visible target and noting effect.” He concluded that “the result of the action was determined by the superior accuracy of the firing from the Kearsarge.”⁶⁵

Semmes refused to criticize or lay blame on any of his officers or crew. Despite his earlier criticism of Jack Tar and the stern discipline imposed during the cruise, Semmes wrote of them after the battle with sentiments he had never before expressed: “When I looked upon my gory deck, toward the close of the action, and saw so many manly forms stretched upon it, with the glazed eye of death, or agonizing with terrible wounds, I felt as a father feels who has lost his children.”⁶⁶

It is true that of the twenty-one men who died in the action and in the waters, thirteen had served from the start of the cruise. It is also true that such a scene as the “gory deck” would impress itself on Semmes’s mind as indelibly as that of his sinking ship. Semmes’s memoirs are impressionistic, but do his impressions convey any less truth than Edouard Manet’s impressionistic painting of the end of the Alabama? No. Semmes could not blame his crew any more than he could blame his ship.

No one who is not a seaman can realize the blow that falls upon the heart of a commander, upon the sinking of his ship. It is not merely the loss of a battle—it is the overwhelming of his household, as it were, in a great catastrophe. The Alabama had not only been my battlefield, but my home, in which I had lived two long years, and in which I had experienced many vicissitudes of pain and pleasure, sickness and health.⁶⁷

And so Semmes sought other causes for the catastrophe. Just two days after the event, from Southampton, England, Semmes composed his official report to Commodore Barron. In it, he referred to the slight damage done by shells exploding against the Kearsarge’s hull, but only in the context of his order to use shot alternately with shells; he did not mention weak gunpowder. Two paragraphs later, simply as a matter of information, he noted that his officers who went alongside the enemy’s ship reported that “her midship section on both sides was thoroughly iron-coated” by perpendicular chains covered by a thin outer planking, but he made no critical comment about the iron coating. Ten days later, on 1 July, he wrote: “My defeat is due to two circumstances—the very thorough manner in which the enemy’s ship was protected by her chain armor and the deterioration . . . of my powder and fuses.” On 5 July, he placed the loss on the condition of the powder and referred to the Kearsarge’s chain armor only by indirection.

In neither letter did he criticize Captain John B. Winslow for applying the chain armor or for covering it with planking. He did comment in the letters that he was “overwhelmed” and “oppressed” with “mortification” for the defeat. His humiliation grew with the passing years, so that he wrote in his memoirs: “The plain fact is, without any varnish, the Kearsarge, though as effectively protected as if she had been armored with the best of iron plates, was to all appearance a wooden ship of war.” She really had “concealed armor.”68

The battle, then, had been unfair, won by deceit and trickery. The Semmes who wrote those words was not the naval officer who took the Sumter through the Union blockade in 1861, who destroyed more Northern merchantmen than any other raider captain in history, who guided and molded a motley crew of replacements and various nationalities into fighting men who, despite defeat, left him glory. No, it was not Captain Raphael Semmes of the CSS Alabama but a broken man whose pride and, perhaps, self-respect had been destroyed on that Sunday off Cherbourg in 1864.

Although his years of greatness ended when the Alabama sank, excitement still beckoned Semmes. After several weeks of paying off the crew and settling the Alabama’s affairs, he regained his self-confidence. He was feted by several pro-South British societies, one of which presented him with a new sword. Recovered from the ordeal of battle and his health restored, Semmes embarked on 3 October 1864 on his return journey to the Confederate States. Wartime necessity imposed on him a circuitous route: by ship to Matamoros, Mexico, thence to Brownsville, Texas, and by coach with a military escort to Shreveport, Louisiana, where he rested a few days and visited his son, whom he had last seen at West Point before the war. Traveling by horseback, eluding U.S. troops by sleeping in swamps and swimming rivers, the fifty-six-year-old Semmes, in good health and high spirits, greeted his wife and daughters in Mobile on 19 December.⁶⁹ Given the circumstances, a seven-and-a-half-week trip from England to Mobile was rather remarkable.

Semmes left his family on 2 January 1865 to report to Secretary Mallory in Richmond. For two weeks Semmes traveled in the wake of war, shocked at the “scene of havoc and destruction.” In Richmond, he was received by President Davis and both houses of Congress, promoted to admiral, and given command of the James River Fleet. The breakdown of Confederate society was almost more than Semmes could bear. His concepts of social structure, privilege and responsibility, honesty, and loyalty were shaken. “The Alabama had gone to her grave none too soon. If she had not been buried with honors at war, with the howling winds of the British Channel to sing her requiem, she might soon be handed over to the exultant Yankee, to be exhibited at Boston as a trophy of war.”70 Time had stopped for the Alabama; now safe in her grave, she remained in her proper place in Semmes’s concept of the order of things. It was a notion that, along with his family, sustained him during those last, horrible days of the war.

Semmes had to destroy his own fleet as Grant turned Lee’s right flank; he fled with his officers and sailors to Danville, Virginia, where President Davis appointed him a brigadier general in the Confederate States Army. At the end of the war, he was with General Joseph E. Johnston in North Carolina and accepted that unusual military convention offered by General William T. Sherman to Johnston’s troops. Later, he used its particular terms to refute charges of piracy and, after a four-month imprisonment, gained a pardon from President Andrew Johnson.

Forbidden from practicing law during the period of reconstruction, Semmes sustained himself and his family by teaching in an academy that later became Louisiana State University, editing a newspaper in Memphis, and lecturing on his wartime experiences. He also wrote the 833-page Memoirs of Service Afloat during the War Between the States (1869). He completed his life in Mobile as a lawyer, appropriately specializing in international law and maritime affairs. In 1877, short by a month of being sixty-eight years old, he died at Point Clear, his second residence, on the east side of Mobile Bay. The citizens of Mobile declared a full day of mourning, during which cannon sounded every half hour. After a military burial in the Catholic cemetery, Semmes had rejoined the Alabama.

What kind of man was Raphael Semmes? In one sense he was very ordinary, a typical product of his time. But he was also an extraordinary man because he tempered romanticism with the discipline of a naval career, and balanced nationalism with the logic of a legal mind. He accepted the decisions of the battlefield and adjusted to life after the Confederacy, but he always remained convinced that the South was constitutionally right. He also managed to retain, despite the Civil War, the mind-set about the proper order of things that he developed during the Mexican War.

As commanding officer of the Sumter and the Alabama, he gained world renown as a romantic sea raider, but he also applied imagination and resourcefulness to the unpleasant job that wartime circumstances assigned him. Whatever the task, he threw himself into it with conviction and intelligence. Imagery dominated his moods, reinforcing his aloofness as a sea captain and fostering occasional mental depressions that led him to identify with his ship so as to become one with her. If history associates “Semmes and the CSS Alabama,” it is right; and if historians have romanticized the man and the ship, they are also right, because that is the way Semmes imagined himself—as one with her on a great adventure.

NOTES

1. W. Adolphe Roberts, Semmes of the Alabama (New York, 1938), 282–84.

2. George W. Dalzell, The Flight from the Flag (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1940), 237–48.

3. United States, Department of the Navy, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion (hereafter cited as ORN), ser. 2, 2:151, Mallory to Davis, first annual report, 27 February 1862. Also, see Warren F. Spencer, The Confederate Navy in Europe (University, Ala., 1983), 1–4, for the circumstances that necessitated Mallory’s naval policy.

4. The Davis proclamation is in ORN, ser. 2, 3:96–97; the Lincoln proclamation is in James D. Richardson, comp., A Compilation of Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1897, 10 vols. (New York, 1896–1899), 7:3215. For the early French-English consultation, see Lynn M. Case and Warren F. Spencer, The United States and France: Civil War Diplomacy (Philadelphia, 1970), 50–57, and 59 for the French proclamation of neutrality. The British proclamation of neutrality is in Ephraim Douglas Adams, Great Britain and the American Civil War, 2 vols. (New York, 1925), 1:94–95.

5. For a more detailed discussion of the European neutrality proclamations and their effects on the Confederate Navy, see Spencer, Confederate Navy in Europe, 8–10, 212–16.

6. For Seward’s reactions to the neutrality proclamation, see Norman B. Ferris, Desperate Diplomacy: William H. Seward’s Foreign Policy, 1861 (Knoxville, Tenn., 1976), 33–54, passim, and Case and Spencer, United States and France, 71–72.

7. For Semmes’s early life, see Roberts, Semmes, 11–27, and John McIntosh Kell, Recollections of a Naval Life (Washington, D.C., 1900), 278–79. For his naval assignments, see Records of the Bureau of Naval Personnel, Record Group (RG) 24, National Archives, rolls 4–7, 9 (hereafter cited as Records of Naval Personnel).

8. For Semmes’s naval leaves and promotion, see Records of Naval Personnel, rolls 5, 6. For his Poinsett services, see Harper Allen Gosnell, Rebel Raider (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1948), 4–5.

9. Roberts, Semmes, 18.

10. These quotes are from Raphael Semmes, Service Afloat and Ashore during the Mexican War (Cincinnati, 1851), 80–82. For the Mexican War and the Navy’s role in it, see K. Jack Bauer, The Mexican War, 1846–1848 (New York, 1974), especially chap. 7; Robert Selph Henry, The Story of the Mexican War (New York, 1950), and Charles L. Dufour, The Mexican War (New York, 1968), especially chap. 23. All of these authors cite Semmes, Service Afloat and Ashore, as an eyewitness account. It is difficult to discern whether Semmes reflects his ideas as of the time of the events or as of the time he wrote (1849–1850). Even in the latter case, this work reflects his ideas as a result of the Mexican War and as he held them prior to secession.

11. Semmes, Service Afloat and Ashore, 76.

12. Semmes’s report is in ibid., 93–99. The critical comment is by Gosnell, Rebel Raider, 6.

13. Semmes, Service Afloat and Ashore, 158–96, passim. The quote is on 159, and the letters are on 159–61. Semmes’s duty with the Army is also covered in Edward S. Wallace, General William Jenkins Worth (Dallas, 1953), 136–49, passim. Wallace cites Semmes’s work frequently but supplements his accounts of Semmes with other original sources.

14. Semmes, Service Afloat and Ashore, 168, 169.

15. For the exchange of letters, see ibid., 198–202.

16. Ibid., 302.

17. See, in order, ibid., 255, 256, 379, 281, 282–83, 379

18. This and the following information are in Records of Naval Personnel, roll 7, and “Treasury Department Collection of Confederate Records,” publication No. 19, National Archives.

19. “Treasury Department Collection.” The U.S. government took over the lighthouses from private owners in 1787; the Lighthouse Board, established in 1852, was under the Treasury Department; the Lighthouse Service, established in 1910 in the Department of Commerce, was transferred to the U.S. Coast Guard in 1939.

20. Raphael Semmes, Memoirs of Service Afloat during the War between the States (Baltimore, 1869), 72.

21. Ibid., 86–88. The younger Semmes later served as a major in the Confederate army.

22. For the purchasing mission of Lieutenant James North and for the travels of James D. Bulloch, see Spencer, Confederate Navy in Europe, 16–17, 19–20.

23. The best historical treatment of Mallory is J. T. Durkin, Stephen R. Mallory: Confederate Navy Chief (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1954).

24. The story of the birth, conversion, and fate of the CSS Sumter has been thoroughly detailed in Charles Grayson Summersell, The Cruise of the C.S.S. Sumter (University, Ala., 1965), and need not be repeated in this essay.

25. The quotes in this section all come from Semmes, Memoirs, 96–118, passim.

26. Ibid., 123–25.

27. Ibid., 121

28. Dalzell, Flight from the Flag, 240.

29. Ibid., 137; and Roberts, Semmes, Appendix II, 282–84.

30. Dalzell, Flight from the Flag, 247.

31. Ibid., 241, 247 (“ . . . the only business American bottoms got consisted of evil-smelling, offensive cargoes that neutral vessels did not want”).

32. ORN, ser. 1, 2:777–79.

33. For the CSS Sumter cruise, see Summersell, Cruise of C.S.S. Sumter, and Gosnell, Rebel Raider; for the two best secondary accounts of the CSS Alabama, see Norman C. Delaney, John McIntosh Kell of the Raider Alabama (University, Ala., 1973), and The Journal of George Townley Fullam, edited and annotated by Charles G. Summersell (University, Ala., 1973). Also, see the works of William Stanley Hoole: Four Years in the Confederate Navy: The Career of Captain John Low on the C.S.S. Fingal, Florida, Alabama, Tuscaloosa, and Ajax (Athens, 1964), and The Logs of the C.S.S. Alabama and the C.S.S. Tuscaloosa 1862–1863 (University, Ala., 1972).

34. Sumter log, ORN, ser. 1, 1:695; Semmes, Memoirs, 128–29; and Kell, Recollections of Naval Life, 150.

35. Semmes, Memoirs, 161–62. Summersell, Cruise of C.S.S. Sumter, 60–71, 80–82, details these two incidents.

36. Alabama log; ORN, ser. 1, 2:755.

37. Semmess actions and reasons for his decision in the famous Martaban case are taken from the Alabama log, ibid., 792, and Semmes, Memoirs, 717–19, where he acknowledges the cargo to have been neutral owned, but without legal evidence. The case is presented fully in Summersell, Journal of George Fullam, 166–69. The accuracy of Semmes’s Memoirs account is confirmed in “Statement of Samuel B. Pike . . . ,” 30 December 1863, Governor’s Papers: Miscellaneous Letters, Public Records Office (PRO), Singapore. I am indebted to my former colleague at Old Dominion University, Harold S. Wilson, for sharing with me his research notes from the Public Records Office, Singapore, and the Straits Times, Singapore.

38. Straits Times, 2 January 1864.

39. Chamber of Commerce to Captain Burn, 30 December 1863, Governor’s Papers: Misc. Letters, PRO, Singapore.

40. In order, U.S. consul to U.S. State Department, 8 January 1864, RG 59: Despatches from the U.S. Consuls in Singapore, M-464, roll 2, National Archives; McDougal to Welles, 22 October 1863, ORN, ser. 1, 2:474; U.S. Consul to Seward, 10 January 1864, RG 59: Despatches from the U.S. Consuls in Calcutta, M-464, n. 3, National Archives.

41. Sir James Hope to Charles M. Morris (commanding officer of the CSS Florida), undated, enclosed in Morris to Mallory, St. George, Bermuda, 21 June 1864, ORN, ser. 1, 3:616.

42. Semmes, Memoirs, 304. Semmes never entered a port in England, only colonial English ports. Summersell, Cruise of C.S.S. Sumter, 146–51, details Semmes’s experiences while at Cadiz. Also, see log of the Sumter, ORN, ser. 1, 1:734–37, and Semmes’s correspondence while at Cádiz, ORN, ser. 1, 1:638–53. The Spanish did revoke the leave order, but Semmes in his fury refused to read it.

43. The letter is in ORN, ser. 1, 1:640–43, and appeared in the Times (London), 17 January 1862.

44. Summersell, Journal of George Fullam, 54; Delaney, John Kell, 137–38; and Semmes, Memoirs, 511–13.

45. Semmes, Memoirs, 750–51, 763–64; and Delaney, John Kell, 174.

46. Sumter log, ORN, ser.1, 1.737; Semmes, Memoirs, 306–46. The best secondary account of the Sumter at Gibraltar and of her later fate is Summersell, Cruise of C.S.S. Sumter, 152–78. Also, see Spencer, Confederate Navy in Europe, 34–37, for the Sumter’s role in Confederate naval affairs in Europe.

47. Semmes, Memoirs, 375–81.

48. Semmes, Memoirs, 351–53. For Confederate confusion concerning Alabama command assignment, see Spencer, Confederate Navy in Europe, 48–55, and for the ship’s preparation and sailing, 55–58. For an evaluation of Semmes’s officer roster, see ibid., 58–60. Spencer’s account is based largely on James D. Bulloch, The Secret Service of the Confederate States in Europe, 2 vols. (Liverpool, England, 1883); Frank J. Merli, Great Britain and the Confederate Navy, 1861–1865 (Bloomington, Ind., 1970); and various documents in ORN, ser. 1, vol. 1, and ser. 2, vol. 2.

49. Spencer, Confederate Navy in Europe, 8–10, 212–16, and passim.

50. Bulloch to Mallory, 21 July 1862, ORN, ser. 2, 2:336; and Arthur Sinclair, Two Years on the Alabama, 3d ed. (Boston, 1896), 127.

51. Semmes, Memoirs, 402–5.1 use Semmes’s dimensions of the ship, which are given in round figures. It is through his eyes that we must meet the Alabama.

52. Ibid., 408–13.

53. Bulloch’s report to Mallory, ORN ser. 1, vol. 1, 777, and Semmes, Memoirs, 413.

54. Summersell, Journal of George Fullam, Appendix, 197–98.

55 . The battle is described by Lieutenant Commander Homer C. Blake, USN, in his report to Secretary Welles, ORN, ser. 1, 2:19–21; Semmes’s firsthand account is in ibid., 721–22, and his later one in his Memoirs, 545–52. The two captains differed on the distance between the ships during the battle, Semmes giving a range of two- to five-hundred yards, while Blake gave twenty-five to one hundred yards. A sailor from the Hatteras as confirmed Blake’s figures, so I have used the shorter distance.

56. ORN, ser. 1, 2:753, 764.

57. Ibid., 765–67.

58. These and subsequent quotations are from Semmes, Memoirs, in order, 748, 749–50, and 746, 756, 765.

59. Semmes to Samuel Barron, Commodore, CSN, 13 June 1864, ORN, ser. 1, 3:651; Barron to Semmes, draft, 14 June 1864, Whittle Papers, Norfolk Public Library, folder X, no. 7. The commodore had already selected Commander Thomas J. Page to succeed Semmes.

60. Spencer, Confederate Navy in Europe, 191–92.

61. Kell, Recollections of Naval Life, 245. In 1883, a newspaper report quoted Kell as saying that Semmes had told him: “I have sent for you to discuss the advisability of fighting the Kearsarge” (Alfred I. Branham, reporter, reprinted in booklet form, “290”: Story of the Sinking of the Alabama, 1930). Either version could be correct, although Semmes was not in the habit of discussing ship operations with the officers.

62. Sinclair, Two Years, 275–76.

63. The best accounts remain those by participants and by Bulloch. Captain Semmes rendered an impressionistic report, ORN, ser. 1, 3:649–51, and an even more subjective account in his Memoirs, 751–65; Captain Winslow’s reports were matter-of-fact, ORN, ser. 1, 3:59–82, especially 79–81; Lieutenant Arthur Sinclair of the Alabama, writing almost thirty years after Semmes, gave a subjective yet amazingly honest account in Sinclair, Two Years, 259–91; and Commander Bulloch, writing with the aid of documents, including the two captain’s reports, presented an analytical and balanced account in Secret Service, 1:277–93. For accounts of eyewitnesses, see George T. Sinclair to Barron, Cherbourg, 20 June 1864, Whittle Papers, folder X, no. 9, and William M. Leary, Jr., “The Alabama vs. the Kearsarge,” American Neptune 29, no. 3 (1969): 167–68fF. Excellent illustrations are in Norman C. Delaney, “Showdown at Cherbourg,” Civil War Times Illustrated 15, no. 3 (June 1976): 16–21. The best secondary accounts are Delaney, John Kell, 164–68, and Summersell, Journal of George Fullam, 190–96. Other good secondary accounts are Roberts, Semmes, 195–211, and Edward Boykin, Ghost Ship of the Confederacy: The Story of the Alabama and her Captain, Raphael Semmes (New York, 1957), 344–84. For the diplomacy of the pre- and postbattle days, see Case and Spencer, United States and France, 509–15.

64. Delaney, John Kell, 170, citing a newspaper report of the battle.

65. Bulloch, Secret Service, 1:279.

66. Semmes, Memoirs, 763.

67. Ibid.

68. In order: Semmes to Barron, 21 June 1864, ORN, ser. 1, 3:650; Semmes to Slidell, 1 July 1864, and to Barron, 5 July 1864, ibid., 663, 664; and Semmes, Memoirs, 754, 761, 762.

69. The story of the journey is based on Semmes, Memoirs, 790–98.

70. Ibid., 801.

FURTHER READING

NOTES