ships were hunting the Alabama. Huge
crowds came to see the famous ship
when she anchored in Cape Town in
August 1863. But the days of this raider
were doomed to be short. On June 11,
1864, the Alabama sought haven in
Cherbourg, France. After 22 months,
mostly spent at sea, both crew and ship
were in need of rest and repair. Three
days later, the sloop-of-war USS
Kearsarge appeared outside the harbor.
Her commander, Captain John
Winslow, had been a shipmate of
Semmes when they were both young.The sinking of the Alabama
“My intention is to fight the Kearsarge
as soon as I can make the necessary
arrangements,” Semmes wrote to a U.S.
diplomat through an intermediary. “I
beg she will not depart until I am ready
to go out.” On June 19, dressed in his
finest uniform, Semmes sailed the
Alabama out into the English Channel,
where the Kearsarge was waiting
just beyond the 3-mile (4.8-km)
territorial limit. Thousands
thronged the Normandy
cliffs to watch the duel,
which lasted little
more than an hour.
Maneuvering slowly
around each other, the
combatants were soon
engulfed in smoke. The Alabama
fired 370 rounds, but many were too
high or failed to explode. The Kearsarge
fired only 173 shots, but with her
superior gunnery they had telling
effect, first disabling the raider’s
steering mechanism and then
tearing a gash in her side at the
waterline.
Water poured
into the
Alabama, and
the ship
struck her colors (lowered her flag
as a sign of surrender) before
sinking stern first. The Kearsarge
recovered most of the survivors,
but a number of the Alabama’s
officers, including Semmes, were
rescued by a British yacht and
escaped to England.Last of the raiders
James Bulloch, the Confederate
agent, put one more famous raider
to sea. Since tightened neutrality
laws made it impossible to build
another vessel in Britain, he
converted one instead. The Sea
King departed London in
October 1864—ostensibly for
Bombay and points east. Fitted with
guns and munitions, she became CSS
Shenandoah. Captained by James
Waddell, the ship spent the next year
cruising seas unexplored by former
commerce raiders. Sailing south, shehad driven insurance rates sky high
and forced many vessels to adopt
foreign registry. Nor did their activity
draw many Union ships away from
blockading the Southern waterways,
much affect the blockade. At any
one time, only a few score Union
warships out of the hundreds on
blockade duty were hunting for
the raiders—barely a dozen—that
embarked on the high seas.CONFEDERATE SEA CAPTAIN 1809–77RAPHAEL SEMMES
“Old Beeswax,” as his sailors called Semmes
after his waxed mustaches, was a native of
the state of Maryland and a U.S. naval
officer. At the outbreak of war, he followed
his adopted state of Alabama into the
Confederacy. He first won fame by taking
18 prizes as captain of CSS Sumter. After
that ship was trapped in Gibraltar, the
dashing Semmes escaped to England,
where he took command of the fabled
Alabama, the most successful commerce
raider of the war. In 1865, back in Virginia,
Semmes was given command of the James
River Squadron; but its sailors were soon
turned into makeshift infantry, and when he
surrendered them in April, he was holding
the rank of brigadier general.crossed from the
Cape of Good Hope to
Australia and then sailed
far into the Pacific, where she
preyed upon Yankee whalers
venturing north to the Aleutian
Islands and the Arctic Ocean. In June
1865, still taking prizes (some 37 in
all), Waddell read in a newspaper
about General
Lee’s surrender.
On August 2, off
the coast of
California, he
confirmed that the Confederacy had
indeed collapsed. Disarming his ship,
he avoided U.S. ports, where piracy
charges awaited. Instead, he steered
for Cape Horn, and on to Britain, a
voyage of nearly 19,000 miles
(30,000km).
On November 5, 1865, the battered
Shenandoah steamed up the Mersey
River into the English port of Liverpool.
At 10 a.m. the following day, the ship’s
ensign was hauled down—the last
Confederate flag to be struck, and the
only one to have circumnavigated the
globe. Waddell then surrendered his
ship to British authorities.
After the war, the U.S. government
took stock of the damage to its
maritime commerce. Confederate
raiders had taken 257 merchant ships
and whalers, about five percent of the
nation’s merchant marine. Though the
raiders did not wreak the havoc that
Stephen Mallory had hoped for, theyConfederate navy frock coat
This typical Confederate officer’s frock coat belonged
to Lieutenant William F. Robinson of the Confederate
States Navy, who served on various ships in the waters
around New Orleans and Mobile.
CONFEDERATE RAIDERSMost Confederate commerce raiders were
lost during or soon after the war, but their
legacy still lingers.THE ALABAMA CLAIMS
After the war, the U.S. government claimed war
damages from Britain for compromising her
neutrality by knowingly permitting the Alabama
and the Florida to be built in England. The
dispute escalated to a dangerous level, with
some senators demanding that Britain relinquish
Canada as payment, before the 1871 Treaty of
Washington established an international
tribunal to arbitrate the “Alabama Claims.” In
the end, the U.S. was awarded $15.5 million,
and the case helped introduce the principle of
arbitration in matters of international law.FINAL RESTING PLACES
The Florida sank in 1864, after a collision off
Newport News, Virginia—possibly a deliberate
act to keep the ship from being returned to Brazil
and re-entering Confederate service. The
Shenandoah was sold by the U.S. government
to the Sultan of Zanzibar, renamed El Majidi, and
sank in the 1870s after a typhoon drove it onto
an East African reef. And in 1984, the French
navy discovered the Alabama lying beneath
200ft (60m) of water off Cherbourg.AFTER
Boarding ax
Boarders used this multipurpose ax to help
them climb onto enemy vessels when dueling
ships lay alongside each other. It was also a
handy weapon and a tool for clearing
decks of torn rigging and
broken timbers.Not a single U.S. merchant sailor lost his
life as a result of the Alabama’s raids
on commercial shipping.