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The Alabama and the Kearsarge: The Sailor's Civil War (Civil War America)

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The Civil War is one of the last bastions of the amateur historian, and has given rise to a lot of amateurish work--but not in this case. Author William Marvel has cast aside many of the hackneyed myths that surround the Alabama and her last battle and has gone back to primary sources. Using these obscure logbooks and diaries, he alternately describes the lives of both the Alabama and the Kearsarge and particularly their crews. What emerges from Marvel's combination of conscientious research and lively writing is a tale both scholarly and enthralling, a detailed and fascinating slice of Civil War life at sea. I have read no other account of the Civil War-era sailor that gives such a vivid and convincing picture of his origins, thoughts, work, fights and ultimate fate. To back up the narrative there are a few interesting photographs (no plans for modelers, though), plenty of footnotes, a complete bibliography, a glossary and crew rosters. This book stands head and shoulders above the standard glory-mongering Civil War tales of derring-do, and will delight the armchair historian or naval history buff.

Most works on the Civil War at sea deal with river operations or the clash of ironclads at Hampton Rhodes. Marvel takes us on a world cruise as the Confederate commerce raider Alabama plays global cat-and-mouse with all manner of American merchant ships, Federal warships and the assorted foreign tradesman. This is an extremely well researched book. Endnotes include both Alabama's and Kearsarge's ships' rosters (including nationality and ultimate disposition). There is a glossary of naval terminology and 31 pages of notes. The text includes 19 pages of photographs and three maps, the last a tactical illustration of the duel off the French coast. No diagrams or detailed descriptions of the ships themselves.

The subtitle - The Sailor's Civil War - captures the book's essence. Blending logs, letters, and personal accounts, this author gives insight into the life of a mid-19th Century sailor. The first few chapters give some look into the ships' construction. However, most of the first 18 chapters (243 pages) are devoted (ad nauseum) to the names of crewmen, how they came to join a given ship's company, ports of call, and their frequent misconduct. These same chapters are sprinkled with stories of each of Alabama's conquests and both ships' breakdowns and repairs, deception on the high-seas and how neutral nations managed combatants. The author, for example, conveys that steam propulsion was anything but highly reliable technology (a bit akin to a 1980's PC user dealing with DOS).

This is a scholarly work. But, in respectful disagreement with an earlier reviewer, I did not find Marvel's style lively and only enthralling in spurts. At points it becomes tedious, as Marvel is intent on presenting every name and fact on his research pile. The repetition and detail begins to detract from the broader theme, as I found myself scanning later chapters as the names of sailors, ports and captured ships changed but not the story. Rather than a chronological approach, alternating stories between vessels, it may have made for more engaging reading to develop single chapters devoted to life at sea, sailor conduct and discipline, the tenous nature of steam technology, deceptive tactics (e.g., flying a neutral's collars), neutral national protocol, etc. As it stands the reader is tempted to ask him- or herself, "Haven't I read this before... what's next?"

Let's be clear. The focus is life at sea during the Civil War, and a chronicle of the travels of the two principal warships. In this the book succeeds albeit at length. One caution: readers longing for details on the climatic battle between CSS Alabama and USS Kearsarge must wait until the final two chapters (43 pages). Once there, the engagement is covered in a mere seven pages (250-256). And those seeking detail about Alabama or Kearsarge, or the latter's subsequent service and fate following the war must look elsewhere.

I will say that, as a born sailor, I am enamored of the stories of the Great Age of Sail and was fascinated by William Marvel's story of the competing and ultimately intersecting careers of the CSS ALABAMA and the USS KEARSARGE. The ALABAMA was dedicated to a despicable task, that task being the destruction of non-combatant vessels whose physical existence was often the evidence of the pride and life's work of those who built, sailed or owned them. As many of them were not Southerners and shipped without ever seeing the nation they fought on behalf of, most of the men of the ALABAMA were motivated in their duty less by the perceived nobility of their cause, the establishment of an independent Southern Confederacy, than by the promise of prize money in the capturing of United States Merchant Marine vessels and their cargoes. The crew of the KEARSARGE, a U.S. Navy vessel sailed in order to destroy the marauding ALABAMA.

Say "The Civil War" to most Americans, and they will immediately think of Grant and Lee, the surrender at Appomattox, Bull Run (Manassas), Antietam (Sharpsburg), The Wilderness, Shiloh, Gettysburg, and Vicksburg.

Far fewer will think of the Confederate Navy, though its accomplishments are singularly impressive; amongst them, the first successful battle submarine (CSS HUNLEY) and the first purpose-built ironclad warship (CSS VIRGINIA aka MERRIMACK). Some will speak of blockade runners, and others of the commerce raiders, including the CSS ALABAMA.

Recognizing at the outset of the war that the Confederacy could never hope to contend with the Union Navy in gross tonnage and firepower despite the capture of the massive Gosport (Virginia) Navy Yard, Confederate Secretary of the Navy Steven Mallory commissioned James Dunwody Bulloch (the uncle of future President Theodore Roosevelt) to buy, build, borrow or steal as many fast ships as he could find from as many sources as he could find.

Great Britain (particularly Liverpool) seemed particularly amenable to dealing with Bulloch and his buyers. Although Great Britain had officially declared its "neutrality" in the War Between The States, the Neutrality Act did not forbid private contractors from dealing with private Confederate citizens. Bulloch was able to arrange for the building of the commerce raiders CSS ALABAMA and CSS FLORIDA, among other ships. He also arranged for the purchase of more ships, including the CSS SHENANDOAH. And though Great Britain would not allow the arming of such ships in its home waters, this restriction was easily evaded by having the civilian vessel sail to a second, non-British, port, where the ship could be outfitted with weaponry (also usually purchased in England). ALABAMA, like SHENANDOAH and FLORIDA, was a "composite ship"---a sailing ship with an auxiliary steam engine. Her propeller could be lifted out of the water to reduce drag. The ALABAMA is historically significant because she was the most successful Confederate vessel to sail the seas, taking 65 prizes in her two year career.

Since time immemorial, commerce raiding, by whatever name, has been an accepted part of maritime warfare. Meant to choke off an enemy combatant's supply of foodstuffs, trade goods and imported weapons, such attacks are traditionally carried out by Men o' War, who generally sink the ship together with its cargo and usually its crew.

The Confederate commerce raiders are somewhat unique because they not only destroyed enemy shipping, but they habitually seized the destroyed ships' supplies and recruited new sailors from their crews, acting, in this regard, like pirate ships. Whether it was piracy or not depends upon one's own outlook. Ironically enough, Raphael Semmes, the Captain of the ALABAMA had written "(Commerce raiders) are little better than licensed pirates; and it behooves all civilized nations [ . . . ] to suppress the practice altogether," in 1851, eleven years before he took command of the CSS ALABAMA. The Confederacy justified Commerce Raiding internationally as an act of war and domestically as a necessity. The commerce raiders were busiest in the second half of the war, when supplies, weapons and crews had become dear.

During a career that stretched from August 1862 to July 1864, ALABAMA took and burned 65 prizes including the warship USS HATTERAS, and recommissioned a progeny CSS TUSCALOOSA that worked with her to take one more. CSS FLORIDA took 37 and recommissioned two progeny that took 23 more, and CSS SHENANDOAH took 38. Although William Marvel points to numerous factors that caused the decline of the U.S. Merchant Marine in the late 19th Century, even he does not deny that the damage done to U.S. interests was severe. Just these three top raiders and their progeny put a total of 164 Union merchantmen out of action. Too, there were other raiders that took fewer prizes. During the second half of the Civil War, Union ships were sold and sailed under foreign flags for safety's sake. It is no coincidence that the commerce raiders were denied the general amnesty offered to most other Confederates. The Bulloch brothers remained in England. The ALABAMA's crew was largely exempt from this fate, as Raphael Semmes (holding twin commissions as a CSA Admiral and CSA General at war's end) arranged for his ALABAMA shipmates to be counted as "Naval Infantry" for purposes of the amnesty.

Mr. Marvel does an excellent, if overly lengthy, job of presenting us with the history of the CSS ALABAMA and the USS KEARSARGE. Throughout most of the book, he alternates chapters on the two vessels. Marvel is comfortable with life before the mast, and his writing is sprinkled with sea salt.

Marvel relies heavily on the ships' logs, the crews' published memoirs, and the diaries some of the men kept while on board to paint us a full picture of life aboard these competing warships.

Of the two, the KEARSARGE seems to have been cursed with sour luck. Launched on September 11, 1861 under the command of Captain Charles Pickering, the KEARSARGE set out to sea and was immediately battered by a hurricane. Surviving the storm, KEARSARGE took up its station in the mid-Atlantic, patrolling between the Azores and Iberia for months without ever meeting a Confederate. She was then ordered to Gibraltar to blockade the CSS SUMTER, then in port. What the Union Navy did not know was that the SUMTER was an unseaworthy abandoned hulk, kept lightly manned simply to keep the KEARSARGE pinned to Gibraltar, while her Captain (Semmes) went to Liverpool to assume command of the ALABAMA, launched on July 29, 1862. Eventually relieved at Gibraltar, KEARSARGE put into Cadiz, Spain for repairs to her troublesome propeller shaft, repairs that kept her in port until March of 1863. She spent so much time in port, in fact, that the Navy replaced Captain Pickering with Captain John Winslow, who quickly took her to sea. She spent most of the next year on patrol, ranging from Madeira to the Outer Hebrides. Again, KEARSARGE exhibited sour luck, often sailing into an area just days or even hours after a Confederate had gone on its way. At one point, the Confederacy had three Commerce Raiders---FLORIDA, GEORGIA, and ALABAMA---preying on U.S. flagged vessels in the North Atlantic at once, and the KEARSARGE never met any of them. In truth, the KEARSARGE needed to be three ships, not one, if it was going to be able to disrupt this ad hoc Confederate Squadron.

As for the ALABAMA, the Southern ship that never entered a Southern port, it quickly developed a mythic reputation. With its black-painted hull and low freeboard, it had a menacing appearance. Its speed gave it the nickname of "The Greyhound" and Semmes was known as "The Wolf of the Deep." ALABAMA traversed the Atlantic north and south, east and west, and sailed across the Indian Ocean as far as Singapore, seeking prizes, most of which were burned to the waterline, their cargoes seized. ALABAMA seemed to go where she wanted and do what she wanted unhindered by any of the Union ships seeking her (including the USS ALABAMA; and by way of further confusion, there was also a CSS UNITED STATES and a USS CONFEDERACY).

What is immediately obvious from Marvel's reportage is that life aboard both ships was strikingly similar. Both crews were subject to the intensely hard work and endless ennui that afflicts long distance cruisers. The rare landfalls each ship made allowed for riotous Liberty Calls that often resulted in drunken, insubordinate sailors being clapped in irons. It also allowed for some turnover among the crews. In almost every port, some men would jump ship. Others would sign on. This gave both ships an international polyglot feel. The ALABAMA had a preponderance of the Queen's Subjects on board. The KEARSARGE had Portuguese, Scandinavians, and Polynesians among its crew. On both ships, the men whose flag fluttered at the gaff were in the minority.

Having recently read Sea of Gray: The Around-the-World Odyssey of the Confederate Raider Shenandoah by Tom Chaffin, it is interesting to compare and contrast the experience of the men on the three ships, and in particular ALABAMA and SHENANDOAH. Allowing for the differences in writing styles between Messrs. Chaffin and Marvel, it is apparent that SHENANDOAH skippered by James Iredell Waddell, was a discontented ship, while the men of ALABAMA were a highly motivated crew. For the most part, a Commerce Raider's prizes were stripped of anything usable---sails, spars, gear, food, water, coal (if any) and valuables---before being scuttled. Crews were brought on board. The differences between the two Confederate Captains become glaringly obvious thereafter.

While captured officers were largely let be, the SHENANDOAH actively tried to recruit men from before the mast, and used all manner of "inducements" to do so, including clapping them in irons, locking them in the forepeak, and tricing them---hanging them from their thumbs while they balanced their weight on their toes. The SHENANDOAH's Executive Officer filled his diary with reports of men triced and ironed, ending these descriptions with self-congratulatory remarks on the numbers of new sailors who gladly "thanks be to God" signed the Ship's Articles. No wonder.

Captain Semmes did not stoop to such tactics. Willing crewmen were signed on. Other prisoners were repatriated to other ships or in foreign ports. Semmes made certain that his occasional black crewmembers, even suspected runaway slaves, were entered on the ship's roll and paid wages. Semmes never seems to have resorted to tricing and ironing unless it was to quell insubordination. Often, his crew and officers were merely confined to quarters, which may be why he is remembered with honor while Waddell has largely been forgotten.

It is telling that many members of the plank crew of the SHENANDOAH, men who had served on the ALABAMA and were expected to fill out the crew of the new ship, decided not to sail on the SHENANDOAH when she got her orders. Chaffin, admitting that he is "decidedly landlubber," misses the very great significance of the fact that most of the experienced sea dogs of the ALABAMA wanted nothing to do with the new ship, sensing, even on her short shakedown cruise, that something was badly amiss on board.

Captain Pickering seemed a bit careless, a quality that may have led to his loss of the USS HOUSATONIC to the submarine CSS HUNLEY later in the war. Captain Winslow, for his part, seemed relatively easygoing with his men, if remote, as most skippers did in those days. Since the KEARSARGE did not take prisoners, opportunities for recruitment were unforced. A few times, a man might sign aboard, collect a signing bonus, and immediately jump ship, losing himself in the confusion of a foreign harbor. The KEARSARGE's great disadvantage wasn't life aboard her, it was life thereafter. Tuberculosis ran rampant amongst the crew, mostly young men and boys (as young as twelve), a great many of whom died in the 1860s and 1870s. Marvel theorizes that one of KEARSARGE's was a carrier of TB.

The showdown between the ALABAMA and the KEARSARGE came about primarily because Captain Semmes decided to take his weatherworn "Greyhound" into port for repairs. The ALABAMA's bottom was fouled, belieing her reputation for speed---she could barely poke along at 2 knots, according to Marvel, without engaging her auxiliary engine, which had become risky to use due to the degradation of her boilers over time. Her rigging was worn and loose, and one British visitor aboard described her as "dirty."

Other factors played a part as well. Semmes was ill, and wished to be relieved after two years. The war news, full of Confederate defeats, had dispirited the crew, many of whom wanted to go home before the end of the war might make that impossible. When ALABAMA dropped her anchor in Cherbourg Harbor on June 11, 1864, many of her Northern European, French and British crewmen chose to leave her. Semmes himself noted in his log ("ominously" as Marvel remarks) that "Our cruise is over."

Underscoring the continuing downturn in Confederate fortunes, the French refused her a drydock.

In the interim, the KEARSARGE had arrived, taking up a station just beyond the limit of French territorial waters. Raphael Semmes faced a choice: He could abandon ALABAMA, much like he'd abandoned SUMTER, or he could fight. Slow and cranky, ALABAMA faced almost certain defeat, but on June 19th, Semmes and his crew took "the Greyhound" out of Cherbourg for her final battle.

In an hour, ALABAMA slipped beneath the waves.

Marvel's description of this short battle is virtually the last word of this book, and it is worth waiting for. The ALABAMA's gun crews shot high and too frequently. Semmes' ship did get a few good shots off, but the ALABAMA's powder and fuses largely failed to work even on the true.

KEARSARGE took one 100 pound shell in her sternpost that could have sunk her if it had detonated, but that never happened. Switching to solid shot, Semmes discovered that KEARSARGE had been modified by having a layer of chain mail draped down her sides. Hidden by planking, it was not visible to the eye.

The KEARARGE's gun crews, better drilled and with better powder and shot, sank the raider. Of the crew of about 135, 120 survived, including Semmes, who was rescued by a British ship that spirited him away to England.

Semmes returned to the Confederacy and was promoted to Admiral in February 1865 and General in April. He was among the last ranking Confederates to surrender. After a brief imprisonment, he resumed his legal career. Surprisingly, because he had been an officer of the USN at one time, he was and remained bitter toward the Service. He had little respect for the "pack of dogs" that made up the United States Navy, and he considered his old friend Winslow's "treachery" in ironcladding the KEARSARGE to be "unfair," stating that had he known the KEARSARGE had been so modified he would not have sacrificed his men's lives. He became a vocal and literary exponent of "The Lost Cause" and was lionized by Southerners.

Marvel closes the book with a brief summary of the crew.

I found that in the end, I greatly admired the vessel ALABAMA for her dash and daring, if not for her duty, just as I admired the KEARSARGE for her duty, if not for any dash or daring.

The officers and men of both ships measure up well. Though I have no sympathy for the Southern cause, slavery, Raphael Semmes seems to have been a man of character such as the South had in Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson or J.E.B. Stuart. The KEARSARGE has no such standouts, but she did not need them. She was a vessel that served.

In the last analysis, perhaps what is most distinctive about THE ALABAMA AND THE KEARSARGE: THE SAILOR'S CIVIL WAR, is that it is, if nothing else, a memorial to the men who served despite the ugly face of war and its ultimate futility.