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Commerce Raiding

Virginia in Dry Dock, formerly the USS Merrimack

One historian concludes that with the fall of Fort Fisher, "The Navy's war was over." But it is important to emphasize that the major battles in the "navy's war" on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts and along the banks of the Mississippi were won only with the full cooperation of the army. New Orleans was the only major Confederate city to fall exclusively to the navy.

While Du Pont, Dahlgren, Farragut, and Porter could maintain ships off strongholds to interdict blockade runners, they proved generally unable to take the ports or forts in front of the blockade. Until they were taken and in fact occupied, the South's ports and harbors could not be said to be permanently and irrevocably closed to foreign commerce. In the Civil War blockade, therefore, the navy's function was essentially supportive of the army.

This indispensable requirement for full-fledged army-navy cooperation in capturing major enemy positions from the sea had been demonstrated negatively by the British failure to subdue the United States in the War of 1812 and positively 1y General Winfield Scott's invasion of Mexico along the Veracruz-Mexico City axis. It was an unpleasant lesson to contemplate, and its unpalatability explains to some degree why after the Civil War United States naval officers preferred instead to dwell on the apparent promise for the future revealed in the short happy life of the C.S.S. Alabama, the greatest American commerce raider of all time.

Confronted with a stronger opponent, the Confederacy instinctively turned toward the historical American way of fighting at sea: coastal defense and commerce raiding. Coastal defense was only mar ginally in its navy's bailiwick. For the South, as for all mid-nineteenthcentury powers, the backbone of coastal defense was a system of large forts built of earth and stone and perched on protective bluffs overlooking the channels and harbors they were guarding. The Union's inability to overcome many of those forts until very late in the war and the Confederacy's consequent retention of such crucial cities as Wilmington, Charleston, and Mobile shows conclusively that the South's coastal defense program worked.

What did not work was the naval component of coastal defense, and therefore the Union navy was able to maintain an effective offshore blockade of the Southern ports it could not physically occupy. The C. S. S. Virginia and Rear Admiral Buchanan's Tennessee epitomized the Confederacy's doomed attempt to disrupt the Union blockade. The concept was sound; there simply were not enough ironclad gunboats to do the job. The ironclads that might have succeeded, the Laird-built rams, were confiscated by a British government under threat of war for complicity in breaking the Union blockade. A similar point can be made about other innovations with which the defenders experimented: the submarine Hunley and the semi-submersible Davids, which mounted a spar torpedo for blasting a hole in the opponent's hull in the vulnerable area beneath the waterline. But both were primitive in design and too few in number to affect the blockade.

The South's naval men had luck with coastal defense in only two areas: mines and blockade runners. Matthew Fontaine Maury, chief of the Confederate Submarine Battery Service, built enough good mines to destroy thirty-one Union blockaders, the greatest single cause of Northern naval losses in the war.

Blockade runners generally are not classed with coastal defense, but by carrying war materiel and goods in and out of ostensibly closed ports they undermined the comprehensiveness of the North's blockade to the very end of the war. These were small, fast, shallow-draft vessels of limited range. They ran only from Confederate ports to sanctuaries in the West Indies and Caribbean, where they dumped their loads of cotton or tobacco and took on whatever arms or ammunition Europe was willing to sell. The great profitability of that trade attracted Southern entrepreneurial capital from the beginning of the war and drew it awav_ from the other capitalistic system of naval warfare: privateering.

In any event, privateering had lost much of its attraction because of the 1856 Declaration of Paris, which outlawed this means of fighting at sea. Since the declaration ran counter to the American tradition of oceanic warfare, the United States had refused to sign. Although Secretary of State William H. Seward promised to adhere to the prohibition when the Civil War opened, the issue by then was largely moot, because Great Britain had banned prize courts throughout the empire, and France had followed suit.

In 1861, while the Union blockade still existed mostly on paper, the European proscription meant very little. Southern- privateers could send prizes hack into Confederate ports for condemnation and auction. Confederate privateers captured more than fifty Union merchantmen in the first five months of the war, showing the potential for harm in a traditional American maritime offensive. But the increasing eflectiveness of the offshore blockade made passage in and out of Southern ports increasingly hazardous. Privateers bad to run the gauntlet, search for prey, and capture the victims. The privateer then put a small prize crew on board the captured vessel. Each prize crew had to keep the regular crew from mutinving and retaking the vessel. With this restive manpower, the prize masters had to navigate their way past the blockaders in an unfamiliar vessel whose handling characteristics and maneuverability were unknown.

By contrast, a blockade runner carried a cargo for profit in a swift run to a relativelv nearby port. It then swapped cargos and with a load of valuable goods dashed hack under the full control of'a dedicated and experienced crew. For those reasons, after 1861 the South sent very few of the traditionally American, privately owned sea rovers out to prey on Union merchant shipping. Commerce raiding became the exclusive preserve of the Confederate States Navy, and the record here was so strikingly successfiil that for a generation afterward American naval officers could think of no better way to conduct offensive warfare at sea.

There were a number of commerce raiders - the Sumter, the Florida, the Shanandoah - but there was only one Alabama. This barkentine-rigged, 230-foot-long rover mounted eight guns and could make better than 13 knots under steam. Built for 13ulloch, she sailed from Britain under the guise of 'a merchant vessel on her first sea trial. She never returned. instead, her skipper, Raphael Senunes, took her to the Azores for arming and outfitting and then commissioned her at sea. In August 1864 she set out on a twenty-two-month campaign of' commerce destruction.

The Declaration of Paris and the Union blockade denied prize courts to Semmes, so he routinely stripped captured U.S. merchantmen of whatever he wanted, took the crews and passengers on board the Alabama for safety, and blew up the prizes. When overloaded with prisoners, he would strip a prize, designate it a "cartel ship" and send it ashore. He operated first in the North Atlantic, where he made twenty captures, and later rampaged on the world's oceans from the Gulf of Mexico to the South China Sea. In all, he took sixty-eight Union vessels, contributing to what has been called "the flight fi-om the flair" by the American-owned merchant marine and driving maritime insurance rates sky-high.

In June 1864 Semmes dropped into Cherbourg, hoping to refit in one of the French docks. The American consul spotted him and cabled the U. S. S. Kearsarge, anchored in Holland. U. S. Navy Captain John A. Winslow had let the cruiser Florida slip by him off* Brest in February. Not wanting to miss this second chance to hag one of the two deadliest Confederate ships then in action, Winslow brought his screw-sloop down to Cherbourg in a hurry. Semmes threw down the gauntlet, and Winslow readily accepted, knowing that his superior ship gave him the advantage. The Alabama had not been built to fight a warship; her crew had not drilled regularly at their guns, because powder and shot were irreplaceable, and her machinery was worn out.

In full view of cheering spectators lining the shore, the two protagonists circled one another hoping for the raking shot, which the tired Alabama could not achieve. She was gunned clown in an hour, but in sinking she denied the Union the satisfaction of taking her prisoner. Semmes jumped over the side without surrendering. He was picked up by a watching British yacht and whisked to safety in Britain. As a replacement, Bulloch in October commissioned the Shenandoah, which in the remaining months of the war took thirty-six prizes to become the second-ranking Confederate commerce raider in terns of kills. But it was the Alabama that caught the world's imagination and seemed to set the pace for America's future guerre de course.

Raphael Semmes formed a transitional link between commerce raiding in the age of sail and modern submarine warfare. He was denied the ancient motivational power of enriching his crew through prize money, although at one point he did hope to capture one of the treasure ships racing from the Isthmus of 1'anama to New York City with California gold. His steam engine gave him advantages in running down prey denied to earlier commerce raiders fully depended on the winds. Compelled to destroy his captures rather than auction them off, he refused to harm their passengers and crews. He conducted his commerce destruction with humane gallantry. In this fundamental regard he differed from the U-boat skippers of World War I or the submariners of World War II. In Raphael Semmes's raider Alabama the Confederate States Navy truly distinguished itself.

With the Confederate naval threat - except that posed by commerce raiders - subdued by the end of 1864, Secretary of the Navy Welles began a partial demobilization even before Robert E. Lee surrendered to U. S. Grant at Appomattox. By late 1865 he had sold half of the navy's 671 ships, mostly the converted merchantmen used on the blockade. With no intention of eviscerating the navy, he thought in the traditional terms of cruising squadrons and ships in reserve, the combination of which in an emergency would provide "for the prompt reestablishment at any time of our great naval force in all its efficiency." Like most of his prewar predecessors, Welles glimpsed "true wisdom" in a policy of cherishing and husbanding the navy so as "to hold within prompt and easy reach its vast and salutary power for the national defense and self vindication.”

The Civil War had witnessed an anomaly of offensive naval operations as part of a campaign of conquest. The future promised to resemble a more typical past, wherein the United States Navy de ployed its active vessels on distant station and maintained a reserve fleet theoretically suitable for rapid recommissioning should war with a European power seem imminent. Welles's ironclad "floating batteries" were to be laid up in noncorrosive f'resh water at League Island, the new navy yard in Philadelphia. The Army and Navy Journal predicted they would "be a grand and imposing sight. " The screwdriven and side-wheel steamers, rotated through the several reconstituted and globally dispersed squadrons, would protect overseas Americans and their commerce.

For Welles it was to be business as usual, and for two years he was remarkably successful. In December 1867 the secretary described a navy of 238 ships and 1,869 guns. There were 103 vessels mounting 898 guns in commission, an active force numerically more than twice the strength of the navy of late 1860. More than half of the commissioned ships-a total of fifty-six-were deployed with the six operating squadrons, until then the largest overseas peacetime force in American history. Some 2,000 officers and 11,900 enlisted men remained in uniform.

Kenneth J. Hagan. A Navy Divided Against Itself. This People's Navy: The Making of American Sea Power. The Free Press. Copyright 1991.

A History of the Confederate Navy Luraghi. This landmark study shatters the myths about the Confederate Navy and finally gives the Southern navy proper credit for its strategic successes, international range, and technical advances. It disproves the notions, for example, that the South's ironclads were failures and that breaking the blockade was the navy's single strategic aim.

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