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War At Sea

Scourge of the Seas CSS Alabama Known to the U.S. for 21 months as the "Scourge of the Seas," the CSS Alabama cruised the four corners of the globe while creating havoc for U.S. merchant shipping and never once coming to a Confederate port.

In two proclamations made during April, 1861, Lincoln declared the entire Southern coastline blockaded. The Confederate States could not live without imports to sustain the economy and maintain its fighting forces. Northern blockading vessels, by cutting off imports, would help strangle the rebellious states.

In the beginning, the blockade was a paper one. The United States Navy had 90 ships but only about half this number were available for active services. They were a heterogeneous lot, some powered by steam, some by sail. The fleet gathered at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in June, 1861, was a tiny force to patrol the 3,500-mile Confederate coast.

Vessels available were split into two groups, the Atlantic Blockading Squadron, 22 ships carrying 296 guns; the Gulf Blockading Squadron, 21 vessels with 282 guns. Shortly after blockading began, the squadrons were split again, into North Atlantic, South Atlantic, East Gulf, and West Gulf.

Navy Secretary Gideon Welles and his assistant, Gustavus Fox went to work to meet the crying need for ships and men. By purchase, they quickly acquired 79 steamers and 58 sailing vessels of various classes. In government navy yards, 24 ships were laid down. By the end of 1861, private contractors were working on 14 screw sloops, 23 screw gunboats, 12 sidewheelers, and three experimental ironclads. As new hulls were brought to completion in the Northern shipyards, the blockade acquired teeth.

By the end of the war, the Navy had 600 vessels to seal off Southern ports and hard recruiting and training had manned them with efficient crews. Aiding the blockading squadrons were amphibious attacks, mounted by Army and Navy in concert, on the major coastal cities. Each time a seaport such as New Orleans, Savannah, or Mobile fell into Federal hands, the task of the blockaders was lightened. The blockade was ineffective during the first years of war. But by 1864, its constricting pressure was hurting the South.

A small group of tiny vessels made up the Confederate Navy when war began, and occasional capture of a Yankee ship helped swell the total. The little craft packed a sting. About twenty of them were fitted out for battle and given letters of marque, permitting them to prey on Northern shipping.

Rebels vessels sometimes flew the American flag when the Union steam gunboats appeared, but the trick seldom succeeded. More often, the outclassed ships tore into their larger opponents, only to be blown out of the water, as happened to the privateer Petrel under the guns of the United States frigate St. Lawrence. But courage and audacity paid off from time to time, and the miniature fleet took or destroyed some sixty Union ships.

Of more immediate value to the Confederate States were the blockade runners. These wrote a chapter into Civil War history. In their holds, the Southern government sent cotton, tobacco, leather, and turpentine, for export via the Caribbean, to be exchanged for gold or munitions.

Ships engaged in this precarious trade sailed from cities such as Charleston, Wilmington, Savannah, Mobile, Galveston, and Corpus Christi, as well as minor ports. Loaded with Southern freight, they slipped through blockading steamers when luck was with them, and made for Bermuda, the Bahamas, Cuba, Mexico, and Brazil. At those places, cargoes were transshipped for other destinations. On their return trips, blockade runners brought in food, drugs, arms, clothing, and ammunition. They also brought luxuries: brandy, cigars, and lace, to be purchased and distributed by Southern speculators.

Blockade running soon became big business. The Confederate government owned several ships engaged in the trade, as did the individual state governments. Most vessels, however, were the property of private individuals or syndicates, many of them abroad. Risking their lives, blockade-running captains piled up fantastic profits for their owners and reaped rich salaries for themselves. One trip could net a captain $5,000; two trips paid for the ship.

Blockade running produced specialized vessels like Lady Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Anglia. Long, low, sleek, powerful, these ocean greyhounds were made to confound Federal warships guarding the coast. The finest blockade runners were British-built, coming from the great shipyards of the Clyde. Painted gray for camouflage, they burned smokeless coal, and many could telescope their smokestacks when pursuing vessels hove in sight, making them all but invisible on the horizon.

No one knows how many blockade runners operated from 1861 to 1865, but United States vessels took a terrible toll, capturing or destroying more than 1,500 of the fleet craft. Despite this attrition, the runners made some 8,000 trips, bringing Jefferson Davis 600,000 small arms, along with medicines, tools, shoes, chemicals, coffee, meat, and metals.

The Confederate Navy's most romantic ships were the commerce raiders, built to ravage Federal merchant shipping. Queen of them all was the cruiser Alabama, under Captain Raphael Semmes. In twenty-two months, the rakish vessel created a Southern odyssey.

Alabama was built by John Laird of Birkenhead, England, as the dispatch vessel "290," to circumvent British law against arming belligerent powers. Upon launching, she proceeded to the Azores, where another ship met her, carrying guns and ammunition. She was armed, and a crew procured from among the men who brought her out. Semmes and a group of Southern officers boarded the vessel, commissioned a cruiser in the Confederate Navy on August 24, 1862.

Alabama was a seaman's dream: about 1,000 tons, 230 feet long, making 10 knots normally and over 13 under pressure. Two engines drove her 15-foot propeller and she was bunkered with an 18-day coal supply. The ship carried a full set of sails and was barkentine rigged.

Eight guns, six in broadside and one each fore and aft, armed the raider. Her mission was to rove the seas, preying on Yankee shipping, and she did the job to perfection. In her brief lifetime, Alabama traveled 70,000 miles, capturing or destroying more than 60 enemy ships.

From the Azores, Semmes cruised the North Atlantic shipping lanes off Newfoundland, then went south to the West Indies. Daring the Federal blockade, he entered the Gulf of Mexico, approached Galveston, Texas, and lured the cruiser Hatteras out to battle, sinking her in thirteen minutes.

Alabama put in at Jamaica and paroled the crew of Hatteras, coasted Brazil, and crossed the South Atlantic to Africa's Cape of Good Hope. A long trip into Far Eastern waters followed, through the Indian Ocean and China Sea, then back through Malacca Strait to the Arabian Sea. Rounding Africa once more, Semmes crossed the Atlantic again to Brazil, returned to the Azores, and went on into the French port of Cherbourg to coal and repair on June 11, 1864.

Throughout the long voyage, Alabama burned and sank Northern shipping wherever encountered. The crews were taken on board and transferred to neutral ships or landed at foreign ports. Her victims' stores kept the Southern ship supplied with food, fuel, and luxuries.

Hearing the scourge of the seas was at Cherbourg, Captain John A. Winslow brought the United States cruiser Kearsarge down from Holland and stood off the French port. Semmes challenged him to battle and was accepted. The ships were roughly equal in size and fire power.

On June 19, Alabama steamed forth to engage Kearsarge. Both ships steamed in a series of circles as their broadsides roared out. Superior Union gunnery holed Alabama's hull and uprooted her guns. Semmes drew off and struck his colors, but the graceful vessel was fatally hurt and plunged to the bottom seventy minutes after the first gun was fired. The majority of the officers and men were rescued.

Alabama was the most glamorous of the Confederate raiders, but there were others that made Yankee vessels feel the weight of their metal. Many were acquired through the energetic action of three Confederate naval commissioners: Commodores Matthew F. Maury and Samuel Barron, and Captain James D. Bulloch. Bulloch operated in England as did Maury; Barron was stationed in Paris.

Lacking sufficient shipbuilding capacity, the Confederate government ordered rams and commerce destroyers from overseas. The commissioners were zealous and their efforts, plus those of Southern manufacturers, gave the South eighteen cruisers to injure the Federal merchant marine.

Rebel sea raiding began in 1861 as the Confederate government seized Habana, a steamer running between Havana and New Orleans, in the latter port. Christened Sumter, she was armed and sent out under Semmes for a series of actions that took seventeen ships. Treading lightly through legal briar patches, Bulloch had the cruiser Florida built in Liverpool, and she was completed in early 1862. Operating in the Atlantic, this ship captured a string of prizes.

In 1863, Maury purchased a new iron steamship on the Clyde River, and after a series of machinations, she was suitably armed and sent to sea as the cruiser Georgia. With small coal capacity, her range was limited. After a year's cruise in which only eight vessels were taken, she was sold.

The blockade runner Atlanta had a checkered career. After traveling the Bermuda-Wilmington run twice in the summer of 1864, she was turned into a cruiser, rechristened Tallahassee, and sent up the Atlantic coast toward Halifax. In three weeks, she captured thirty coasters and fishing vessels. A short time later, her name was again changed and she became Olustee. Striking the Atlantic coast once more, she took seven prizes, returned to Wilmington, shed her guns, and became a blockade runner as before, with the apt name of Chameleon.

Another Confederate vessel serving both as blockade runner and cruiser was Nashville. As a commerce destroyer, she took and burned such vessels as the Yankee merchantman Harvey Birch. Alabama and her sisters had sunk much of the Northern merchant fleet by late 1864, and the Confederates struck for the New Bedford whaling fleet in the Bering Strait. The converted merchantman Sea King, armed and sent forth as the Rebel cruiser Shenandoah, took forty whalers.

John S. Blay. War At Sea. The Civil War; A Pictorial Profile. Bonanza Books, New York, 1958.

A Short History of the Civil War at Sea Tucker. The struggle at sea might not have been as bloody as the fighting on land, but it was every bit as interesting and included a colorful cast of characters. This book provides a concise and lively overview of the "blue water" Civil War along with important themes such as the technological revolution in naval warfare; the Confederate use of torpedoes, submarines, and commerce raiders; and the Union's successful strategy of blockade.

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