In June 1864, the Confederate commerce raider CSS Alabama limped into Cherbourg, France. She’d been at sea for 22 months. In that time, under Captain Raphael Semmes, she’d captured 65 Union merchant ships, burned most of them, and sunk a Union warship. No other Confederate vessel came close to that record.
Semmes needed repairs. What he got instead was USS Kearsarge, which showed up three days later and parked outside the harbor.
Ship number 290
Alabama was British-built. She went down the ways at John Laird Sons and Company in Birkenhead, across the Mersey from Liverpool, known only as yard number 290. The deal was arranged by the Confederate agent James Bulloch through a Liverpool cotton broker. British neutrality law allowed a yard to build a ship designed for war as long as it was not armed in British waters. So Laird built her with reinforced decks for guns and magazines below the waterline, and left the guns off.
She was launched as Enrica on May 15, 1862, and slipped out of Birkenhead on July 29, just ahead of the Union’s attempts to have her seized. A civilian crew took her to Terceira in the Azores. Semmes arrived on August 20 with a supply ship carrying her guns, coal and stores. On August 24, about a mile offshore in international waters, he read his commission from Jefferson Davis, the British colors came down, and Enrica became CSS Alabama.
She had only her officers and no crew. Semmes offered signing money and double wages in gold, and 83 seamen signed on, many of them British.
22 months at sea
Alabama spent her first weeks among the American whaling fleet near the Azores, burning ships after taking off their supplies and crews. Then she crossed to the New England shipping lanes, went south to the West Indies and into the Gulf of Mexico.
In January 1863, off Galveston, Semmes posed as a blockade runner and lured the converted side-wheeler USS Hatteras out to sea. When hailed after dark, he claimed to be British until the moment he fired. Hatteras sank quickly in shallow water. It was the only Union warship Alabama ever sank.
From there she worked the waters off Brazil, then crossed to the Cape of Good Hope and the Indian Ocean, and took her last prizes in the Strait of Malacca before turning back for Europe. By the end she had been at sea 534 days out of 657 and never once entered a Confederate port. She boarded nearly 450 vessels and took more than 2,000 prisoners, and her prizes were valued at nearly $6 million. Her crew called Semmes “Old Beeswax” for the way he twisted his waxed moustache.
Cherbourg
Semmes could have stayed in port. French neutrality would have protected him, but his ship would have been bottled up and useless. Instead, he sent a challenge through diplomatic channels: “my intention is to fight the Kearsarge as soon as I can make the necessary arrangements.”
Word got out. On the morning of June 19, crowds gathered along the French coast to watch.
The French ironclad Couronne escorted Alabama out to make sure the fight happened outside French waters. Alabama fired first. The two ships steamed in seven circles on opposite courses, each trying to rake the other.
It lasted about an hour. Alabama fired around 370 rounds, fast and often high. Her powder and fuses had deteriorated after two years at sea. Her best shot, a shell from her forward Blakely rifle, lodged in Kearsarge’s sternpost and failed to explode. Had it gone off, it could have wrecked Kearsarge’s steering. Kearsarge had another advantage Semmes later said he never knew about: chain cable hung along her sides and hidden behind black-painted boards to protect her engines.
Kearsarge’s 11-inch Dahlgrens did the rest. A shell opened Alabama’s side at the waterline, the boilers flooded, and she went down by the stern. Semmes threw his sword into the sea rather than surrender it. By the usual count, nineteen of Alabama’s men were killed or drowned and 21 were wounded, though some accounts put the dead at 28 or more. Aboard Kearsarge, three men were wounded and one died the next day.
As Alabama went down, a British private yacht called Deerhound, owned by John Lancaster, picked Semmes and a group of his officers and men out of the water. Then it sailed for Southampton. Kearsarge’s crew begged to fire on her. Captain John Winslow refused. Semmes was gone.
After the war
Semmes made his way back to the Confederacy, became a rear admiral in February 1865, and burned his own James River Squadron when Richmond fell. After the war he was arrested and held at the New York Navy Yard, then released after about three months without trial. He was elected probate judge in Mobile, Alabama, in 1866, but federal authorities blocked him from serving. He taught at the Louisiana State Seminary (which became LSU). He edited the Memphis Daily Bulletin. He wrote his memoirs. He practiced law in Mobile until he died in 1877.
The damage outlived him. The United States pursued Britain for the losses caused by Alabama and other British-built raiders. In 1872 an international arbitration tribunal awarded the US $15.5 million, a landmark in international law. In the next century, German raiders took up the same trade, from the Emden in the Indian Ocean to the pocket battleship Deutschland in 1939.
In November 1984, the French mine hunter Circé found a wreck in nearly 200 feet of water off Cherbourg. It was later confirmed as Alabama.
One more thing. Edouard Manet, the painter, wasn’t at the battle. But he read the newspaper accounts and started painting immediately. Twenty-six days later his painting was hanging in Alfred Cadart’s gallery in Paris. It’s now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
