Читать книгу A Confederate Biography - Dwight Hughes - Страница 11

Introduction

Admiral Raphael Semmes, the foremost sailor of the Confederacy, introduced his Memoirs of Service Afloat with the following:

The cruise of a ship is a biography. The ship becomes a personification. She not only “walks the waters like a thing of life,” but she speaks in moving accents to those capable of interpreting her. But her interpreter must be a seaman, and not a landsman.

A ship is fundamentally a machine—an instrument of marine transportation, ocean commerce, and naval warfare. But to those who create it, to those who sail or encounter it, and indeed to one who studies the records a century and a half later, a ship is a great deal more. It is a highly sophisticated artifact of human ingenuity. It takes on vibrant life and distinct personality (traditionally female in a historically male profession). It engages the passions. A ship can be, therefore, a central character in a life story through which we view more clearly our ancestors, their epoch, and their momentous war. Of course, she is all of these things—and not just an inanimate object—only because of the men in her life and through their collective experiences in her company.

The officers of the Confederate States ship Shenandoah were a cross section of the South from Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Missouri. From 19 October 1864 to 6 November 1865, they carried the Confederacy and the conflict around the globe and to the ends of the earth through every extreme of sea and storm. Their observations looking back from the most remote and alien surroundings imaginable, along with the viewpoints of the people they encountered, provide a unique perspective of the war with elements both common to and differing from land-bound compatriots.

These officers included scions of the deep South plantation aristocracy and of Old Dominion first families: a nephew of Robert E. Lee; a grandnephew of founding father George Mason; descendants of men who served directly under George Washington in the Revolution; and a relative, by marriage, of Matthew Fontaine Maury. One officer was an uncle of a young Theodore Roosevelt and another the son-in-law of Raphael Semmes. The officer from Missouri, by contrast, was a middle-class Midwesterner and former drugstore clerk. All but two, the captain and the ship’s surgeon, were under the age of twenty-five.

They considered themselves Americans, Southerners, rebels, warriors, and seamen embarking on what would be the voyage of their lives. They already had suffered three and a half years of bloody, discouraging conflict on board puny gunboats and lumbering ironclads up and down the interior waters of their fledgling country, frequently on the same vessels or in the same battles; a few were veterans of the CSS Alabama’s two-year cruise. They did not all fight for the same reasons but stood together in defense of their country as they understood it, pursuing a difficult mission in which they succeeded spectacularly after it no longer mattered.

Having sacrificed careers in the U.S. Navy that nurtured them, these men struggled to reproduce its essence in their new navy, one with few ships. Two of the five lieutenants had been deepwater sailors in the U.S. Navy and one in the merchant service. Four had attended the new Naval Academy at Annapolis, and two midshipmen had been appointed to the academy before secession changed their loyalties. Two of the lieutenants followed distinguished naval fathers who had served in Pacific exploring expeditions, in antislavery patrols on the coast of Africa, with Commodore Matthew C. Perry at the opening of Japan, and during the Mexican War. One of the fathers had been Naval Academy commandant of midshipmen; both fathers became senior officers in Confederate service.

Three heritages drove the men of Shenandoah. As grandsons of revolutionaries, they believed profoundly in liberty and democracy. They shared the atavistic social mores of the Southern gentleman class along with its timeless dedication to family, country, duty, and personal integrity. These characteristics were reinforced in their central identities as officers of the Confederate States navy, to which they applied the Southern martial tradition just as energetically as did their army brothers in arms.

The men they led, however, were a polyglot assemblage of international merchant sailors enlisted in foreign ports or from captured ships with enticements of gold and threats of confinement. They were of nearly every nation and color—including born-and-raised Yankees and several African Americans—representing that motley mixture of seafaring humanity operating within its own rigidly authoritarian and cramped society. In their professional roles, Confederate navy officers and seamen had more in common with Northern counterparts than with Southern comrades.

And all of them served Shenandoah—their mistress, their protector, their enabler. Having finally an opportunity to take the fight to the enemy in a fine blue-water ship, these Southerners endowed her with all the frustrated longing for victory, retribution, peace, and personal and professional honor. She was a magnificent ship, a reflection of a rich maritime heritage. The square-rigged sailing ship is among the oldest and the most complex creations of the human race, evolving slowly over millennia from fundamental concepts. For five centuries these vehicles dominated the oceans and enabled global civilization; they reached their most effective as well as their most esthetically pleasing expression in the clippers. Probably no other single technology had such far-reaching impact over so immense a span of time.

But in a few decades, natural elements of wood, hemp, and canvas would give way to forged and manufactured materials of iron and steel. The siren call of wind in the rigging was silenced by the thump of the engines and the roar of mechanical blowers; the fragrance of the sea was tainted by coal smoke. Shenandoah was a paradigm of dramatic transitions in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, and she presented stark contradictions: a valiant warship to Southerners, a hated pirate to Northerners. She was a swift and graceful tea clipper and a state-of-the-art steamer, an amalgam of wooden hull and iron frames, the epitome of the ancient art of tall ship construction, and a prime example of the new technology of the Machine Age. Shenandoah represented the quintessence of commercial sail while serving as one of history’s most effective commerce destroyers. Nearly perfect for her mission, she was a new kind of warship, a prototype of cruisers to follow and an example for raiders stalking the oceans through the world wars.

The naval profession itself was undergoing wrenching transformations from the staid, inferior, wooden sailing Navy to (for a few years at least) the second largest and most powerful and technologically advanced fleet in the world. The old officer clique was small and inbred with its peculiar ethos—where family careers, intermarriage, and the most detached and esoteric of callings created a tight web of social kinship not unlike the Southern gentry. A generational clash arose between the orthodox antebellum Navy fettered by tradition and the professional officer corps emerging from the new Naval Academy, rapid technological advances, nineteenth-century social reforms, and the crucible of war. The academy represented a revolution in officer training, one that invoked intense dispute. This generational difference was manifest between the captain of Shenandoah and his young lieutenants.

Shenandoah’s mission—commerce raiding or guerre de course—was a central component of U.S. Navy and maritime heritage, a profitable business, and a watery form of guerilla warfare in the spirit of John Mosby and Bedford Forrest with a bit of W. T. Sherman. To the consternation of Yankee shippers and ship owners, a few rebel cruisers virtually drove the American merchant marine from the sea and crippled the already declining whaling industry. As intended, they had considerable impact on home-front morale, boosting Confederate confidence while squeezing the Lincoln administration to achieve peace at the expense of Southern independence. But the strategic effectiveness of guerre de course during the Civil War remains questionable, and it was not considered even by its proponents to be the most professionally fulfilling or glorious of enterprises.

The Civil War also had repercussions far beyond familiar domestic battlefields and was, in turn, significantly influenced by faraway people and events. Navies by their nature operate in, are regulated by, and act upon the international arena in both war and peace—largely unobserved by most citizens. International affairs governed by complex and antiquated maritime law played a potentially decisive role in the conflict. The neutrality, or lack thereof, by major European powers was a central concern to both sides. As the most powerful maritime and imperial power, Great Britain wrestled with conflicting political forces that pushed the causes of both North and South. The fight across the Atlantic seriously endangered British trade, economy, and domestic stability; it threatened a disastrous third war with former colonies. Shenandoah and her sisters were smack in the middle of this diplomatic maelstrom and contributed to it.

Many Confederate warships and blockade runners, including Alabama and Shenandoah, were born in British yards, largely manned with British sailors—products presumably of lawful international commerce. But they generated intense controversy and deep hostility between Washington and London and Richmond. Shenandoah’s Captain James Waddell struggled with the uncomfortable roles of isolated diplomat and untutored international lawyer to represent a country not yet recognized; to acquire indispensable manpower, stores, and repairs in foreign ports; and to avoid international incidents.

Shenandoah’s visit to the most remote and most British outpost of the empire throws these issues into relief, providing an outsider’s view of the war. The citizenry of Melbourne, Australia (including a sizeable American expatriate community), were fascinated by the conflict and by their first and only rebel visitor. At the end of long and tenuous sea-lanes of communication, Australians reflected the politics, prejudices, and misperceptions of their homeland and were intensely concerned with issues of trade and commerce warfare. The people split into contentious political camps; one supported their Confederate guests while the other took up the Yankee banner—the antipodal manifestation of the struggle, or the war down under. The Confederates were feted as heroes by the former faction and nearly lost their ship to the latter, while the royal governor and bureaucracy muddled and vacillated. The British colony of Victoria had much in common with both the Confederacy and the United States and manifested some of their same differences.

Leaving Melbourne, Shenandoah sailed into the vast Pacific and at the paradisiacal island of Pohnpei captured and destroyed four more ships; the burning Yankee vessels illuminated alien surroundings, while in the South, Richmond went up in flames. This uniquely American conflagration flared simultaneously at both ends of the earth. Southern gentlemen enjoyed a tropical holiday, mingling with an exotic warrior society that was more like them than they knew. The history and customs of this land presented both intriguing parallels and stark contrasts with the Confederacy. As lonely rebels slept under tropic stars, guns fell silent at Appomattox, and with morale restored by rest, recreation, and destruction, Shenandoah sailed once more, leaving an enduring legacy in this faraway place.

While the Civil War struggled to conclusion and the nation began to bind its wounds, Shenandoah invaded the north, the deep cold of the Bering Sea. She fired the last gun of the conflict, set the Land of the Midnight Sun aglow with flaming Yankee whalers, almost became trapped by ice, and then headed back south. Off the coast of California, a passing British vessel delivered news of the end of the war—former Confederates were now pariahs, men without a country, profession, fortune, or future, presumably subject to imprisonment or hanging as pirates. Their fears amplified by great distance, these Southerners could only imagine homes destroyed, families destitute and starving, menfolk imprisoned, dead, or executed.

On 6 November 1865, seven months after Lee’s surrender, Shenandoah limped into Liverpool. Captain Waddell lowered the last Confederate banner without defeat or surrender and abandoned his tired vessel to the British. He and his officers went ashore to reconstitute their lives. This volume is, as Admiral Semmes describes, a biography of a cruise and a microcosm of the Confederate-American experience.