The Confederate Navy

On looking over the history of the rise of the Confederacy, viewed even from the writings of the earlier and more or less partisan historians, a reader will not fail to be impressed with the wonderful resourcefulness that was displayed in meeting the unexpected exigencies of war. Viewed from an absolutely impartial standpoint, the South apparently accomplished the impossible. The young Confederacy succeeded against heavy odds in making something out of almost nothing.

There was no naval warfare in the proper sense of the $ word during the four years' conflict; there were no fleets that met in battle at sea, and only two or three actions that could be touched upon in strictly naval annals. But at the outset, in the making up of the Government of the new republic, there was formed a Navy Department whose accomplishments, struggling against the difficulties that confronted it, were little short of marvelous, considering the limited time, available for preparation, in a country almost barren of ship-yards and other means of providing and equipping sea-going vessels, not to mention warships.

Many of the men who left the Federal service were commanders of ships, and there were instances where they might easily have turned their vessels over to the Confederacy, but, without an exception, they returned the ships entrusted to them to the Federal Government before leaving the service, thus " retiring with clean hands." There were also several officers on coast-line vessels that were in Southern ports after the firing of the first gun, who sailed back to the North with their ships before going south to join the Confederates.

The South was immeasurably handicapped in more ways than one, but principally by its utter lack of any war-ships. The Confederacy was able to enter upon the seas early, with a naval force that had to be reckoned with, as a result of its enterprise in seizing the undefended Norfolk Navy-yard only nine days after Sumter was fired upon. As early as February 21, 18G1, Jefferson Davis appointed Stephen Mallory as Secretary of the Confederate Navy. He resigned from the United States Senate, where he had represented his State, Florida, and before he joined the Confederate Cabinet the navy-yard in his home town, Pcnsacola, had been seized, January 10, 1861, by Florida and Alabama State troops. The Federal navy-yards in the South were neither so active nor so well equipped as those at the North. But Norfolk Navy-yard, one of the oldest and most extensive, was provided with everything for the building and finishing of vessels of the largest size.

An additional obstacle in the path of the formation of a Confederate navy was the fact that the great powers of Europe issued proclamations of neutrality almost immediately after the first gun had been fired at Fort Sumter, and the lesser powers soon followed the lead of the greater ones. In substance, these proclamations allowed ships of either navy harbor for the purpose of making repairs or of securing supplies. No ship might reenforce her crew in any of these foreign ports or make any alterations other than repairs necessary to make their crafts seaworthy; they were to receive on board no ordnance supplies or any other " contraband " articles; they might not take on board more than enough coal to carry them to the nearest port in their own country, and they could not coal in the harbor of any one power more than once in three months, except by special permission.

As soon as war had been declared it became evident that Virginia would join the seceding States, and before the hasty and ill-advised evacuation of the great navy-yard at Norfolk, the Federals destroyed as much of the property as they could. Six of the seven ships that were then in the Gosport yard, on the 20th of April, when the destruction was commenced, were totally destroyed, but the seventh, the screw frigate Merrimac, after being burned almost to the water-line, was saved after the Federals had left, and the Confederate authorities, under the direction of John M. Brooke, late lieutenant, United States navy, immediately started the reconstruction of the wreck on plans that were new to naval warfare. On the 8th of March, in the following year, the armored Merrimac, rechristened the Virginia, raised the hopes of the Confederacy, and closed the day of the wooden battle-ship by the sinking of the Cumberland and the destruction of the Congress in Hampton Roads, Virginia. The hopes she had roused, however, were shattered on the day following by the advent of Ericsson's Monitor.

The main reliance of the South was upon blockade-runners. It frequently took a blockade-runner to catch a blockade-runner, and as the Federal navy captured ship after ship of this character they began to acquire a numerous fleet of swift steamers from which it was difficult for any vessel to get away. All the Southern ports were busily engaged in these enterprises, much of their capital and energy, shut out from the usual fields of activity, being concentrated in this one eager pursuit. Wilmington, North Carolina, took the lead, trading chiefly with Europe, but Charleston, Mobile, Savannah and New Orleans had their full share in the new game of chance. Nor -were other places less noted idle. Along the extensive Southern estuaries might be found here and there at some obscure inlet or sheltered cove an improvised settlement diligently prosecuting the same traffic, the vessel screened by a convenient headland tufted with trees, and the neighboring beach strewn with cotton in process of shipment, or perhaps piled with a freight just landed and worth now a hundredfold its cost, and all these busy doings going on with the watchers outside not a whit the wiser.

Naval power was a decisive element in the western campaigns of the Civil War. Given the enormous size of the western theater of operations (680 miles in a straight line from Cairo, Illinois, to New Orleans) and the relative austerity of the road and rail nets, navigable waterways were the preferred method of movement for both commercial and military enterprises. In a situation analogous to twentieth-century "air superiority," control of the western rivers conferred significant military advantages, particularly with regards to mobility and firepower. In an age when most military transportation moved by muscle power, the Mississippi River steamboat was a logistician's dream come true.

In 1861, the Confederate War Department had established a "River Defense Fleet" in New Orleans, consisting of fourteen commercial riverboats converted into rams by strengthening their bows and stacking cotton bales on their decks as a form of armor (giving birth to the term "cottonclad"). Elsewhere on the Mississippi and its tributaries, about twenty-five other riverboats had artillery mounted on their decks making them into gunboats. Additionally, the Confederates laid keels for six new ironclad gunboats and began converting an existing boat into a seventh. This imposing river force met with disaster in 1862.

The Confederate navy accomplished little on the western rivers; such craft as could be brought to bear were no match for the northern gun-boats, which after the fall of Vicksburg nearly had the field to themselves. There was yet a marine force styled the "river defence," or more popularly "Montgomery's fleet," and consisted of a number of Mississippi steamboats, commanded and manned exclusively by river men, and placed under the control of the War Department. These boats, with their engines protected by a barricade of cotton and their bows riveted with a plating of iron, were designed for the special purpose of running down and sinking the ironclads of the enemy. Part of the fleet was eventually destroyed by their own commanders after co-operating with the navy in the unsuccessful attempt to prevent the Federal fleet from passing Forts Jackson and St. Philip, in April, 1862, and the rest for the most part were captured or sunk during a hotly contested engagement with a superior force of ironclads off Memphis, in June of the same year.

On the 9th of May, 1861, Secretary Mallory, convinced that the resources of the Confederacy were not sufficient to complete a navy that would be adequate to maintain the defenses of the waterways of the South, commissioned James D. Bulloch to go to England and attempt to have some suitable ships constructed there, informing him at the same time that the necessary funds would be secured and placed at his disposal by the representatives of the Confederacy in England. The matter of building war-vessels in England presented many difficulties, for, under the British policy of neutrality, any ship of either of the warring powers that took on any armament or other equipment that was classed as contraband, was guilty of a breach of the neutrality agreement, and might be taken possession of by the British Government.

Several vessels from which the Confederacy had hoped much either failed entirely to get to sea or found their efforts frustrated. The "Laird rams" served no good purpose; the Alexandra, crossing to Nassau in 1863, was there held, and accomplished nothing; the Rappahannock, which had once been a despatch-boat of the British navy, frightened off early in 1864, while unprepared, and taking refuge at Calais, was kept inactive there under the guns of a French man-of-war; the Nashville, a beautiful ship, was destroyed by the monitor Montauk near Savannah, February, 28, 1863. The Georgia had only a brief career.

The Southern navy was modeled precisely after that of the United States. The same articles of war and internal rules were adopted, and the same discipline, usages, and general routine prevailed. With all these accessories, the older officers, holding their accustomed rank and surrounded very much by their former familiar associates, might have had need at times to cast a glance at the flag overhead or at the gray they had donned in place of the blue to realize fully that they belonged to a new service, foreign and hostile to the one in which they had passed the better part of their lives.

This organization was working smoothly and efficiently when a sweeping change was made by an act of Congress passed in May, 1863, creating a new service styled the "provisional navy." The officers appointed to it were all taken from the older service, now contra-distinguished as the "regular navy." The juniors were transferred in toto; the seniors were selected by the Secretary of the Navy: all maintained unimpaired their status in the old navy.

The vessels, with all their materiel and their entire crews, were next summarily transferred en masse to the new creation, and the regular navy, thus stripped of all its properties, was reduced to a small body of veterans still in the vigor of life, yet cut off from all participation in service afloat, and consigned to the comparative inaction of "shore duties," which, nevertheless, were shared in common with the provisionals.

This duplicate organization of a general service, which, despite its nominal partition, remained essentially one and the same, was attended with confusion, embarrassments, and even more serious objections that led, after a year's trial, the chief of the bureau of detail to recommend that the transfer to the new service should be made to embrace all the officers indiscriminately; but high officials are seldom inclined to brook any interference with pet measures, and the suggestion found no favor.

About the same time another act was passed to establish what was called the "volunteer navy." The effect of this measure would have been to systematize privateering, and, by combining its forces under the guise of a new name into a national marine, to raise it to a higher level than could be attained by single and independent vessels sailing under the authority of letters of marque and reprisal.

Soon after the commencement of the war, the Confederate privateers became such a menace that President Lincoln issued a proclamation that all the privateers would be regarded as pirates, and that their crews and officers would be subjected to punishment as such. Six months after the issuing of this order the crew of the captured privateer Savannah was tried for piracy, but the jury disagreed. While awaiting a new trial, the Confederacy imprisoned an equal number of officers of the Federal army, who were held as prisoners of war, and notified the Federals that whatever punishment was inflicted upon the privateersmen would be imposed upon the officers who were held as hostages. The great nations of the world refused to accept the ultimatum of the Union that the privateers were practising piracy, and from that time to the close of the war the men captured on privateers were treated as prisoners of war.

On the open ocean the southern commerce destroyers performed remarkable feats, bringing to the Union great disaster. In 1860 two-thirds of the foreign commerce of New York was carried on in American bottoms; that the transfers to the British flag, to avoid capture of ships, were, in 1861, 126; in 1862, 135; in 1863, 348; in 1864, 106. In 1865 the number of foreign ships frequenting the harbor of New York was three and one-half times greater than in 1858. The merchant-marine of the United States was near extinction. The vessels, large and small, by which this remarkable result was accomplished - 258 captures and 715 transfers, most of them because of fear of capture - appear to have numbered nineteen.

The Confederate cruisers were sometimes allowed to coal to their full capacity, and even to refit, and in violation of the British foreign enlistment act to replenish their crews; while at the same time the cold shoulder was turned to the vessels of the United States. In the rest of the foreign world also there was much carelessness as to the obligations of neutrals, the neglect of international rules becoming more marked when the cause of the Union was depressed.

One of the first Southern naval men to resign from the Federal Naval Department was Commander Raphael Semmes, who at once went South to enter the service of the new Government. Raphael Semmes was an officer of the old navy, a man of enterprise and capacity, who, forsaking his allegiance, presently became captain of the Sumter, the pioneer of the commerce-destroyers. Following the course of Semmes, we pass now to the Alabama, which, having been constructed in and having escaped from England amid circumstances already described,1 was now awaiting her captain. The cruises upon which she was about to enter and the results following from them make her one of the famous ships of history. Taking command of the Alabama in the Azores, August 20, 1862, Semmes utilized his previous experience in the Sumter, establishing accurately in the main ocean highways the strategic points where his depredations would tell best. Such was the Alabama's course for nearly two years, during which time, though swift ships and able commanders were ever hot upon the scent, the enemy was baffled and the purpose of the long cruise thoroughly carried out. Rarely has a great end been accomplished with means so small.

The Alabama met with a dramatic fate. Fatigued perhaps with his success, Semmes in the summer of 1864 brought his ship back to the English Channel, and while sheltering in Cherbourg, was challenged by the Kearsarge, only slightly superior in size and armament. A fierce passage-at-arms took place off Cherbourg, June 19, 1864. Like fighting eagles the two ships circled at speed through mile after mile. The practice of the Kearsarge was more certain, though a shell lodged in her stern-post by the Alabama, had it exploded, would have been fatal. But it was the Alabama which sank at last beneath the waves. The career of the Alabama far surpasses in interest that of any other of the Confederate cruisers.