Some Great Characters Sailed Civil War Seas

There is high seas adventure in Burning Rage, the new Civil War mystery featuring Confederate soldier turned Benedictine monk Ced Buckley. By the spring of 1864 Commander Raphael Semmes’ Alabama is nearing the end of its career as a Rebel merchant raider.

 

A Currier & Ives print commemorates the sinking of the Alabama off Cherbourg, France. The French transitional Impressionist Edouard Manet painted a similar scene after reading news accounts of the Alabama’s battle with the U.S.S. Kearsage. From the Library of Congress Collection.

 

Semmes, born in Maryland, has traversed the globe as the captain of Alabama, a swift and well-armed British-built screw-sloop. He has menaced Union shipping, capturing more than sixty-two merchant vessels, most of which he burned to the water line. In his own words, Semmes considered the Alabama an inexorable staghound and a merchantman a panting breathless fawn.

But by the time of our story, the Alabama is being hunted in earnest by the Union navy and Semmes and his famous ship are exhausted. Piracy, it seems, even legally sanctioned piracy, is a young man’s game. Semmes, who served in the United States Navy from 1826 to 1860, including a stint during the Mexican War, was no spring chicken in 1864. In Burning Rage, the Alabama is in Capetown, South Africa, where Semmes meets one of the book’s fictional characters, Captain Nathaniel Tilghman, a rascally Marylander. Tilghman still dabbles in the slave trade though trans-Atlantic human trafficking had been abolished de jure in 1859.

Tilghman skippers a sidewheel clipper ship, the Salem, and meets Semmes in Capetown’s seamy Chinese quarter. Semmes has a business proposition for Tilghman, to smuggle a shipment of gold destined for the Confederate government into Baltimore.

Thus begins a sea adventure that features a naval battle with a Union warship, and leads the Salem to an open air slave market in the Portuguese controlled Cape Verde Islands. Tilghman finds friends in Sao Miguel on the island of Santiago; former Confederate officer Slim John Sweeney and his wife Carmen, who help him escape from a riotous mob of Portuguese thieves.

 

This tobacco company advertisement depicts the Yorktown, a three-masted clipper ship, modified with steam powered sidewheels. Nathaniel Tilghman’s fictional Salem  had a similar configuration in Burning Rage. The Library of Congress Collection.

 

Subsequently he comes to trust one of the very Africans he’d tried to sell in Sao Miguel. The slave trader and his odd crew sail for Baltimore, delivering the gold to Confederate operatives at the city’s Catholic cathedral.

By June 1864, Semmes and the Alabama are bottled up by the Union navy in Cherbourg, France, where Semmes had put in to resupply the Confederate raider. When Semmes tries to make a run for it, he is confronted by the Kearsage, a Union sloop-of-war. The ensuing Battle of Cherbourg was chronicled by the French painter Edouard Manet, who read newspaper accounts of the battle and quickly produced “The Sinking of the Alabama.” Within a month it was on display in a print shop in Paris, bringing the demise of the Confederate raider to the world in vivid color. Today the painting is owned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which has not displayed it for many years. Besides Manet, the Alabama’s exploits inspired many a romantic. An Afrikaner folk-song, “Daar Kom die Alibama,” became popular in South Africa after Semmes’ 1863 expedition to Capetown. The raider’s campaigns also spawned an English sea chanty, “Roll Alabama, Roll.”

Raphael Semmes statue, Mobile.

As the hardest of the die-hards, Semmes could inspire such romance. Off Cherbourg, as the Rebel ship sank by the stern, Semmes threw his cutlass in the ocean rather than surrender it. The commander and some of his crew escaped and were rescued by a private British yacht, which was ironically named the Deerhound. (Semmes thought the Alabama a staghound and is fished out of the sea by a Deerhound!) The Confederate skipper is taken to England where he is hailed as a hero by some. Shortly, he returns to the C.S.A., where he is promoted to rear admiral and commands Richmond’s James River Squadron for a time.

Later he is given a commission as an army brigadier general and leads his city sailors as an infantry unit dubbed the Naval Brigade. Part of this outfit fights with Lee at Sayler’s Creek on the way to Appomattox. Semmes though escapes with other sailors and joins Joseph Johnston’s army in North Carolina. After the war, Semmes serves as a judge and teaches literature and philosophy at the forerunner of Louisiana State University. He died in 1877 and is buried in Mobile in the Old Catholic Cemetery.

In Burning Rage, Captain Tilghman and his new friends set sail for Norfolk and eventually fall in with a Southern spy, another interesting character based on a real life Confederate agent who later became the president of Virginia Tech. If you like great characters like Raphael Semmes and Nathaniel Tilghman, try reading Burning Rage, a Ced Buckley Civil War Mystery, available at Amazon.com.