Shenandoah: Loss and Gain 160 Years Ago

As autumn blazed the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia on October 19, 1864, Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan routed Confederates under Lt. Gen. Jubal Early at the battle of Cedar Creek, a bloody ending to the Second Valley Campaign. This beautiful breadbasket of the South was securely in Union hands. General in Chief Ulysses S. Grant instructed Sheridan that the Valley should be made such a waste, a crow to fly over it would have to carry rations. By spring, his troops would denude the area of crops, livestock, and farm buildings; residents would be starving.

At almost the same hour, British steamships Laurel and Sea King rendezvoused an ocean away near the Portuguese island of Madeira in the North Atlantic four hundred miles west of Casablanca. They sought refuge in the lee of a volcanic rock called Las Desertas providing calm water, deep holding ground, and isolation from suspicious authorities.

Laurel’s manifest reported a cargo of merchandise for Bermuda and Matamoras, Mexico, with a crew of forty men and twenty-nine passengers listed as Poles intending to volunteer in the Confederate army. Her holds, however, were crammed with equipment, supplies, and bales of clothing to convert a peaceful merchant ship into a deadly commerce destroyer and to sustain her on a long cruise. Despite civilian attire, the passengers were officers, warrant officers, and petty officers of the Confederate States Navy.

Sea King was a swift and graceful tea clipper with a steam engine, the epitome of the ancient art of tall ship construction and a prime example of the machine age. She carried a large quantity of provisions and seven hundred tons of coal, much more than bunkers could stow. Bagged piles of the dirty fuel occupied portions of the cavernous hold and berth deck.

Sea King’s anchor plunged to the bottom as Laurel made fast alongside. Fires were kept hot in the clipper’s boilers with steam up, the anchor cable ready to slip at a moment’s notice. The two crews erected tackles and purchases to the main yardarm and began transferring cargo, a demanding task normally accomplished in port.

Laurel’s passengers shifted personal gear to Sea King. South Carolinian Dr. Charles E. Lining, ship’s surgeon, kept a journal: “I immediately went on board to take a glance of what is to be my home for many, many months. I found her a splendid, roomy ship, with a fine wardroom, but nearly entirely void of furniture etc.”[1]

There was no time to lose. Despite all efforts at secrecy, Portuguese authorities in Madeira remembered that renowned raider, the CSS Alabama, now resting silently on the bottom of the English Channel after her fiery clash with the USS Kearsarge the previous June. They understood that the new arrival could be “otro Alabama,” another Alabama.

As Laurel waited in Madeira harbor for Sea King’s arrival, U.S. Consul Robert Bayman was alerted to her purpose and was watching. He badgered authorities to detain the vessel for purported violations of international law—claiming she was just another Rebel pirate—and sent out reports and calls for assistance on every departing ship. An American man-of-war could appear any time.

Midshipman John Mason, a Virginian and grandnephew of founder George Mason, also kept a journal: “Being thus shorthanded & thinking it no time to stand on our dignity, all of us, the officers, went to work with a will.” They removed coats and vests, rolled up sleeves, and began breaking out cases from Laurel and hoisting them on board Sea King. Men and officers kept hard at it, only taking time for meals and a break for grog.[2]

These Confederates were a cross section of the South from Maryland, Virginia, both Carolinas, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Missouri. They included scions of the deep South plantation aristocracy and of Old Dominion first families: a nephew of Robert E. Lee, descendants of men who fought at George Washington’s side, and a relative by marriage of Matthew Fontaine Maury. One was an uncle of a young Theodore Roosevelt, and another was son-in-law to Raphael Semmes. All but two, the captain and the ship’s surgeon, were under the age of twenty-five.

In the fourth year of the bloody, frustrating conflict, these warriors of the sea finally could do what they did best: take the fight to the enemy in a fine blue-water ship, a rare opportunity in the Confederate States Navy. They were more cynical than when the struggle began, but not disillusioned. Morale and expectations were high.

Crates with guns, gun carriages and fittings, powder, shot, and shell, along with stores of all kinds were swung across, all hurriedly piled in a lumbering, confused mass. Lieutenant William Whittle recalled: “Every particle of work, of bringing order out of chaos and providing for efficiently putting everything in a condition for service, and of converting this ship into an armed cruiser at sea, amidst wind and storm, if encountered, stared us in the face.”[3]

Sailors of both ships, all foreign and mostly British, were called aft on the main deck and informed that Sea King had been sold to become a Confederate cruiser named Shenandoah. James I. Waddell emerged from his cabin and mounted the ladder to the quarterdeck in gray uniform with sword and pistol, the gold stripes of a lieutenant on his sleeves. He stood at the rail above the gathered sailors that sunny October afternoon with only sea, sky, and rocks as witness.

Two years earlier, August 1862, the new CSS Alabama rendezvoused with her stores ship near the island of Terceira in the Azores for the same purposes. Captain Raphael Semmes was equally concerned then: “I could not know how many of them would engage with me…. No creature can be more whimsical than a sailor, until you have bound him past recall, unless indeed it be a woman.”

Semmes mounted a gun carriage as his clerk solemnly read the ship’s commission and orders from the secretary of the navy. At a wave of his hand, the British flag dropped as the Confederate banner appeared at the peak. The commissioning pennant of a man-of-war streamed from the main royal mast head. A gun roared out in salute. The air was rent by cheers from officers and men. The band played Dixie, “that soul-stirring national anthem of the new-born government.”

They would be fighting, Semmes told them, “the battles of the oppressed against the oppressor, and this consideration alone should be enough to nerve the arm of every generous sailor.” He promised adventure and new ports with payment in gold, double ordinary wages, and prize money. He recruited eighty of ninety men from the two ships and felt very much relieved. [4]

Captain Waddell hoped to repeat this performance, but didn’t carry it off. Liquor flowed as the officers struggled to convince sailors to sign on. One seaman reported that a bucket of gold sovereigns appeared: “the officers took up handfuls to tempt the men on deck.” They also were promised the best of living conditions, provisions out of ships captured, and prize money.[5]

Waddell explained that his orders were to simply destroy Federal commerce; the vessel was not made to fight, and combat would be avoided if possible. He hoped that at least fifty men would sign on, which would prove sufficient until reinforcements could be enlisted from captured ships. They got less than half that. Despite all inducements, most of the sailors insisted on returning with Laurel.

A little before sundown the Confederate flag was raised—unnoticed, wrote Dr. Lining, by all except himself and the officer on deck. “We with our small crew, willing, however, to suffer & do all we could…started off on our cruise, our only trust being in a just God, and in our cause.”[6]

In his post-war report, Captain Waddell sounded more confident (and more poetic) than he undoubtedly felt at the time:

And the little adventurer entered upon her new career, throwing out to the breeze the flag of the South, and demanded a place upon that vast ocean of water without fear or favor. That flag unfolded itself gracefully to the freshening breeze, and declared the majesty of the country it represented amid the cheers of a handful of brave-hearted men, and she dashed upon her native element as if more than equal to the contest, cheered on by acclamations from Laurel, which was steaming away for the land we love, to tell the tale to those who would rejoice that another Confederate cruiser was afloat.[7]

The very day that lost one Shenandoah to the Confederacy saw the birth of another. The new warship honored the place, recalled Lt. Whittle, “where the brave Stonewall Jackson always so discomforted the enemy. The burning there of homes over defenseless women and children made the selection of the name not inappropriate for a cruiser, which was to lead a torchlight procession around the world and into every ocean.”[8]

It would be one of the most successful commerce raiding cruises in history, which a year earlier in the summer of 1864 would have been greeted by jubilation in the South and consternation in the North. On November 6, 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. “I claim for her officers and men a triumph over their enemies and over every obstacle,” Waddell wrote, “and for myself I claim having done my duty.”

————

Source: Dwight Sturtevant Hughes, A Confederate Biography: The Cruise of the CSS Shenandoah (Naval Institute Press, 2012)

[1] Charles E. Lining, Journal, Eleanor S. Brokenbrough Library, Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond, VA, unpaginated.

[2] James T. Mason, Journal, Eleanor  S. Brokenbrough Library, Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond, VA.

[3] William C. Whittle, Jr., “The Cruise of the Shenandoah,” in Southern Historical Society Papers 35 (1907), 244.

[4] Raphael Semmes, Memoirs of Service Afloat During the War Between the States (Baltimore: Kelly, Piet and Company, 1869), 409-412.

[5] “Deposition of John Wilson,” The Case of Great Britain as Laid Before the Tribunal of Arbitration Convened at Geneva, 3 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1872), 1:753.

[6] Lining, Journal.

[7] James I. Waddell, “Extracts from notes on the C.S.S. Shenandoah by her commander, James Iredell Waddell, C.S. Navy,” in The Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1896), 1, 3:796.

[8] Whittle, “Cruise of the Shenandoah,” 243.