Raphael Semmes: The Philosophical Mariner, by Warren F. Spencer, University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, (205) 348-5180, 241 pages, $34.95.
The story of the Confederacy at sea is to a large extent the story of Raphael Semmes, the most successful nineteenth-century practitioner of the naval strategy of commerce raiding. Commanding first the Sumter and then the famous Alabama, he led the near-destruction of the Federal merchant marine and was the only naval officer on either side to fight two battles at sea. He helped to defend Richmond in the final year of the war and was the only officer in Confederate service to hold flag rank in both the navy and army.
Born in Charles County, Maryland, in 1809, Semmes was orphaned at the age of thirteen. Reared by two uncles, he enjoyed a middle-class upbringing in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C., and along the eastern shore of Maryland. Semmes’s uncles secured a midshipman’s appointment for their adopted son, and he entered the U.S. Navy in 1826.
Semmes saw interesting service in the Mexican War (much of it ashore on the staff of Brigadier General William Worth), but most of his service in the U.S. Navy was humdrum. In 1858, however, he was called to serve on the Lighthouse Board in Washington and got a firsthand view of the Union’s collapse. A resident of Alabama since 1841, his sympathies lay entirely with the South, and he resigned his commission in the U.S. Navy on February 5, 1861, to throw in his lot with the Confederacy.
Convinced that the Federal merchant marine would prove to be the North’s Achilles’ heel, Semmes urged Confederate Secretary of the Navy Stephen Mallory to endorse a strategy of commerce raiding. He persuaded Mallory to give him command of a converted packet ship, which was promptly rechristened the Sumter and became the first Confederate cruiser. Although blockaded in the Mississippi passes by a Federal flotilla, the 500-ton Sumter made a daring escape on June 30, 1861, and the Confederacy had its first cruiser at sea.
After using the Sumter to capture eighteen Federal merchantmen and seriously damaging the sugar trade between the United States and the West Indies, Semmes was obliged to lay up his vessel at Gibraltar. He then had the good fortune to be named commander of the Confederacy’s finest cruiser, the Alabama. Notwithstanding his 1864 defeat at the hands of the Kearsarge, Semmes’s record with the Alabama is astonishing. During twenty-two months at sea, he destroyed fifty-four Federal merchantmen and bonded ten others. (After the war, when negotiators determined that Britain owed the United States $15.5 million for damages done by ships that British companies had sold to the Confederacy, the amount charged to the Alabama–$6.75 million–was by far the highest.) In addition to her remarkable toll in merchant shipping, the Alabama sank an enemy warship, the Hatteras, and brought untold embarrassment to the U.S. Navy. Semmes’s record would not be approached by any sea raider until the advent of the submarine.
As the author of a Semmes biography myself (Confederate Raider: Raphael Semmes of the Alabama, Brassey’s, 1994), I can testify that Semmes is not an easy subject. Only a handful of his letters survive, and few of these are of substantive interest. His aloofness was occasionally remarked upon by his navy colleagues. In his postwar volume Memoir of Service Afloat During the War Between the States, Semmes totally ignored his service in the U.S. Navy, calling it a closed chapter in his life.
Warren Spencer is at home in the Civil War. His earlier writings include an essay on Semmes in an anthology published by the U.S. Naval Institute. He believes Semmes has not had his due from historians, and in Raphael Semmes he sets out the intellectual attainments of his “philosophical mariner” in great detail. Spencer’s main contribution in this area is his thorough discussion of Semmes’s Mexican War memoir, which reveals the young officer as a thoughtful observer of Mexican social institutions as well as a fervent nationalist, one who is convinced that the white race (i.e., the United States) is destined to control North America and more.
Spencer devotes four chapters and ninety-two pages to Semmes’s pre-Civil War period. By contrast, he devotes only one long chapter to the two years of Semmes’s life that are memorable, those in which he commanded the famous Alabama. The result is an unsatisfying book. Doubtless assuming that his readers would be familiar with the famous battle between the Alabama and the Kearsarge, Spencer gives it only three pages. His statement that “Depression struck Semmes early in the battle when he realized that Alabama’s shot and shell did little damage to the Kearsarge” will strike many readers as understatement.
Moreover, this short book has more than its share of lapses. Spencer’s claim that “No previous biographer has touched upon [Semmes’s] compassion as a family man” does a disservice to my book and to others. Semmes’s practice of collecting the chronometers of the ships he captured stemmed not from his interest in chronometers but from the fact that they could be sold–and they were. Spencer’s statement that the Northern-owned slave David White, whom Semmes recruited for the Alabama, “remained happily with the ship until the end of her cruise,” glosses over the fact that at the end of the cruise, White drowned in the English Channel. And the suggestion that Semmes released some ships on bond out of a residual loyalty to the American flag is baseless.
Although Spencer acknowledges and deplores Semmes’s racism, he does not examine it in any depth, and he sometimes skips over incidents that reflect unfavorably on his subject. There is no mention of the cruel punishment Semmes inflicted on one sailor who cursed the Confederacy, of the female prisoner whom Semmes douses with seawater for calling him a “pirate,” or of Semmes’s practice–probably justified–of putting prisoners in irons in retaliation for similar treatment that had been accorded two of his own officers.
It is one thing to have a thorough academic grounding in the Civil War; it is another to gain the insight necessary to write about so complex a personality as Raphael Semmes. Spencer’s gravest sin is that he has made his subject seem dull. Semmes was first and foremost a warrior, one with an abiding hatred of Yankee materialism. True, he had an appreciation of nature–he spoke of coral as that “little toiler of the sea,” comparing its handiwork to cathedrals. But mariners in the age of sail had plenty of time to philosophize, and Semmes was hardly unique in his interest in nature. He was not a “philosophical mariner” to much greater an extent than any of his peers.
Whatever one may think of Spencer’s treatment, his admiration for Semmes as a naval officer is fully justified. Because all but one of his victims were merchantmen, Semmes has not always been given full credit for his initiative, pugnacity, and daring. He operated in an atmosphere of constant danger and in this environment was bold almost to a fault. His initial breakout from the Mississippi, in the little Sumter, required considerable daring. His attempt to disrupt enemy landings off Galveston, Texas, resulted only in the sinking of the Hatteras, but it reflected his determination to get the most out of the only vessel available to him.
Notwithstanding that he had no home port, he kept two wooden vessels at sea for the better part of three years without an overhaul and without losing either any crewmen or prisoners to disease. As a strategist, he demonstrated that a nation with a weak navy could inflict great damage on any foe with a substantial merchant fleet. What Semmes would have accomplished if he had commanded more than a single warship can only be conjectured. He was the first commerce raider to operate in the age of steam, and–here I am in full agreement with Spencer–he may have been the best of all time.
John M. Taylor
McLean, Virginia
