September 2023
when “Dixie” came around. “The whole ship would be in an uproar of enthusiasm” he recalled, “sometimes as many as a hundred voices joining in the chorus; the unenthusiastic Englishman, the stolid Dutchman, the mercurial Frenchman, the grave Spaniard, and even the mysterious Malayan, all joining in in the inspiring refrain,—‘We’ll live and die in Dixie!’”6
High seas privateering required a little sneakiness. When approaching a suspected enemy ship, Semmes had the U.S. flag flown until closing in on his prey. In October 1863, the Alabama was cruising the Java and South China Seas when she came upon a New York clipper, the Contest. Hoisting at first the Stars and Stripes, Semmes then hauled it down and ran up the Confederacy’s Second National Flag, the Stainless Banner. “We were now wearing that splendid white flag, with its cross and stars,” Semmes writes, “which was so great an improvement upon the old one” (meaning, the Stars and Bars).7
Semmes and his vessel finally met their match on June 19, 1864 off Cherbourg. There they encountered the U.S.S. Kearsarge, which blocked the channel. “Semmes decided that the ship should fight rather than rot in a French port,” writes Dr. Spencer. After an hour of trading shots, Semmes’ vessel started sinking. “We fought her until she could no longer swim,” Semmes recalled, “and then gave her to the waves.”8
Semmes was proud of his accomplishments. He set out
hoping that his commerce raiding would force the enemy to draw blockading warships from the Southern coast. But he settled on knowing that his preying on Northern merchantmen was driving up insurance rates for them, forcing many to stay at home, cowering in port. In December 1861 he recorded, “the enemy was fast losing his Mediterranean trade, under the operation of high premiums for war risks.” By the spring of 1863, American shippers were avoiding the common transoceanic routes out of fear of the Alabama. Even though the Union Navy declined to siphon away from the blockade, “his success against merchantmen,” writes Dr. Spencer, “led merchants worldwide to refuse to ship under the U.S. flag.” Before the war, the American merchant marine was second in the world; it never recovered.9
Semmes wrote proudly of his damage to Northern commerce. During the war, “It went down to vessel ran down enemy ships, zero, and since the war it has not “overhauling her enemy, with the revived.”10 ease of a trained courser coming
As a good Confederate, up with a saddle-nag.” As he Semmes opens his book with burns Northerners’ vessels, he a lecture on the constitutional is mindful of their government “starving validity of secession. Aside from arguments over slavery and the women and children included.” tariff, Yankees and Southerners “Whenever we heard a Yankee were so different in their origins howl go up over a burned ship, and cultures as to have become we knew that there were fewer “two distinct nations.” Semmes’ dollars left, with which to hire the canaille of Europe to unabashed partisanship is shown in this passage from his Memoirs: throttle liberty on the American continent.12
The Yankee is certainly a remarkable specimen of Semmes was promoted to rear the genus homo. He is at admiral in early 1865. He was in
once a duck, and a chicken, Richmond when the capital fell. and takes to the water, or the land, with equal facility. Providence has certainly designed him for some useful purpose. He is ambitious, restless, scheming, energetic, and has no inconvenient moral nature to restrain him from the pursuit of his interests, be the path to these never so crooked. In the development of material wealth he is unsurpassed, and perhaps this is his mission on this new continent of ours. But he is like the beaver, he works from instinct, and is so avid of gain, that he has no time to enjoy the wealth that he produces. Some malicious demon seems to be goading him on, in spite of himself, to continuous and exhausting exertion, which consigns him to the tomb before his time, leaving a “pile” of untouched wealth behind him.11 Semmes enjoys telling how his
For his accomplishments As the Confederacy collapsed and President Davis was fleeing the city, he appointed Semmes a brigadier, commanding a small contingent of troops accompanying Davis’ entourage. Semmes thus holds the singular distinction of having served the Confederacy as both navy admiral and army general. He was dispatched to Johnston’s army in North Carolina, where he surrendered and was paroled.
Returning to Mobile, Semmes bean a law practice. In the next few years he composed his lengthy memoir. He left this life in 1877 and is buried in Mobile’s Catholic Cemetery with his wife Anne. The UDC and SCV have dedicated a biographical tribute alongside their grave.13
Semmes ends his reminiscence with commentary of the Reconstruction strife then ongoing between President Johnson and the Congress. He did not sound optimistic: “The form of government having been changed by the revolution, there are still other acts of the drama to be performed.”14 Boy, was he right.
Endnotes 1. Raphael Semmes, Memoirs of Service Afloat During the War Between the States (Secaucus NJ,
2. Warren F. Spencer, “Raphael Semmes” in Richard N. Current, Encyclopedia of the ed., Confederacy, 4 vols. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), vol. 3, 1392-1393; Semmes, Memoirs,
3. Warren F. Spencer, “Laird Shipyards” in Richard N. Current, ed., Encyclopedia of the Confederacy, 4 vols. (New York, 1993), 904; Semmes, Memoirs,
4. Spencer, “Laird Shipyards,” 904. 5. Semmes, Memoirs, 578; William
“I Thank
Eliza Frances Andrews (1840–1931) received a strong education and was
the Lord I
a successful writer and educator. Her War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl
Am Not a
surely ranks among the most observant
Yankee...”
and intelligent wartime memoirs by a Edited with commentary by Stephen Davis, I Thank the Lord I Am Not a Yankeeincludes selections of her wartime and postwar journals which are most expressive of her Confederate
patriotism and Southern pride.
Stephen Davisis author of ten books on the Civil War, most of which treat the Atlanta Campaign. His two recent volumes
on Confederate General John Bell Hood have won several prizes, including the Fletcher Pratt Award of the New York CWRT.
Marvel, The Alabama & the Kearsarge: The Sailor’s Civil
War (Chapel Hill, 1996), 120.
7. Marvel, Alabama & Kearsarge,
191; Semmes, Memoirs, 693.
8. Spencer, “Raphael Semmes,”
9. Semmes, Memoirs, 289; Spencer,
10. Semmes, Memoirs, 697.
11. Semmes, Memoirs, 285, 481-82. 12. Ibid., 576, 614, 623.
13. William C. Davis, “Raphael Semmes,” in Davis, ed., The Confederate General, 6 vols. (Harrisburg, 1991), vol. 5, 141,
14. Semmes, Memoirs, 833.
Like many boys, Steve Davis grew up with the hobby of dinosaurs. (He can still draw a mean tyrannosaurus.) Since the fourth grade, though, the Civil War has been his passion. In high school he entered an historical essay contest and wrote on Matthew Fontaine Maury—and won a prize!
Of course, at Emory he took Bell Wiley’s Civil War class. A Master’s from Chapel Hill followed, then a Ph.D. at Emory, where he devoted his dissertation to the role of the Civil War in the Southern arts. (A descendant lent him some of Allen Redwood’s drawings; they’re now at the Museum of the Confederacy.) He’s now written ten books, edited a couple more, and written hundreds of articles and book reviews.
At seventy-five, Steve shows no signs of slowing down. Savas Beatie will publish his The National Tribune Remembers the Atlanta Campaign next year. And watch for that counterfactual coming out from Shotwell Publishing!
