The
CSS Alabama under Captain Raphael Semmes was a commerce raider which
helped deliver a fatal blow to Northern merchant shipping. In her
illustrious two-year career she sailed continuously, never dropping
anchor in a Southern port, and sinking 65 Northern ships. The crews of
her sea-going victims were never harmed. Famed Capt. John Newland
Maffitt’s son Eugene was serving aboard the Alabama as a midshipman when
she was sunk off Cherbourg.
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
"Unsurpassed Valor, Courage and Devotion to Liberty"
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
Kearsarge Shows Its True Colors
“The
vessels were nearly evenly matched [though one] vessel was in perfect
condition, and armed with two 11-inch Dahlgren guns against one
eight-inch and one seven-inch gun. The guns of the Alabama were old,
the shells defective, the powder spoiled.
But
above all, the Alabama, a wooden vessel, was fighting a vessel which
concealed under her planks chain cables, which made her “in fact a
partially-armored vessel.” The “gallant Winslow” allowed his former
friend and comrade to offer him a challenge, knowing that Semmes
believed the Kearsarge to be a wooden vessel.
Even
as it was, with every advantage on the side of her chained-plated foe,
it was by a very narrow margin that the Alabama lost the game. In the
old stern post of the Kearsarge – still preserved at Washington – lies
[embedded] a seven-inch rifle shell, which, if it had exploded – and it
would have exploded had its powder and fuse come from the magazine of
the Kearsarge instead of from that of the Alabama – then the Deerhound
would have rescued
Capt. Winslow and his crew, and the boats of the
Alabama would have rendered prompt assistance.”
It
will be remembered that the “gallant Winslow” was so far from rendering
“prompt assistance” that but for the Deerhound – the English steam
yacht – Semmes and his officers and crew would most of them have been
drowned. Had he known the Deerhound’s intentions, boasted this valiant
and “gallant” officer, he would have pursued and sunk her.
And
[US Secretary of State William] Seward “claimed it the right of the
Kearsarge that “the pirates should drown.” I quote from Percy Greg, who
tells how Capt. Winslow tried to get the French authorities to send to
him the prisoners the Alabama had captured. The United States government
adds that Greg “had obliged every officer and man paroled by the
Alabama to choose between the disgrace of breaking his parole and the
extreme penalties of martial law.
This
fact, not admitting excuse, is simply suppressed by Northern writers.
If the United States government would inscribe on their “tablets” these
truths of history, and may others of a like character, the [Grand Army
of the Republic] GAR would put them in their schoolbooks, and then might
come the real “reconciliation between the sections,” for the North,
seeing their past in its true colors, must needs cry, “I have sinned,”
until which time the South cannot say, “I forgive.”
The Alabama and the Kearsarge, Kate Mason Rowland, Confederate Veteran, December 1900, pg 528)
