Australian Confederates

by Terry Smyth

  The Queensland planters modelled their estates on those of the American South, with grand houses surrounded by cotton fields where – so white society was led to believe – docile darkies sang happily at their work, content to toil from dawn till dusk under the paternal eye of their beloved masters.

  As in the American South, Australian planters branded their field hands. But unlike in America, where branding was mostly used as a punishment for recaptured runaway slaves, Australian planters branded people as they did cattle. Wielding the branding iron was simply a means of identifying property, a practice that had an important bearing on an 1868 court case in Rockhampton, Queensland, in which a certain John Tancred was charged with stealing an islander boy named Towhey, the property of Arthur Gossett. The complainant swore he could prove his ownership of the boy because he had branded him not once but twice – on the leg and on the side – which he demonstrated to the court. The judge fined Tancred £10 for theft, and Gossett walked away with his young slave in tow. The press report of the case heartily approved of the outcome, helpfully suggesting: ‘perhaps it may not yet be too late for the Assembly to insert a “branding” clause in the Polynesian Labourers Bill’.11

  Blackbirding meant handsome profits to ship owners, ship’s masters and planters, and untold misery to the islanders. Despite often spirited opposition from missionaries, humanitarian groups, the British Government and elements of the Australian press, the trade would not be outlawed until 1903, by which time some 60,000 islanders had been taken to Australia – victims of greed, exploitation and violence, even wholesale murder.

  While the most notorious of the blackbirders was the American pirate William ‘Bully’ Hayes – of whom much has been written and too often romanticised – the worst atrocity of the blackbirding era was carried out by a Melbourne doctor, James Patrick Murray. As master of the brig Carl, Murray’s favourite trick was to send his crew ashore disguised as missionaries. When the islanders assembled for a religious service, the raiders would draw weapons and force them aboard ship. On one occasion, in 1871, when his captives attempted to escape from the ship’s hold, Murray ordered them all shot. For several hours, the doctor and his men fired indiscriminately through the hatch. All the while, Murray, revolver in one hand and mug of coffee in the other, was lustily singing ‘Marching Through Georgia’ – a song about the Union Army’s 1864 march to the sea to capture Savannah, Georgia. In an obscene irony, a verse of the song begins, ‘How the darkies shouted when they heard the joyful sound.’

  The Carl massacre claimed 70 lives – 35 killed by gunfire, and 35 wounded who were thrown overboard with their hands tied. Murray escaped prosecution. Guaranteed immunity for testifying against members of his crew – two of whom were hanged – and still registered to practise medicine, he abandoned his family and fled the country.

  ‘Dr Murray was last seen in Sydney on the 20th of January last and now cannot be found,’ the press reported. ‘It is generally believed that he has gone to England. He has a wife and two children in Victoria, having been married there to a lady who formerly resided at St Kilda. So ends the colonial history of a man whose name will go down to posterity as one of the most vile offenders that ever disgraced the annals of any country.’12

  Murray did indeed go to England. He practised medicine in Manchester until struck off the register, then hung out a shingle as a dentist until struck off. Rumour had it that he turned up next in Africa, and history loses sight of him after his name appears on the passenger list of a ship bound for Boston. Murray never paid for his crimes but it’s likely the taint of the Carl massacre followed him to the grave, wherever that may be.

  On the morning of 25 January 1865, as the Shenandoah sails through the heads of Port Phillip Bay, Captain James Waddell, easing his ship towards an anchorage at Sandridge – now Port Melbourne – is as yet unaware that the city a few miles distant harbours pro-Confederacy sentiments or that the institution of slavery, on the verge of collapse in the American South, has been reborn in Australia’s north. He is about to find kindred spirits in Melbourne, but a whole lot of trouble, too.

  As to why destiny, those many years earlier, had set in motion the events leading to the Shenandoah’s voyage to the bottom of the world, Captain Waddell would no doubt be surprised to learn it began when a man with time on his hands and invention on his mind stood staring at a chicken coop. Of course, Eli Whitney and Caty Greene were long dead and gone when King Cotton went to hell in a hand-basket and Union soldiers marching through Georgia burnt to the ground Mulberry Grove plantation. Whitney’s cotton gin had not made him rich, as he had hoped. While his invention changed the world in its way, its very simplicity, along with the primitive patent laws of those days, made it easy to copy.

  He did win fame, however. In his lifetime, Eli Whitney was feted as an engineering mastermind, which surely brought him some satisfaction. And although he gave no credit to Caty for her invaluable collaboration, he did at least give an honourable mention to the cat.

  Chapter 2

  Daughter of the stars

  It is the afternoon of Wednesday 25 January 1865. On Hobson’s Bay, in a light wind and clear weather, it’s just another busy day at Melbourne’s main port. Sailing out through Port Phillip Heads, the schooner Lady Robilliard has departed for Belfast, the barque Theordore Dill for Batavia, the Wasp for Western Port, the Natal for Newcastle and the Derwent for Hobart Town.

  Arriving earlier today, to anchor in the bay, the brig Eliza Goddard sailed in from Java, the Orwell from London and the Sir Isaac Newton from South Australia. Also in port is the warship Victoria, pride of the Victorian colonial navy.

  At two o’clock, at the Melbourne port station, news comes in by telegraph from the Cape Otway lighthouse that a large screw steamer, flying no colours but thought to be the Royal Standard, 52 days out from Liverpool, is inward bound. That message is soon corrected. The incoming vessel is not the Royal Standard but the Shenandoah, a Confederate warship known to have captured and destroyed at least 11 Yankee merchant ships.

  By the time the Shenandoah has entered the west channel, the city is already abuzz with the news. The ship’s assistant surgeon, Fred McNulty, will later recall, ‘Never was conquering flag at peak hailed with half such honours as we were given upon that bright tropical morning. Steamer, tugboat, yacht – all Melbourne, in fact, with its 180,000 souls, seemed to have outdone itself in welcome to the Confederates. Flags dipped, cannon boomed, and men in long thousands cheered us as we moved slowly up the channel and dropped anchor. The telegraph had told of our coming from down the coast, where we had been sighted with Confederate flag flying … Evidently the heart of colonial Britain was in our cause.’1

  The ‘conquering flag’ is the naval ensign of the Confederacy. Known as ‘The Stainless Banner’, it features a white field with the Confederate battle flag as a saltire: a diagonal cross in the top left-hand corner, known as the ‘Stars and Bars’. So called because of the white field, the Stainless Banner is also known as ‘Jackson’s flag’ because the first of its kind was used to enfold the body of General ‘Stonewall’ Jackson. It is popular with those in the South who believe it symbolises white supremacy. More practically minded Southerners are concerned that it could too easily be mistaken for a flag of truce.

  On spying the Confederate vessel’s flag fluttering in the breeze, most Yankee ships in the bay haul down ‘Old Glory’, presumably to avoid making themselves a target, and one ship raises instead the flag of the Ionian Islands – a blue flag bearing a winged lion with a Union Jack in the corner. A couple of American ships run up the ‘Stars and Stripes’ in a show of defiance, but their symbolic protest is a sideshow of the Shenandoah’s travelling Confederate circus.

  Like McNulty, Master’s Mate Cornelius Hunt is impressed by the reception. His memoir records, ‘As soon as it became generally known in Melbourne that a Confederate cruiser had arrived in the offing, a scene of excitement was inaugurated which baffles all adequate description. Crowds of
people were rushing hither and thither, seeking authentic information concerning the stranger, and ere we had been an hour at anchor, a perfect fleet of boats was pulling towards us from every direction.’2

  Lieutenant Frank Chew recalls: ‘Among our fair visitors there were many very pretty girls. It is useless to say that we vied with each other in showing them attention, and I might venture to add that some of our officers might have left their hearts in the “Golden Empire”.

  ‘Upon every steamer’s approaching the ship we would look out for pretty faces and if found we stood near the gangway so as to take them in charge. If they were particularly agreeable we took them after to the cabin and requested the pleasure of a glass of wine with them.’3

  Not all Victorians are enthused. One goldfields newspaper, the splendidly named Creswick & Clunes Advertiser and County of Talbot Agricultural Journal, huffs: ‘We fail to see that more glory attaches to this band of marauders than to the pirates of Morocco.’4

  Immediately upon arrival, Captain Waddell despatches one of his officers, Lieutenant John Grimball, with a letter for Victoria’s Governor, Sir Charles Darling. It reads: ‘I have the honour to announce to your Excellency the arrival of the Confederate States Steamer Shenandoah, under my command, in Port Phillip, this afternoon, and I have also to communicate that the steamer’s machinery requires repairs, and that I am in want of coals. I desire your Excellency to grant permission for me to make the necessary repairs, to take in a [load] of coals, to enable me to get to sea as quickly as possible. I desire also your Excellency’s permission to land my prisoners. I shall observe the neutrality.’5

  What Waddell doesn’t tell the Governor, of course, is that the need for repairs is a convenient excuse. While it’s true that damage to the propeller shaft was discovered during the voyage south, the real reason for coming to Melbourne is to secretly recruit men to join his short-handed crew.

  Later that afternoon, in Victoria’s Parliament, during yet another tedious and interminable debate on import tariffs, Minister for Justice Archibald Michie is handed a telegram informing him of the arrival of the Shenandoah. Michie, who is also Melbourne correspondent for The Times, rushes off to report the incident to his London editors. The Times will not publish Michie’s report until 13 March, followed four days later by a pompous editorial cautioning the colonials to judiciously observe the neutrality laws when dealing with their uninvited guests. It’s a waste of ink and bombast. By then, the Confederate cruiser is long gone from Melbourne, steaming from the bottom of the world to the top, with the ultimate aim of destroying the Yankee whaling fleet.

  At anchor, newspapers are pitched aboard the Shenandoah as, Captain Waddell will later write, ‘cheer after cheer greeted us from the generous, brave-hearted Englishmen and Australians, who believed in the justice of our cause. We were prepared for the reception. The pilot [who came aboard when the ship entered the Heads of Port Phillip Bay] has said, “You have a great many friends in Melbourne.”’6

  Waddell is soon to find he has enemies, too, in Melbourne. Powerful enemies. And the newspapers pitched aboard give him little cheer. Having been at sea since the previous October, he was unaware of the re-election of Abraham Lincoln; of Sherman’s march to the sea, leaving a path of destruction for 300 miles from Atlanta to Savannah; of the Confederates’ crushing defeat at Nashville.

  To old salts in port, there’s something familiar about the warship, and a close look at her stern reveals the faded lettering of her former name: the Sea King, a British merchant ship that had visited Australia about a year earlier. Refitted as an eight-gun man-of-war, the auxiliary screw vessel – capable of both sail and steam power – has been renamed the Shenandoah, after the river and valley of that name in western Virginia, part of the Union. It is an ironic choice, though probably not deliberately so. The word is believed to mean ‘Daughter of the Stars’ in a Native American language; in 1865 the stars are no longer favouring the South.

  Control of the valley, running north to south between the Blue Ridge and Allegheny mountains, is strategically vital to both sides. For the North, the Shenandoah had been the ‘Valley of Humiliation’ early in the war, while the triumphant rebels called it the ‘Breadbasket of the Confederacy’.7 Mainly thanks to Stonewall Jackson, who in 1862 fought off three Union armies there, the valley remained the back door for Confederacy forays until late in 1864, when Union forces under General ‘Little Phil’ Sheridan defeated Jubal Early’s Confederates at the battle of Cedar Creek, and closed the back door; currently, the breadbasket is no more.

  William Conway Whittle, the ship’s executive officer, writes, ‘I do not know why the name Shenandoah was chosen, unless because of the constantly recurring conflicts, retreats and advances through the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, where the brave Stonewall Jackson always so discomforted the enemy, causing, it is said, one of the distinguished Federal generals to say of that valley that it must be made such a waste that a crow to fly over it would have to rake its rations.

  ‘The burning there of homes of defenceless women and children made the selection of the name not inappropriate for a cruiser which was to lead a torch-light procession around the world and into every ocean.’8

  Perhaps now, for Captain Waddell and his crew, the name is symbolic of a forlorn hope; a talisman to bring back glory days, and take revenge for the destruction visited on the Shenandoah Valley by Federal forces.

  And on the journey to the far side of the world, the crew of this Daughter of the Stars wished upon a bright light moving slowly across the night sky. Discovered on January 17 by a Tasmanian ex-convict, watchmaker and amateur astronomer Francis Abbott, the Great Southern Comet of 1865 was so bright it would be visible to the naked eye until the end of February.

  There is no guiding star, nor hope nor glory for a troop of the 5th Colored Cavalry driving a herd of cattle to Louisville, Kentucky. On a narrow road outside Simpsonville, the black Union soldiers are ambushed by Confederate guerrillas.

  The 5th Colored Cavalry, under the command of General James Sank Brisbin, a prominent abolitionist, consists mainly of former slaves. Kentucky, although a slave state, has stayed in the Union. Since Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed only slaves in the rebel states, many black men in Kentucky have gained a measure of freedom by joining the regiment.

  Attacked from behind, 35 black soldiers are gunned down after their white officers run away. The wounded are shot dead by the rebel irregulars, whose habit it is to execute any wounded or captured black soldiers.

  The press will report that one of the white officers hid under a store until the attack was over then rode off for Louisville without looking back, and that other officers were found ‘loafing in the tavern’. The report, based on eye-witness accounts, continues:

  The ground was stained with blood and the dead bodies of negro soldiers were stretched out along the road. It was evident that the guerrillas had dashed upon the party guarding the rear of the cattle and taken them completely by surprise. They could not have offered any serious resistance, as none of the outlaws were even wounded. It is presumed that the negroes surrendered and were shot down in cold blood, as but two of the entire number escaped – one of them by secreting himself behind a wagon, the other by running, as he was met several miles from the scene of tragedy, wounded and nearly exhausted. Thirty-five dead bodies were counted lying in the road and vicinity. It was a horrible butchery, yet the scoundrels engaged in the bloody work shot down their victims with feelings of delight.

  After the wholesale murder, they took good care to secure the arms and ammunition of the slain. The officers in command of the negro troops should be held responsible for the slaughter, for it is certain that if they had been with their men, and enforced a proper discipline, the outlaws would have been whipped with ease.9

  None of the white officers would be disciplined for deserting their men.

  That same day, in a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp in Florence, South Carolina, one of the cap
tured Union soldiers dies of pneumonia. Given that more than 2,000 of the 16,000 Union prisoners in the Florence Stockade have died of disease or starvation during the past four months, the death of one more Yankee bluecoat might pass without remark, but for the fact that this soldier was a woman disguised as a man.

  Florena Budwin, of Philadelphia, dressed as a man and enlisted in the Union army to be with her husband, Captain John Budwin. After John was killed in battle, Florena – the male alias she used is not known – was captured and imprisoned, firstly in the notorious Andersonville prison camp in Georgia – where almost 13,000 of the 45,000 Union prisoners would die during the war – then in the Florence Stockade in South Carolina. There, she tended to sick prisoners until falling ill herself. It was only then that a doctor discovered her sex, and by that stage she was beyond help.

  Private Florena Budwin died on 25 January 1865, just a few weeks before all the sick prisoners at the camp were released. She was 20 years old.

  And Florena wasn’t the only woman to take up arms out of love, loyalty or patriotic fervour. While there are no exact figures because presumably not all were discovered, it’s estimated that on both sides at least 600 women disguised as men fought in the American Civil War, and that more than 60 were killed or wounded.10