by Terry Smyth
‘There can be no doubt whatever that the prevailing feeling of the English public is a simple desire to get rid of criminals, and to restore a sense of security to householders and travellers. They are supremely indifferent to the moral reformation of people who cut your purse or your throat. Thus, whenever any panic seizes the popular mind, the general cry is in favour of transportation.’2
South of the Murray, Melbourne’s Argus observed, with a typically parochial slant, ‘At this moment, New South Wales is almost at the mercy of her convict population. Mail robberies are of daily occurrence, and on more than one occasion the gold escort has been stopped and pillaged by armed bands, composed, it is believed, of convicts or the descendants of such men. The influence old settlers of this kind have over the young in their neighbourhood is well known. It is openly stated that the leaders in the latest outrages on the Sydney side of the border would have long ago been in the hands of the police but for the shelter and assistance afforded to them by settlers and their descendants having the taint of the chain gang upon them.
‘There are other lands where prisons may be built, and islands where convicts may be employed, and where they would not be brought into contact with free settlers. The Times proposes Labrador, and the Falkland Islands have been suggested.’3
In South Australia, which had never experienced transportation, the press raised the spectre of the rise of a race of super-criminals: ‘Amalgamating with the natives, the result would be the appearance of a class of men combining the cunning and endurance of the Aborigines with the worst features of the European criminal.
‘Before an influx of garrotting bushrangers, our handful of police would be utterly powerless, and for England to save London by throwing its criminals into Australia would be equivalent to sending an infant to the rescue when a giant had failed.’4
It was never a serious proposal and it never happened, but for a while the good folk of colonial Australia got to wallow in moral outrage and dystopian fantasies.
Monday 16 February 1863 was a day James and Anne Waddell would never forget. That morning, at their home in Annapolis, Maryland, their little daughter Annie died of scarlet fever. Annie Harwood Waddell passed away a week short of her fourth birthday. She was the only child the Waddells would ever have.
Annie’s father was not with her at the last. Ordered to England to take command of one of two ironclads being built in Liverpool, he was in Halifax, Nova Scotia, waiting for safe passage to England, when he received the sad news. He sent for Anne, who somehow made it through the Union blockade to Halifax, and together they sailed for England and took up residence in Liverpool.
It is testament to Waddell’s taciturn nature that his memoirs make no mention of this personal tragedy. Then again, perhaps he found the memory too painful to revive with pen and paper. He notes only that ‘I was ordered to Europe for foreign service, and I reached England in May, 1863.’5
In Scotland, meanwhile, at Glasgow’s Stephenson & Co. shipyard, a cargo ship was under construction. Owned by London merchants Gladstone & Co., shipbrokers Robinson & Co., and Jersey mariner and shipbuilder Captain Jean Pinel, she was intended for the China tea trade. The Sea King was a 1,160-ton, fully rigged, three-masted ship with 21 square sails, and auxiliary power from a 200 horsepower A & J Inglis steam engine, driving a screw that could be lowered into the water for extra propulsion or lifted when under sail alone. She was 230 feet in length, with a beam of 32 and a half feet and a draught of 20 feet. Composite-built of iron frame with teak planking below the waterline and elm planking above, the Sea King was sleek and built for speed.
Launched on 17 August 1863, her trial run, from Glasgow to London, was a near disaster; enough to cause superstitious sailors, wondering what fate the sea gods might have in mind for the Sea King, to declare her a lucky ship, but a lucky ship that trouble was sure to follow.
John Pinel, who accompanied his father Jean on the journey, recorded in his journal, ‘We had a very rough voyage and put in to Loch Ryan in the south of Scotland. From there we made a fresh start and ran into a heavy gale in the Irish Sea.
‘Our cargo consisted of pig iron taken for ballast and a quantity of gunpowder in kegs stowed on top of the iron. The cargo shifted during the gale and some of the powder kegs were buried under the iron, with great danger of an explosion should the iron shift again and crush the kegs.
‘Water was poured on the iron to minimise the chance of this and fortunately no further trouble occurred; the weather moderated and we had fine weather for the rest of the passage.’6
In that fine weather, to the delight of her designers and owners, the Sea King showed she could make an impressive 12 knots (14 mph or 22.5 kph).
When, later that year in New Zealand, hostilities again broke out between Maori tribes and government forces, the British Government, which at that time had no steam transport ships, chartered the Sea King and other merchantmen to carry troops to Auckland. During that maiden voyage, she visited Australia, calling in at Sydney for 11 days, Newcastle for a day to load coal, then on to Wuhan, China, before returning to Liverpool with a cargo of tea.
At 10 Rumford Place, Liverpool, a bald man with thick mutton-chop sideburns and piercing eyes had been anxiously awaiting the return of the Sea King. James Dunwoody Bulloch was the Confederacy’s chief agent in Britain. His mission involved organising blockade runners, providing arms and other vital supplies to the South, and outwitting Yankee diplomats and spies. And he was very good at his job.
Scion of a prominent slaveholding Georgian family connected to the Roosevelts – one of his nephews was Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt, a future US president – Bulloch had served in the US Navy and on merchantmen, was experienced in commerce and had a natural talent for espionage. He also had an eye for the main chance, and he was sure that the main chance for the South in the war at sea lay with privateers: privately owned armed raiders licensed by the Confederate Government to target the enemy’s commercial fleet, and, in particular, Yankee whalers.
Back in 1861, in response to President Lincoln’s call for the raising of an army to put down the rebellion, and for a naval blockade of Southern ports, Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, issued the following proclamation: ‘Whereas, Abraham Lincoln, the President of the United States has, by proclamation, announced the intention of invading this Confederacy with an armed force for the purpose of capturing its fortresses, and thereby subverting its independence and subjecting the free people thereof to the dominion of a foreign power; and, whereas, it has thus become the duty of this government to repel the threatened invasion, and to defend the rights and liberties of the people by all the means which the laws of nations and the usages of civilized warfare place at its disposal.
‘Now, therefore, I, Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America, do issue this my proclamation, inviting all those who may desire, by service in private armed vessels on the high seas, to aid this government in resisting so wanton and wicked an aggression, to make application for commissions or letters of marque and reprisal to be issued under the seal of these Confederate States.’7
Letters of marque and reprisal authorised privateers to wage war and to cross international borders to take action. Whether for love of country or lust for booty or some measure of both, privateers could capture and destroy ships of an enemy’s merchant fleet, claiming the value of the ships’ cargoes as prize money.
Lincoln promptly countered by declaring that privateers would be considered pirates. And the penalty for piracy was death by hanging.
There was nothing new about attacking the commercial marine of an enemy. It had been employed throughout the ages as an effective means of damaging an enemy’s economy, and thus its capacity to wage war. Americans had used it to devastating effect on the British during the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812.
The practice of privateering had been outlawed in Europe in 1856 by the Declaration of Paris, which branded privateers as pirates, but th
e United States had not signed that treaty. The United States offered to ratify the treaty after the Civil War began, but the request was denied. Britain rejected the offer as a hypocritical reversal of America’s recently declared policy to employ privateers in naval warfare. Now that it faced the threat of Confederate privateers wreaking havoc on its own merchant fleet, Washington had turned an about-face, threatening to hang privateers as pirates.
While the North reacted to news of Jeff Davis’s letters of marque and reprisal with rising panic, the South considered ways of turning a profit for privateering, and Richmond was soon besieged with applications for letters of marque from ship owners on almost every Confederate port on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.
It did prove profitable for a while, with 50 or so Yankee merchantmen captured in the first few months of the war. By 1862, however, many European ports had been closed to privateers and their prizes, and the US Navy was exacting a heavy toll on Confederate cruisers.
After the loss, in quick succession, of the raiders Savannah, Beauregard and Jefferson Davis, and the fall of New Orleans and other vital ports, Southern entrepreneurs turned instead to outfitting blockade runners and supplying the fledgling Confederate Navy. Privateering with wooden sailing ships was simply not effective enough. What was needed were fast, armed, propeller-driven steamers, and since the Confederacy’s few shipyards were either inadequate for the task or under Yankee control, the plan was to build or buy such vessels in foreign shipyards.
If, as anticipated, steam-powered raiders decimated the slower, cumbersome ships of the Yankee merchant fleet, insurance rates in the Union would skyrocket, Northern ship owners would rush to register their vessels under foreign flags, and US Navy warships blockading Southern ports would be diverted to hunt for commercial raiders. And that’s exactly what happened.
Not wishing to be seen to be taking sides, the treaty nations, including Britain, France and Spain, refused to treat Confederate privateers as pirates.
The British Government, while proclaiming Britain and its colonies to be neutral, recognised the Confederacy as a belligerent power and declared the Union blockade of Southern ports lawful. Accordingly, Britain despatched rules of neutrality to be strictly observed by all its colonies. Under these rules, no warship, privateer or other armed vessel belonging to either side in the conflict visiting a British port would be allowed to leave port within 24 hours after an enemy vessel left port. Belligerent vessels would have to leave port and put to sea within 24 hours of arriving in a British port, unless delayed by bad weather or need of provisions. In such cases, ships would be required to leave as soon as they were able, and could take on only enough supplies to enable them to reach their country of origin or some nearer destination.
None of this British boondoggle bothered James Dunwoody Bulloch. There were ways and means to run this bureaucratic blockade, and he knew them all. Bulloch’s mission, on the orders of the Confederacy’s Secretary of the Navy, Stephen P. Mallory, was to create a fleet of steam-propelled raiders with ‘the greatest chance for success against the enemy’s commerce’.8 Given the urgency, his brief was to buy foreign ships suitable for the purpose, and at the same time arrange for the building of new raiders in British shipyards.
Building, purchasing and illegally arming ships for war under the noses of the British Government, as well as US diplomats and their agents, was never going to be easy. Pitted against Bulloch were the cold, calculating US Ambassador Francis Adams – son and grandson of past presidents John Quincy Adams and John Adams – and the US Consul in Liverpool, Thomas H. Dudley. The cunning and fiercely anti-Southern Dudley, in particular, would prove a dangerous adversary.
Bankrolled by Liverpool cotton trader Charles Kuhn Prioleau, a Southerner who was the Confederacy’s unofficial banker in England, Bulloch contracted with a Mersey shipwright to build a 185-foot wooden ship to be outfitted as the Confederacy’s first raider. The ship, named the Oreto, was launched in December 1861. The trick now was to get her to sea without arousing suspicion. Bulloch achieved this by renaming her the Palermo, registered in the name of a compliant Italian merchant in Liverpool. The Palermo steamed out of Liverpool with the British Government and the Yankee agents none the wiser, then headed for the Caribbean where, at Nassau, she was armed and renamed the Florida.
At the same time, at shipyards on the opposite side of the Mersey, another ship was under construction for Bulloch’s front-men. Tagged vessel number 290, it was named the Enrica but was destined to become the Alabama, the most notorious Confederate raider before the Shenandoah. Changing tactic from the ruse he used to get the Florida out of port, Bulloch got the Alabama away to sea on the pretence of a trial run.
Perhaps it was because these raiders got away so easily that Bulloch pushed his luck too far. Ordered by Mallory to turn his efforts to building ironclad rams – supposedly the best hope of breaking the Union blockade – he commissioned the construction of two rams, one of which was to be commanded by James Waddell.
There was no way of keeping the building of such powerful warships a secret. Each steam-driven ship was 220-feet long, clad with iron and with teak a foot thick. They had a top speed of 10 and a half knots, and blistering firepower from revolving turrets. The battleships of their day, they had the potential to win the war for the South, so it was hardly surprising that the United States lurched into panic mode.
US Ambassador Adams went so far as to threaten war with Britain if the ironclads were allowed to sail into Confederate hands, and the threat had the desired effect. In October 1863, the ships were seized by the British, leaving Bulloch with no ships capable of entering enemy ports, and Waddell without a command. He had no choice but to cool his heels and await new orders.
When Waddell arrived in England in May 1863, news from home had at first been encouraging. Confederate victories at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville eased the frustration of waiting to join the fight. But then, in July of 1863, came Gettysburg, the crushing defeat that ended General Lee’s second invasion of the North and sent his Army of Northern Virginia limping back to Richmond. Gettysburg would later be called the turning point of the war; the battle where the cause was lost; but all that the South knew for sure at that moment was that tens of thousands of men lay dead and wounded on a muddy field in Pennsylvania, and that Robert E. Lee was not invincible.
Lee himself saw the defeat not as a disaster but as a setback. He wrote to his daughter-in-law Charlotte that his grief was over the casualties. ‘The loss of our gallant officers and men throughout the army causes me to weep tears of blood and to wish that I could never hear the sound of a gun again,’ he told her. ‘My only consolation is that they are the happier and we that are left are to be pitied.’9
On Thursday 24 September 1863, one of Lee’s soldiers who survived Gettysburg, 21-year-old Sergeant Eli Pinson Landers, of Lawrenceville, Georgia, wrote home to his mother from Chattanooga, Tennessee:
Dear Mother,
I tell you it was a trying case for me to pass so near home and not call but I pondered the matter. I thought sufficiently and thought it was my duty to stick to the company, deny myself, forsake home for the present and cleave to the cause of our bleeding country to drive the oppressors from our soil which threatens our own door. I thought we was badly needed or we would not a been sent for. I knew it would not be much pleasure for me to be at home without leave.
I may never see you nor my home again but if I never do I can’t help it. I expect to be a man of honour to our country at the risk of my life. I don’t want to be a disgrace to myself nor my relations. It is unknown who will get killed in this fight. It may be me and if I do get killed if there is any chance I want my body taken up and laid in the dust round old Sweetwater [Lake] and I want a tombstone put at my head with my name and my company and regiment, the day I enlisted and the name and date of all the battles I have ever been in. I have spoke to some of the company to see to this matter if they should live and me not. I reckon what little I’ve go
t will pay expenses. This is my request if it is possible.
Now don’t think I’ve give up to being killed but you know it is an uncertain thing as we are expecting to be called to attention soon so I will hasten through. Don’t be uneasy about me.
Your affectionate son,
E.P.
On Friday 16 October 1863, Eli Landers, a veteran of 11 major battles, twice wounded, died of typhoid fever in camp at Rome, Georgia – 80 miles (130km) from home.
For James Iredell Waddell, consolation for the failing fortunes of the South would come late in 1864 with an order from Bulloch to make ready to take command of a new raider to replace the Alabama, sent by Yankee cannon fire to the bottom of the ocean.
For two years, under the command of the dashing and charismatic Raphael Semmes, the Alabama had raided from the Atlantic to the Pacific, capturing 65 Union merchantmen and notably sinking USS Hatteras off the coast of Galveston, Texas.
The Alabama could even be in two places at once, if two conflicting newspaper reports were to be believed. On 16 February 1863, Melbourne’s Argus told its readers: ‘Captain Simpson of the barque Selim, bound for India from Melbourne, sighted a black man-of-war steamer off the Cocos Islands, 3,000km northwest of Perth.
‘When she sighted the Selim, she bore away from her under canvas, and when sufficiently near to land put out the English flag, rounded to under small canvas, and showed what the captain of the Selim says has been described to him as, and which he had no doubt of being, the Confederate flag.’10
