by Terry Smyth
Captain Paynter declares himself satisfied there are no British subjects aboard, and tells the ship’s company that all 110 of them are free to go ashore.
This announcement is met with loud cheers and, no doubt, sighs of relief, as the men rush off to gather their possessions and prepare to board the waiting Bee.
We will never know what passed between the two captains at this time. Perhaps it was the ghost of a smirk from the Englishman, an appreciative nod from the Confederate. It’s highly unlikely that Paynter – a bluff old salt in the same mould as James Waddell – was fooled by the amateurish performance. For reasons of his own – perhaps a quiet admiration for the master and men of the one that got away – he chose to turn a deaf ear.
Certainly, Waddell’s memoirs reveal a mutual respect between the skippers, and Waddell writes, ‘Captain Paynter visited me several times and gratified me by expressing his approval of the good conduct exhibited by those who had so recently been under my command under circumstances so painful. “It is,” said he, “the result of a good discipline and confidence in your rectitude.”’11
Then again, it may be that Paynter, accustomed as he was to the mandatory well-scrubbed and clean-shaven appearance of Royal Navy sailors, simply could not conceive of the scruffy, full-bearded, motley crew of the Shenandoah as Britons.
A Liverpool Mercury correspondent at the scene reported, ‘Before leaving the vessel, they gave three lusty cheers for Captain Waddell, their late commander. Captain Waddell, in feeling terms, acknowledged the compliment, and said that he hoped the men would always behave themselves, as brave sailors ought to do.’12
With that, the crew bid farewell to the Shenandoah and board the ship taking them to the landing stage and freedom, but also to an uncertain future. And after all they’ve been through together, most of them will never meet again.
A few days after leaving the ship, James Waddell suffers bouts of haemorrhaging from the lungs, and for a while is close to death. At around this time, he learns that his wife, Anne, who had sailed for America the day after he left England on the Sea King, 13 months earlier, had been arrested upon her arrival in the United States.
On the orders of Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, Anne was imprisoned on the dubious charge of being the wife of a pirate, and later released after signing a declaration that she would neither see nor communicate with her husband for the duration of the war. Circumstance dictated that Anne would honour that agreement, whether she wanted to or not.
She and her husband are reunited in England, and make their home at Waterloo, near Liverpool. In time, and with Anne’s care, James Waddell regains his health.
Waddell would never forgive Edwin Stanton for the harsh treatment of his wife. In his memoir, he writes, ‘If it be true that Mr Stanton committed suicide, no wonder he cut his unhaltered throat, his horrible crimes could in no way be expiated so well as in his violation of the sixth commandment. Is murder suicide?’13
The rumoured suicide is one of several canards concerning Edwin Stanton. A chronic asthmatic, he died of respiratory failure in Washington DC, on Christmas Eve 1869. A favourite of conspiracy theorists to this day, Stanton was also rumoured to have suffered bouts of insanity, to have dug up the body of his mistress to make sure she was dead, to have slept with his wife’s corpse, and to have masterminded the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. There is no credible evidence to support any of these claims.
A scalp is required – for appearance’s sake, at least. After all the sound and fury, Her Majesty’s Government must place someone, anyone, in the dock for violating the Foreign Enlistment Act. Since James Waddell, his officers and crew have avoided prosecution, the finger is pointed at Peter Corbett, master of the Shenandoah’s previous incarnation, the Sea King.
On 27 November, in the Court of Queen’s Bench, London, Captain Corbett, a British subject, is indicted on 55 counts of breaching the act. The most serious of these charges are that he incited men to serve on a foreign warship, that he did likewise upon the high seas, and that the offence was committed on board a British vessel.
The case for the prosecution does not run smoothly. While some witnesses swear that crewmen from the Sea King and the Laurel were induced by Corbett to join the Confederate service, with offers of high pay and prize money, other witnesses testify that nothing of the sort occurred.
The judge tells the jury that given such conflicting evidence, their verdict will simply depend on which side of the story they believe. The jury retires, only to return five minutes later with a verdict of not guilty.
Across the Atlantic, the case fuels further resentment. The way America sees it, the ostensibly neutral British have colluded in the arming and manning of enemy vessels, turned a blind eye to the illegal recruitment of seamen in the colony of Victoria, and have allowed all those involved in the affair to walk free. Demands for the extradition to the United States of Waddell and his officers have been ignored.
In London, US Ambassador Francis Adams is convinced that because Britain accepted responsibility for the returning Shenandoah, the United States can sue the British Government for compensation for the damage done by the raider. In Washington, Secretary of State William Seward is of a like mind, and the wheels are set in motion for a massive claims action.
Meanwhile, in an affidavit to the US Consul in Liverpool Thomas Dudley, a young sailor who served on the Sea King and then on the Shenandoah, William Temple, claims that while in Melbourne, the Governor of Victoria, Sir Charles Darling, met in private with Captain Waddell on board the Shenandoah. Temple also claims that the ship’s officers were well aware recruits had come aboard, that all the recruits were British subjects, and that they were enlisted in the Confederate service within sight of land. Temple’s affidavit includes a list of all the men recruited in Melbourne.
To US Ambassador Adams, these revelations are dynamite; vital new evidence to support criminal charges and a claim for damages. The trouble is, Governor Darling and Captain Waddell never met. In a despatch to London, Darling insists that during a church service he saw an officer later identified to him as Waddell, but that they never spoke, nor met, on that or any other occasion.
In Temple’s defence, it’s suggested that perhaps he mistook the Mayor of Melbourne for the Governor, but the sailor’s credibility is severely compromised.
As for his claims regarding the Australian recruits, when put to Captain Waddell he issues the usual emphatic denial, standing, as usual, on his honour as an officer and a Southern gentleman.
Even though William Temple’s claim that Darling met Waddell might well be an innocent mistake, and although he is correct concerning the recruits, he is labelled a liar with a grudge against his former captain. To the continuing frustration of the United States Government, the so-called Temple Affair comes to nothing.
Chapter 24
Bad blood
On Christmas Eve 1865, in Pulaski, Tennessee, six former Confederate soldiers – enraged at the Reconstruction laws imposed on the defeated South – meet at the law offices of Judge Thomas M. Jones. The six men – lawyers John Lester, Richard Reed and James Crowe, with Frank McCord, whose family owns the town’s newspaper, The Pulaski Citizen, along with John Kennedy and Judge Thomas’s son Calvin Jones – vow to oppose the influx of Northern ‘carpetbaggers’ exploiting commercial opportunities and filling official positions in the South, and in particular to actively oppose the granting of voting and other (limited) civil rights to freed slaves. To that end, they form a secret society they call the Ku Klux Klan (Ku Klux after the Greek word kyklos, meaning ‘circle’, and Klan for ‘clan’, representing their Scottish-Irish heritage).
Later apologists for the original Klan will describe it as a social club for disenfranchised Confederate veterans, but from the very beginning it is dedicated to intimidation and terror.
Hundreds of thousands of freed slaves in the South have found themselves not only struggling to survive, with no money, no prospects and little or
no education, but also surrounded by a vast majority of hostile whites.
Houston Hartsfield Holloway, a former slave in Georgia, writes, ‘For we colored people did not know how to be free and the white people did not know how to have a free colored person about them.’1
The Klansmen, determined that no free black person should be ‘about them’, take to terrorising freed slaves in their homes on night rides, dressed in robes made of bed sheets and wearing hoods, as if they are ghosts of dead rebel soldiers.
They give themselves grand titles – Grand Magi, Grand Cyclops, Grand Turk, Knight Hawk, and Lictor – and elect as their first Grand Wizard the ex-Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest.
General Forrest, who will later deny any association with the Klan, had already earned a chapter in the annals of infamy. At the Battle of Fort Pillow, Tennessee, on 12 April 1864, his troops massacred the Union garrison of 500 mostly African-American soldiers after they had surrendered. Sources on both sides confirmed that the Union troops were shot and bayoneted after throwing down their arms.
In his report of the battle to his superior officer, General Leonidas Polk, Forrest writes, ‘The river was dyed with the blood of the slaughtered for two hundred yards. The approximate loss was upward of five hundred killed, but few of the officers escaping. My loss was about twenty killed. It is hoped these facts will demonstrate to the Northern people that negro soldiers cannot cope with Southerners.’2
The American military historian David Eicher would call Fort Pillow ‘one of the bleakest, saddest events of American military history’.3
‘Before reaching Liverpool, there was money on board of the ship which was captured prior to the surrender of the Southern armies, and other money which had been captured after the surrender of the Southern armies. The former I directed to be divided among the officers and crew according to the law on the subject of prize money, of which I declined to receive the portion which I would be entitled to, and it was divided among the officers and crew with the rest of the money.’4
That’s Captain Waddell’s recollection, but it’s not how Cornelius Hunt remembers it.
‘For the many and valuable services he rendered to his native country during the hour of her trial, [Confederate agent James Bulloch] steadfastly refused to receive any compensation,’ Hunt writes. ‘A short time prior to the final collapse, several thousand pounds of the Public Fund came into his hands, which he laid aside, not knowing how else to dispose of it, to provide for the immediate necessities of such naval officers of the Confederacy as the close of the war should leave homeless and proscribed in England.’5
Hunt says each officer is allocated £200 from the fund ‘as recompense for the long service they had rendered, and for which they could never hope to receive any other compensation’.6
Hunt claims Bulloch appointed Waddell to distribute the money; that his former captain had ‘shamefully abused that trust’,7 and that this is the real reason he was so stubbornly determined to take the Shenandoah to Liverpool rather than to Sydney or Cape Town.
According to Hunt, after disembarking in Liverpool, and before the ship’s officers have been made aware of Bulloch’s provision for them, Waddell summons them all to his rooms at George’s Hotel, where he interviews them one at a time, and doles out £50 to £100 each, except for a few favourites, who receive the full £200. The rest of money, Waddell keeps for himself.
Hunt also claims Waddell pays the crew only one-third to one-half of what is owed them, with a vague promise to pay the rest at some time in the future. Hunt says that for weeks afterwards, Waddell’s residence is ‘besieged by these poor men clamouring for the hard-earned pittance out of which he mercilessly defrauded them’.8
Hunt’s accusations don’t stop there. He claims Waddell threatens to withhold the pay of a sailor who has souvenired the ship’s flag, unless he hands it over. When the sailor, who values the Stainless Banner more than money, refuses to give it up, Waddell nevertheless relents and pays him.
It is noteworthy that James Bulloch, who, according to Hunt, supplied the funds Waddell misappropriated, makes no mention of what would have been a scandalous affair, and continues to hold Waddell in high regard. Nor do the journals and memoirs of any other officers support Hunt’s claim, which suggests it is, at worst, a callous libel, motivated by some grudge against the Captain or, at best, a wildly overdramatised version of a minor incident or misunderstanding.
Waddell gave the money captured after Lee’s surrender to the paymaster of the Donegal, for which he received the following receipt, dated 8 November, signed by a clerk and witnessed by the paymaster, ‘Received of Captain James I. Waddell a bag said to contain $820.28, consisting of mixed gold and silver, as per papers annexed to bag.’9
Concluding what he insists is a ‘truthful narrative’, Cornelius Hunt records, ‘It is exceedingly painful for a sailor to write such things concerning a commander under whom he has served. Had Captain Waddell been contented with simply enriching himself at the expense of those who shared the toils and perils of that cruise, which has made his name famous, I should have been silent, for the credit of the service to which I had the honour to belong, but when, after all his officers had left England, and he therefore felt secure from personal chastisement, he ventured to publish that atrocious libel concerning their honour and their courage, I could not in justice to myself and my associates do less than exhibit the man to the world in his true colours.’10
The ‘atrocious libel’ Hunter refers to is in a letter from Waddell, in Liverpool, to a friend in Mobile, Alabama, dated 27 December 1865. In it, Waddell repeats his denial of the allegation that the Shenandoah continued her depredations despite being aware the war had ended. He states that on 2 August, upon being convinced by the master of the British barque Barracouta that the Confederate cause was indeed lost, he immediately set a course for Cape Horn.
That statement is followed by the assertions that so outraged Cornelius Hunt:
The Barracouta news surprised me, and among some of the officers I witnessed a terror which mortified me. I was implored to take the vessel to Australia; that to try to reach a European port would be fatal to all concerned. Petitions were signed by three-fourths of the officers, asking to be taken to Cape Town, arguing and picturing the horrors of capture, and all that sort of stuff.
I called the officers and crew to the quarter-deck, and said calmly to them. ‘I intend taking this ship to Liverpool. I know there is risk to be run, but that has been our associate all the time. We shall be sought after in the Pacific and not in the Atlantic.’
They supported my views, and then followed a letter from the crew, signed by 71 out of 110 men, saying they had confidence in me, and were willing, nay, desired to go with me wherever I thought best to take the vessel.
I had of course a very anxious time – painfully anxious – because the officers set a bad example to the crew. Their conduct was nothing less that mutiny.
I was very decided with some of them. I had to tell one officer I would be Captain or die on the deck, and the vessel should go to no other port than Liverpool.11
Waddell’s letter concludes:
So ends my naval career, and I am called a pirate. I made New England suffer, and I do not regret it. I cannot be condemned by any honest-thinking man. I surrendered to the British Government, and all were unconditionally released. My obstinacy made enemies among some of the officers, but they now inwardly regret their action in the Cape Town affair.12
Chapter 25
The long way home
On bidding farewell to the ship, Lieutenant Frank Chew vowed that, with the death of the Confederacy, he would never go to sea under another flag.
Knowing they risked the noose for piracy if they returned to the United States, Frank Chew, Dab Scales and Jack Grimball sought advice from Commodore Matthew Maury, the former Confederate envoy in England, then in exile in France. Through Maury’s influence, they gained work as surveyors for Emperor Maximilian in Mexic
o, and settled in the town of Carlota, an ex-Confederate enclave near Vera Cruz.
Carlota was the largest enclave of the New Virginia Colony – conceived by Maury, who was an old friend of Maximilian – and numbered among its first settlers Jo Shelby, the Confederate cavalry general who led his Iron Brigade across the Rio Grange into Mexico rather than surrender (see Chapter 19).
Shelby’s cavalry rode from the American Civil War into the civil war being waged between the Juarista rebels and the forces of France’s puppet Emperor Maximilian. Shelby had hoped to provide his brigade’s services as a foreign legion to whichever side made the better offer, but fate decided for him when, south of Monterey, the brigade blundered into the middle of a battle. The French garrison at Matehuala was under siege by rebel troops. The 500 French troops were outnumbered four to one, when, just as all seemed lost, the Confederate cavalry charged the rebel lines and saved the day.
Maximilian was grateful, although not grateful enough – or foolish enough – to risk the Southerners taking control of his army, which was, as previously stated, Shelby’s ultimate aim. The Emperor declined Shelby’s offer, but as consolation offered him and his comrades free land in the Córdoba Valley.
The Iron Brigade – now a fighting force without a fight – was disbanded, and, while many of its men scattered, others stayed. As word spread, hundreds of ex-Confederates headed south of the border to take up land grants in the colony.
In early 1867, when Maximilian’s government fell to Republican forces, the New Virginia Confederates were suddenly no longer welcome in Mexico, and soon the colony was abandoned.
Frank Chew had already left Mexico by then, however. In 1866 – two years before all former Confederates were granted a full pardon – the rules had moderated enough for him to quietly return to Missouri. There, he married Mary Willie Windsor, in 1872, and by 1880 was working as a railroad freight agent in St Louis. Frank Chew died on 11 January 1894, aged 52, survived by his wife, Mary, and their five children.
