CSS Alabama and Raphael Semmes: 65 Ships Burned and a $15.5M Bill

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In 1862 the Confederacy, lacking shipyards, sent agent James Bulloch to Birkenhead, across the Mersey from Liverpool, where John Laird Sons & Company built hull number 290, also called the Enrica. Britain's Foreign Enlistment Act barred arming a warship for a belligerent in British waters, so the ship was built with reinforced decks, bulwarks and deep magazines but no guns. On July 29, 1862, it slipped out on a trial run, and in the Azores Captain Raphael Semmes armed it from a supply ship, including a 100-pounder Blakely rifle, and commissioned it the CSS Alabama on August 24.

Semmes won over a mostly British crew of 83 with double wages in gold and a share of prize money. Over 534 days the Alabama captured or burned 65 Union merchant ships, took over 2,000 prisoners and sank the USS Hatteras. Worn out after 45,000 miles, it put into Cherbourg in June 1864, where the USS Kearsarge under John Ancrum Winslow waited. Semmes challenged it, and on June 19 the two ships circled seven times before the Alabama sank. In 1872 a Geneva arbitration ordered Britain to pay the United States $15.5 million in the Alabama claims.

• The Alabama could raise its brass propeller into the hull and lower its telescopic funnel to pass as a slow sailing merchantman.
• A Blakely shell lodged in the Kearsarge's sternpost but failed to explode because of degraded powder and fuses.
• The Kearsarge carried 120 fathoms of anchor chain along its sides, hidden behind planks painted black.
• Assistant surgeon David Herbert Llewellyn, who could not swim, refused a seat in an overloaded lifeboat and drowned.
• Semmes threw his sword into the sea and escaped to England on the British yacht Deerhound, and the wreck was found off Cherbourg in 1984.