On 19 June 1864, off the French port of Cherbourg, the Union sloop-of-war USS Kearsarge under Captain John A. Winslow fought the Confederate raider CSS Alabama under Captain Raphael Semmes, who had come out to fight rather than be blockaded in port. After about an hour of circling and firing, the Alabama, her old powder and shells failing her, was sinking. Most of her crew were picked up by the Kearsarge, but Semmes and dozens of his men escaped to England in a British yacht. The duel ended the career of the Confederacy's most famous commerce raider.
Two years of raiding
The Alabama was built for the Confederacy by the Laird yard at Birkenhead, across the Mersey from Liverpool, disguised as an ordinary vessel known only as Hull No. 290. She left in July 1862, ostensibly on a trial run, and in the Azores took on her guns and crew and was commissioned under Semmes. For almost two years she ranged across the Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico, the coast of Brazil and the Indian Ocean as far as the East Indies, burning most of the merchant ships she took, and off Galveston she sank the Union warship Hatteras.1
Counts of her captures differ: the State Department's Office of the Historian gives 58 merchant ships, the Naval History and Heritage Command more than 60 prizes, and the American Battlefield Trust at least 65 captures. Union warships hunted her in vain, and Northern shipowners paid higher insurance or moved their ships to foreign flags.2
A challenge at Cherbourg
Badly in need of a refit, the Alabama put into Cherbourg on 11 June 1864, and the Kearsarge arrived on the 14th and took up station off the harbor. Semmes could let his ship be interned or fight, and he chose to fight. In the Alabama's log for 15 June he wrote that the ships were "so equally matched that I do not feel at liberty to decline it". The American Battlefield Trust suggests he may also have hoped that a victory off France would win French sympathy for the Confederacy.3
On the morning of 19 June the Alabama steamed out, escorted by the French ironclad Couronne, which stayed nearby to keep the fight in international waters. Winslow took the Kearsarge well clear of French territorial waters before turning to meet her, and the fight took place close enough to the coast to be watched from shore.4
An hour of circling fire
The Alabama opened fire first, at about a mile; Winslow held his fire until the range had closed to under 1,000 yards. With both ships firing their starboard batteries, they steamed in a circle on opposite courses, each trying to rake the other. Winslow had hung chain cable in tiers along his sides abreast vital spaces, and the American Battlefield Trust notes that it was planked over, so that Semmes later complained of a hidden ironclad. The Alabama's powder and shells, long in store, had deteriorated: several hit the Kearsarge without exploding, among them one that lodged in her sternpost and survives as a relic of the battle.5
After about an hour the Alabama was sinking. The Naval History and Heritage Command's accounts say the wounded Semmes tried to run for Cherbourg, then struck his colors and sent a boat to ask for help; the American Battlefield Trust says he fought until his ship went down and threw his sword into the sea. The Kearsarge rescued most of the survivors, but the British yacht Deerhound picked up Semmes and 41 others and carried them to England.6
The bill for the Alabama
Winslow came home a hero and was promoted to commodore, while Semmes made his way back to the Confederacy and became a rear admiral, according to the American Battlefield Trust. The raider's career had a longer echo. The United States held Britain responsible for letting Confederate cruisers be built in its yards, and in 1872 an arbitration tribunal ordered Britain to pay $15.5 million for the Alabama claims, a settlement the Office of the Historian calls an important precedent for resolving international disputes by arbitration. The ship's place among the war's naval fights is set out in our list of the greatest naval battles and the wider war in the greatest battles of the Civil War.7
Also on this day
- 1831: Battle of Paneriai. During the November Uprising, Antoni Giełgud's Polish corps, sent into Lithuania, attacked Russian forces dug in on the Paneriai heights outside Vilnius.
