Lee P. Ruddin: Remembering the Birth of the CSS Alabama 150 Years On

Lee P. Ruddin is Roundup Editor at HNN. 

The Atlantic alliance has been forged anew with the Obamas’ recent state visit to the UK. While the ceremonial side of things including a 41-gun salute was to be expected, the Prime Minister and President serving up barbecued sausages in Downing Street’s newly acquired ‘Rose Garden’ and high-fiving during a game of ping-pong in south London was certainly not. Neither was the phrase ‘special relationship’ expected to crop up in virtually every speech and interview during the forty-fourth president’s two-day stay, and yet it did, which signals that the romance is back on track after the rocky patch during Gordon Brown’s premiership. (The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge merely added some royal stardust by charming southern California on the final leg of their recent North American tour.)

Whatever the British Head of State said about the U.S.-UK relationship being “tried, tested and, yes, special,” the American Commander-in-Chief matched it, toasting the fact that it “never rests.” Indeed, Barack Obama went further in an op-ed column published in The Times on the first day of his visit, writing with David Cameron that such a relationship was not only special but “essential.”  

Far from being special or essential, though, Anglo-American history is more a tale of enmity than amity. Addressing both houses of Parliament in Westminster Hall on day two, Obama made a joke reference to the Boston Tea Party as if to imply that this was an historical anomaly and one consigned to the dustbin of history. It is protocol that has become customary for these occasions: Tony Blair famously joked in a speech to a Joint Session of Congress about British troops burning the Congress Library during The War of 1812 by saying, 191 years on, “I know this is, kind of, late, but sorry.”

But in the interest of maintaining warm relations, Alex Massie informs Foreign Policy magazine readers, it was necessary for Obama “to ignore the fact that British opinion, to say nothing of British-built ships, favored the Confederacy during the American Civil War.” During the late nineteenth century, lest we forget, the  ‘Alabama Claims’  did nothing but inflame tensions among transatlantic cousins. Many Northerners held the belief (and an increasing number of scholars continue to purport) that the ultimate victory over the South had been postponed for up to two years with the successful raiding of Union vessels by Confederate cruises.

I would contend, though, that in the interest of maintaining warm relations, it is necessary to eschew diplomatic protocols to include a brief history of  the most infamous cruiser, the CSS Alabama, generally and, more specifically, where she was commissioned and when the contract was signed. I say this not because Walter L. Arnstein reminds readers of the academic journal, The Historian, that Americans wanted and demanded Britain pay a heavy, diplomatic not to mention financial, price for extending the war into mid-1865. (The Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign does, after all, reiterate that the “ships had been neither armed nor manned in British waters.”) But rather since August 1, 2011, referred to hereafter as 8/1, is the 150th anniversary of the birth of the Alabama.

“Today,” says Stephen R. Wolf, author of Wolf of the Deep: Raphael Semmes and the Notorious Confederate Raider CSS Alabama, “after the Anglo-American alliances of two world wars and other conflicts, and after massive cultural exchanges between the two nations, it is difficult to recover a proper sense of just how much the United States and Great Britain disliked each other for most of the nineteenth century.” The date 8/1, to be sure, provides such a perspective. I say this since the Alabama cruised into a highly volatile moment in Anglo-American relations, just after the  ‘ Trent Affair,’  when Prime Minster Lord Palmerston and Foreign Secretary John Russell could not be seen to be bullied by the Lincoln administration.   

James Dunwoody Bulloch, a Confederate naval officer, arrived at Liverpool’s landing stage in early June 1861 with orders to commission vessels suitable for use as commerce destroyers against the Union. Bulloch was nothing if not a man in a hurry and, before the month was out, had already crossed the River Mersey to commence negotiations with the Laird brothers, proprietors of the Birkenhead iron works founded in 1829. He was soon commuting daily and working around the clock with the yard’s planners drafting and redrafting the specification of Laird’s 290th hull. On the morning of August 1, 1861, Bulloch and his city lawyer, F.S. Hull, boarded the Tranmere ferry to sign and witness the contract for the ship. It went, says Andrew Bowcock, author of CSS Alabama: Anatomy of a Confederate Raider, as follows:  

“Articles of Agreement made the First Day of August One thousand eight hundred and sixty one Between William Laird the Younger of Birkenhead in the Younger of Birkenhead in the County of Chester Shipbuilder on behalf of himself and his several Copartners in trade carrying on business in the name of John Laird Sons and Company of the one part and James Dunwoody Bulloch of the other part, Whereas it has lately been agreed between the said parties hereto that the said William Laird the Younger and his said Copartners shall build launch and complete for the said party hereto of the other part a Wooden Screw Steam Vessel of the dimensions and particulars hereinafter mentioned for the sum of Forty seven thousand five hundred pounds and upon the terms hereinafter expressed…”   

“There was nothing new about commerce raiding,” David Hepburn Milton, author of Lincoln’s Spymaster: Thomas Haines Dudley and the Liverpool Network, reminds us, “but the ferocity with which the Alabama got about her task was staggering.” This was mainly down to the fact that the South’s flagship gunboat had the advantage of both steam and sail which enabled Captain Semmes to catch, and escape from, the North’s swiftest clipper during his seven expeditions across the seven seas. The historian James McPherson goes even further in Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, reminding readers that although the Rebel cruisers “did not alter the outcome of the war, they diverted numerous Union ships from the blockade, drove insurance rates for American vessels to astronomical heights, forced the vessels to remain in part or convert to foreign registry, and helped topple the American merchant marine from its once dominant position, which it never regained.”

The Alabama’s sinking of a Union steamship (USS Hatteras) was certainly historic; its own fatal engagement with the USS Kearsage was just as dramatic if less historical. Yet it was the novel judgment in international law and the precedent the ‘ Alabama Claims’  set that, without doubt, preserved the ship’s name in the history books. To paraphrase Semmes, the name of the ship will remain a household name wherever civilization extends.