Dis-Spelling ‘Alabama’

This is a (somewhat revised) full-length version of a review that originally appeared in the Journal of Southwest Georgia History, 12, 1997, pages 112-114. Since the printed version was considerably shortened, some of the points I had wanted to make landed on the cutting-room floor. Here they are.

Marvel, William, The Alabama and the Kearsarge: The Sailor’s Civil War, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996, 337 + x pp., ISBN 0-8078-2294-9, $ 34.95

There has never been a scarcity of campaign histories of the Civil War, or of biographies of Generals and politicians. Until recently, however, surprisingly little scholarship had been devoted to the lives, times, motivations, backgrounds, and post-war fates of the ordinary soldiers. Several excellent studies by Gerald Linderman, Reid Mitchell, James McPherson, and Randall Jimerson have done a lot to alleviate this condition in recent years. Their focus is primarily on the soldiers in the armies, and on the shore. William Marvel’s book sets out to do something similar for the sailors in the opposing navies.
Marvel is not a professional historian with a tenured sinecure in the academia, but a freelance writer who needs to shape his books so that they will sell to a wider, interested reading public. Rather than to focus only on letters and diaries by a variety of sailors and marines, he opts for a medium passage. He works with letters, memoirs and diaries, but for his subject he chose the times and journeys of the two most illustrious men-of-war of them all, the Alabama and the Kearsarge. The resulting book is a hybrid, must be, and in this respect the book ironically mirrors the two ships: Both were not quite steamers, but no real sailing vessels any longer either, the Kearsarge also supported by iron railing, but no ironclad. Reader expectations are of course stimulated by the published accounts and memoirs (mostly focussing on the Alabama, and mostly romanticising), the photographs, paintings and songs everybody has seen, heard, or read before. The respective ships, and notably the Alabama and her captain, Raphael Semmes, take on synecdochic qualities in most of these accounts: They are treated as if the CO or the ship were identical with the crew, or the crewmen only negligible parts of a conglomerate whole. Because it focusses more on the sailors than on the ships, The Alabama and the Kearsarge: The Sailor’s Civil War deconstructs this symbiosis and provides fascinating insights into the lives of the men on board the two vessels, particularly for a Navy veteran like myself.
Turns out that (as usual) most romantic myths and metaphors do not last long under closer scrutiny. The sheer number of infractions against discipline and of outright desertions from the Kearsarge, and even more so from the Alabama, is astonishing. One cannot help wondering whatever became of some of those men of whom of Marvel laconically remarks: "... and that was the last anyone ever saw of him." The fact that some of these men had been rated as "tip-top fellows" by their comrades and superiors only a short while before goes a long way in telling about the stultefying boredom of life on a naval vessel in foreign waters in the 19th c.. It must have been an endless stretch of routine and doldrums, particularly at a time when officers knew preciously little about motivating and guiding their men, and, one suspects, all too often cared even less. The immediate positive effect of the opportunity to engage in some recreational activities like sports and athletics (p. 147) is all too visible to not have been noticed (it did a lot to alleviate e.g. the increasingly dangerous mood in the British Home Fleet in 1917 -- by then, even Admirality officers, except in Germany, had finally started to learn from past experience). Still, this is and remains the exception. Cultural and recreational activities are usually restricted to the officers.
The fact that in order to refill their desertion-ridden ranks both the Alabama and the Kearsarge recruit indiscriminately from land and sea points back to the middle ages of seafaring. Both ships may have been American, but their crews hailed from all over the globe. Few of the Alabama’s men, and not even all of the officers were Southerners at all. Like the Georgian Lt. John McIntosh Kell, these were supposed to provide the backbone of the motley crew. However, even some of the hand-picked Savannah pilots deserted. One of the Georgians, Paymaster Yonge, who deserted in Kingston/Jamaica, later did a lot to unveil to the public the Confederate / British complicity in the building and arming of the Confederate raiders, and thus contributed to the eventual downfall of this semi-piratical practice (Yonge later served in the US Cavalry under an assumed name).
The source of the romantic lure of the Alabama also becomes evident. To outside spectators (and only to them), the Alabama holds the advantage of having lead the more adventurous life, so to speak, hunting for prey -- which was plentiful. In a way, her life-story mirrors that of the Confederacy, as presented in older historiographic fiction and less discriminating history books: Full of derring-do and adventure, covered with what was considered glory, and finally going down in a last flurry of excitement. There is little of this retroactive myth in the diaries and letters of her officers, and even less in those of the crewmen. In fact, the Alabama was reaching the end of her line with or without the Kearsarge to push her over the edge in June of 1864. The war against the raiders had already "been won by the foreign ministers, and no one needed to die in the channel except to appease Southern honor" (p. 265) as Marvel in one of his rare moments of sarcasm comments. By the time of the battle outside Cherbourg, the Alabama’s crew was near mutinous, and the ship so run down as to be almost incapacitated. According to the letters and memoirs of her crew, the search for prey had almost as often been a search merely for coal, provisions, or spare parts for her everlastingly brittle machinery.
With the Kearsarge, her dogged search for enemy raiders, the slow and sometimes listlessly conducted operations, again mirror the Union war effort in a nutshell. It took her until June of 1863 before she ever even stopped and searched a suspected blockade runner (only to let her go again). Again, the sailors’ and marines’ diaries and letters betray a bleak, boring, toilsome daily experience (after all, until June 1864 the men on the Kearsarge never knew they would one day sink the Alabama).
In retrospect, of course, the picture changes: Marvel points out with laconic precision how "most of them would forget how intensly they had grown to hate the vessel that had been their home" (p. 264) in their later memories. In several cases, supposedly accurate ‘war-time’ memoirs bear obvious traces of later embellishment and self-aggrandizing. This aggrandizing of self and others is mostly responsible for the disneyfied picture of the Civil War as a spectacle of heroism and splendor still so prominent in the imagination of CW-buffs and Tara-afficionados. Marvel does make a considerable contribution towards the overdue deconstruction of this image. Only sometimes does he get carried away by the narrative flow of his own very able storytelling: Ultimately excusable in a book that, as stated above, needs to sell. Still, the terseness of the letters and diaries for example of coal heavers Charles Poole and William Wainwright is impressive. Even if the ships seem to almost push themselves into the foreground tiem and again, one cannot help being fascinated by some of the characters that come to life in the reporting. I, for one, would like to know more about characters like the German Wilhelm Alsdorf, last survivor of the Kearsarge; or about that hell-hound George Forrest, a deserter from the Alabama unlucky enough to be recaptured by the raider as a crew-member on one of the Alabama’s victims. Court martialled, yet simply re-enrolled as a consequence, he smuggles alcohol aboard and instigates an intoxicated upheaval, is court-martialled again and -- dismissed from the ship, in his pockets the equivalent of 4 months pay collected by his friends. Rather than to be marooned, however, he immediately signs on with a U.S. whaler just captured by the Alabama -- three of whose crew in turn sign on on the raider.
There are darker sides to the men’s stories, too. There lies an incredible tragedy in the fact that the undiagnosed tuberculosis of the Kearsarge’s Chief Engineer probably contributed not only to his own untimely death, but also to that of many of his fellow officers. One wonders why the personnel on naval vessels were not only shorter and of slighter build than their counterparts in the armies, but also had a considerably shorter life expectancy. There seems to have been among the volunteers a more brutal awakening to the realities of life during wartimes than the one Gerald Linderman describes in Embattled Courage. In any case, the diary of the black officers cook of the Kearsarge, Charles Fisher, likewise those of some other members of the crew, would warrant another, more sociohistorical approach. It could then benefit from a combination with the written documents left by crew members from ships like the USS Tuscarora or USS Chippewa, which make repeated cameo appearances in Marvel’s volume but which of course never achieved the notoriety of the USS Kearsarge.
There is only one moment when Marvel’s narrative misses a beat. Early on, Raphael Semmes abducted 17-year-old African American David Henry White from Delaware as a "contraband of war" (p. 75) from the Tonawanda. To assume, as Marvel does, that the "suspected slave" (p. 259) "had experienced the same limited measure of liberty as his shipmates during the past twenty months" (p. 251) sounds cynical, but is probably simply a mistake: it may well be assumed that where so many deserted, an abducted "suspected slave" on shore leave would have found a way back to freedom. As it turned out, David White paid for the appeasement of Southern honor off Cherbourg with his life: He, like some others, could not swim; and Semmes and the rest of his crew were too busy saving themselves to care for those unfortunates.

Wolfgang Hochbruck
University of Freiburg, Germany