Semmes: Rebel Raider (review)

Potomac Books, the successor to Brassey's USA, has continued the "Military Profiles" series edited by Dennis Showalter, providing brief biographies of significant military figures from ancient times to the present. These are small (5 x 8 inches), short books, containing a time line, some 110 pages of text, limited endnotes, and a selective bibliography. Other U.S. Civil War figures in the series are U.S. Navy officers David G. Farragut and William Cushing.

Raphael Semmes certainly deserves inclusion. The most prominent Confederate Navy officer of the Civil War, he and Franklin Buchanan were the only Confederate admirals. Semmes was also the only Confederate commissioned as both an admiral and a general. Most importantly, he was the most successful commerce raider captain of the war, indeed of the entire century.

Semmes, a career naval officer and trained lawyer, was born in Maryland but moved to Alabama. He resigned his commission as a U.S. Navy commander on the secession of his state. Animated by hatred of the North and a passionate advocate of commerce raiding, Semmes found a kindred spirit in Confederate Secretary of the Navy Stephen Mallory. Semmes converted the packet Sumpter into the first Confederate Navy commerce raider. In it he took 18 prizes. But his fame came with his subsequent command of the British-built Alabama.

In a nearly two-year span until June 1864, the Alabama traveled 75,000 miles and accounted for 64 of the some 200 Northern merchantmen destroyed by Confederate commerce raiders. Semmes also engaged and sank the Union gunboat Hatteras off Galveston, Texas. Finally cornered off Cherbourg, France, Semmes challenged the Union screw sloop Kearsarge to battle and lost. Semmes escaped to England, later returned to the Confederacy, and took command of the James River Squadron. On the evacuation of Richmond, he scuttled his ships and formed his men into a naval brigade to fight under his command as an army brigadier general.

An abridgement of his own Confederate Raider: Raphael Semmes of the Alabama (1994), John Taylor's account is engagingly written. Sources include Semmes's memoirs, other eye-witness accounts, and the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion. Taylor's focus throughout is Semmes; thus there is no mention of the Alabama Claims after the war. Strangely, he begins his book with the discussion of the Alabama-Kearsarge battle.

Taylor downplays Semmes's shortcomings. Aloof and vain, he hated the North. Like many other successful commanders, he was lucky and aided by Union incompetence. He also exaggerated his successes. Thus, he claimed that the Hatteras was the equal of his own ship when that was not the case. He also sought excuses for his failures. It was his decision to engage the Kearsarge, but he falsely claimed that he was unaware of the presence of chain mail wrapped around that ship's vitals, which had given it an unfair advantage. This is a strange comment indeed from a captain who had used duplicity at every step, including approaching his prey under false flags. All in all, this is an excellent, short study of one of the most colorful and controversial figures of the U.S. Civil War.