pre civil war confederate navy brass captain insignia

The temperature began rising, and the heat beat down on the men and the freshly holy-stoned deck. There was too much powder and loose ammunition on deck. Men with pipes were told they could not smoke them. Perhaps this whole exercise would turn into nothing more than another stand-off, like those the crew had experienced with the Sumter, Florida, and Rappahannock. Semmes, no one really knew if he was bluffing. Would there even be a battle that day? Despite the bravado of Capt. What follows is an excerpt from a new book To the Uttermost Ends of the Earth: The Epic Hunt for the South’s Most Feared Ship-and the Greatest Sea Battle of the Civil War. Instead, he would turn the tables: The “pirate” vowed that on the morning of June 19, 1864, he would destroy the Kearsarge and its captain who dared to corner him. The Confederate captain refused to surrender. Their precious cargos would never support the North’s military campaigns.Īs a last resort, Lincoln’s Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles, commissioned the USS Kearsarge and its previously undistinguished captain, John Winslow, to “travel to the uttermost ends of the earth, if necessary, to find and destroy the Alabama.” After months of chasing the rebel raider, Winslow trapped Semmes and his crew in the harbor of Cherbourg, France.

Sailing 75,000 miles around the globe and back again, “that pirate Semmes,” as the newspapers called him, sent over 60 ships to the bottom of the ocean. In this endeavor, the Southern ship was wildly successful. B eginning in the summer of 1862, the CSS Alabama, a Confederate ship captained by Raphael Semmes, roamed the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans to find, capture, and burn Union Navy ships.

Pre civil war confederate navy brass captain insignia