June 28, 1865---The Last Gun

JUNE 28, 1865:        

Orders are issued to muster out every man and to dissolve The Army of The Potomac.

Passing through the Bering Strait and straying north of the Arctic Circle, C.S.S. SHENANDOAH wreaks havoc on the New Bedford, Massachusetts whaling industry, destroying the WAVERLY, FAVORITE, BRUNSWICK, HILLMAN, NASSAU, ISAAC HOWLAND, MARTHA, COVINGTON, CONGRESS, NILE and JAMES MAURY in the single most destructive day of the war to U.S. shipping.

This one-day frenzy of destruction ends New Bedford’s long dominance in the whaling industry. It also marks the most northerly action of the Civil War, and the last Confederate attack on the Union, with, most likely, the last shots of the war fired this day. 

The Confederate Navy’s accomplishments are singularly impressive. Amongst them are the first successful battle submarine, C.S.S. HUNLEY, and the first purpose-built ironclad warship, C.S.S. VIRGINIA, nee  MERRIMACK.

Recognizing at the outset of the war that the Confederacy could never hope to contend with the Union Navy in gross tonnage and firepower despite the capture of the massive Gosport (Virginia) Navy Yard, Confederate Secretary of the Navy Steven Mallory commissioned James Dunwoody Bulloch (the uncle of future President Theodore Roosevelt, on the left with his brother Irvine, the Sailing Master of SHENANDOAH) to buy, build, borrow or steal as many fast ships as he could find from as many sources as he could find.

Great Britain (particularly Liverpool) seemed particularly amenable to dealing with Bulloch and his buyers. Although Great Britain had officially declared its "neutrality" in the War Between The States, the Neutrality Act did not forbid private contractors from dealing with private Confederate citizens. Bulloch was able to arrange for the building of the commerce raiders C.S.S. ALABAMA and C.S.S. FLORIDA, among other ships. He also arranged for the purchase of more ships, including the SHENANDOAH. And though Great Britain would not allow the arming of such a ship in its home waters, this restriction was easily evaded by having the civilian vessel sail to a second, usually non-British, port, where the ship could be outfitted with weaponry (also usually purchased in England).

SHENANDOAH, like ALABAMA and FLORIDA, was a "composite ship" --- a sailing ship with an auxiliary steam engine. Her propeller could be lifted out of the water to reduce drag. The SHENANDOAH is historically significant because she was the only Confederate vessel to circumnavigate the globe during the Civil War.

Since time immemorial, commerce raiding, by whatever name, has been an accepted part of maritime warfare. Meant to choke off an enemy combatant's supply of foodstuffs, trade goods and imported weapons, such attacks are traditionally carried out by Men o' War, who generally sink the ship together with its cargo and usually its crew.

The Confederate commerce raiders are somewhat unique because they not only destroyed enemy shipping, but they habitually seized the destroyed ships' supplies and recruited new sailors from their crews, acting, in this regard, like pirate ships. Whether it was piracy or not depends upon one's own outlook. The Confederacy justified it internationally as an act of war and domestically as a necessity. The commerce raiders were busiest in the second half of the war, when supplies, weapons and crews had become dear.

SHENANDOAH was only the third most successful commerce raider. ALABAMA took and burned 65 prizes including the warship U.S.S. HATTERAS and recommissioned a progeny C.S.S. TUSCALOOSA that worked with her to take one more. FLORIDA took 37 and recommissioned two progeny that took 23 more. SHENANDOAH took 38 (though only 31 were destroyed).  Too, there were other raiders that took fewer prizes.

Just the three top raiders and their progeny put a total of 164 Union merchantmen out of action. The damage done to U.S. interests by the commerce raiders was immense. Of 1,600,000 tons of shipping afloat in 1860, the United States lost more than half.  Other Union ships were sold and sailed under foreign flags for safety's sake.

In sum, the commerce raiders put the American merchant marine into a decline from which it never recovered. It is no coincidence that the commerce raiders were denied the general amnesty offered to most other Confederates. The Bulloch brothers remained in England and many of the SHENANDOAH's crew settled in Latin America at war's end.

SHENANDOAH was a discontented ship. Much of this has to be laid at the feet of her skipper, James Iredell Waddell. Waddell, at forty-one, though titular Captain of the SHENANDOAH, was only a Lieutenant in rank, the same as his much younger Executive Officer, James C. Whittle, Jr., and other junior members of the Deck Department. This, in and of itself, was a cause for bad feelings all around, even for Waddell, who was conspicuously not promoted over his officers. Worse yet, it was openly known that Waddell, though appointed by Bulloch, was not Bulloch's first choice for skipper. Waddell, in fact, had sat out most of the war in Liverpool waiting for a billet, and it may be that he was chosen in the absence of anyone else being readily available. Waddell had a reputation for rashness.

But Waddell seems less rash --- which implies daring --- than dense: When news of the Civil War reached him in 1861 he jumped ship --- the U.S.S. JOHN ADAMS --- in St. Helena. Penniless, he was forced to make his way from that remote South Atlantic island, back to the Confederacy. When he reached home, he discovered that he was still penniless since his U.S. Navy mustering out pay had been forfeited by dint of his going A.W.O.L. 

Waddell lacked combat experience, and in his first few weeks of command, made equivocal decisions that negatively impressed his officers and men. It is telling that many members of the plank crew of the SHENANDOAH, men who had served on the ALABAMA and were expected to fill out the crew of the new ship, decided not to sail on the SHENANDOAH when she got her orders. Most of the experienced sea dogs of ALABAMA wanted nothing to do with the new ship, sensing, even on her short shakedown cruise, that something was badly amiss on board.

Waddell's reputation for questionable decisionmaking was not helped by his repeated habit of calling for consensus among his officers before he would set a new course, for example. This may be due to one important fact --- that SHENANDOAH's Sailing Master was Irvine Bulloch, younger half-brother of James Bulloch, the man who gave Waddell his ultimate orders.

When Waddell initially sailed, it was with a skeleton crew and few supplies, to the extent that officers hauled sail. Waddell had been advised by Bulloch to supplement his needs and crew with materials and men taken from prizes. For the most part, SHENANDOAH's prizes were stripped of anything usable --- sails, spars, gear, food, water, coal (if any) and valuables --- before being burned to the waterline. Crews were brought on board.

Captured officers (and their families) were largely let be, though no Yankee skipper remarked on the fineness of the Captain’s table at mess, nor at the courtesy of the Captain toward their wives and daughters, as was the case with Captain Semmes of ALABAMA. In fact, several skippers became angry at Waddell for passing “inappropriate” remarks in the company of ladies. (Waddell did not consider Northern women to be “ladies” so his rudeness was calculated).

SHENANDOAH, very unlike ALABAMA, actively tried to recruit men from before the mast, and used all manner of "inducements" to do so, including clapping them in irons, locking them in the forepeak, and tricing them --- hanging them from their thumbs while they balanced their weight on their toes. The Executive Officer, Lieutenant Whittle, who seems to have been a bit of a sadist and a religious fanatic to boot, filled his diary with reports of men triced and ironed, ending these descriptions with self-congratulatory remarks on the numbers of new sailors who gladly "thanks be to God" signed the Ship's Articles. No wonder.

Whittle's diary reflected the attitude of a man who clearly believed that he and not his skipper should have been in command. He was outraged when Waddell inexplicably, intentionally, and most extraordinarily, bypassed Whittle in the chain of command, issuing new orders to subalterns and reorganizing the Deck Department without telling him.

Rather than disrupting the ship's operation, Waddell might have, but curiously never did, relieve Whittle.

It is transparently clear that the two men disliked one another. It is also transparently clear that Waddell had little confidence in members of his Deck Department, not to mention the crew, who, as the cruise continued and more prizes were taken, became a polyglot, multicultural, multicolored mass of men, maltreated and disparaged by both Waddell and Whittle, who in general, expressed all the prejudices of their era with particular nastiness. It may be that the two men were too much alike.

Waddell stooped to pirate tactics more than once. Every so often, SHENANDOAH would make a landfall or spare a prize in order to disgorge her excess passengers --- the skippers and officers of the prizes she'd burned, occasionally along with their wives and children --- on some small sandspit.

When one skipper argued that his people might starve before another ship came along to rescue them, Waddell coldly advised him to "Eat the Kanakas [Hawaiians]" that were being marooned along with them. Another time, he senselessly put his prisoners into a string a whaleboats and towed them behind the SHENANDOAH for miles. Had the boats capsized he might be remembered as a mass killer.

During this time, SHENANDOAH peregrinated with seeming pointlessness across the oceans, sometimes going back on her track. Waddell's standing orders were to visit Australia for political reasons, and to prey upon the U.S. North Pacific whaling fleet, both of which he did after months of desultory cruising that bagged just a few prizes. The ship's Australian landfall was memorable but ended badly. She put into Melbourne, a city with a large number of Southern expatriates. The crew was feted by the city's elite, and about 40 Aussies signed the ship’s articles. But Waddell rudely neglected a scheduled meeting with the Provincial Governor. This gross diplomatic faux pas, combined with constant pressure from the U.S. Consul, led the Australian government to expel SHENANDOAH.

She reached the North Pacific whaling grounds, some eight months after setting out. Yet again, Captain Waddell gave erratic orders, shrugging off any possibility of Yankee prizes by taking the ship into the foggy, ice-choked and exclusively Russian Sea of Okhotsk before finally turning toward Russian America.

And so it was in June of 1865 that the SHENANDOAH went on a rampage among the Yankee whaling fleet of the North Pacific. Between May 27 and June 28, she took 24 prizes, burning most of them, firing the very last shots of the Civil War, and putting a sizeable dent in the United States' merchant marine.

The conundrum facing Waddell and his crew was, of course, that the Civil War was over. Lee had surrendered to Grant at Appomattox on April 9, Lincoln had been assassinated on April 15, Jefferson Davis was captured on May 10, the last major land battle of the war had been fought at Palmito Ranch, Texas on May 13, and the last sizeable Confederate land forces --- a Cherokee detachment under General Stand Watie in Indian Territory ---had surrendered on June 23rd.

SHENANDOAH's crew knew of most of these developments, either through communications with passing neutral ships or reports from captured prize crews, but Waddell deluded himself (and his crew), refusing to credit any of the "rumors" because they came primarily from Yankees and foreigners. Indeed, Waddell, swollen with self-assurance after his June rampage, conceived a plan to attack San Francisco singlehandedly.

Strictly speaking, Waddell was acting against James D. Bulloch's orders, which were to take the ship into a neutral port and sell her if the war news seemed ominous. Bulloch had even warned Waddell not to return to Great Britain in such an event. Waddell, however, surrendered himself not to the Yankees but to megalomania. The planned attack on San Francisco never materialized, but the megalomania remained, for how else to explain the skipper's next decisions, reached after the SHENANDOAH raised a British ship off the coast of Mexico in early August?

The news coming from the British ship, BARRACOUTA, was devastating, that the war was over and had been over for many months. The SHENANDOAH was no longer a warship. She and her crew were wanted for piracy, subject to destruction by any lawful authority. Waddell finally chose to believe the British captain. He disarmed his ship and struck her colors.

He did not, however, follow orders. Through the lens of time, Waddell's next actions seem to have courted madness. Waddell could have easily put into a nearby South American port where his crew could have dispersed unmolested. Instead, he decided to make for Liverpool. He was 17,000 sea miles from England --- as far from his destination as it is possible to get and still be on the planet. He was sailing into the Southern Ocean in the midst of its unforgiving winter in order to "'round the Horn." Landfalls for resupply and repair were scarcer than hen's teeth on his track, and liable to be teeming with U.S. flagged vessels on the alert for SHENANDOAH. Every mile she sailed increased the chances of meeting a U.S. Man o' War and being captured or sunk and drowned or hanged. And, in order to avoid confirming the charge of piracy, SHENANDOAH could take no more prizes, thus denying her crew fresh food, water, and chandlery for the duration of her voyage. She needed to stretch whatever already depleted supplies she had on board to the breaking point if she were to reach England.

Adding to these burdens, the crew's morale was in the bilges. Once proud representatives of the Confederate States of America they had become, by force of events, a gang of skulking buccaneers. And there was no guarantee that the British, no longer "neutrals" in the war just ended, wouldn't hang the crew themselves.

Waddell may have chosen to make for Liverpool because, typically for him, he simply couldn't decide which of any of a dozen Pacific ports would be the best choice for landfall. One of the crew diaries asserts that Waddell decided to return to England in order to complete a circumnavigation and enter the history books; that he succeeded in attaining this goal, at least, is self-evident.

Waddell's habits of indecisiveness, equivocation, and denseness added to the problems on board. Admitting openly to his uncertainty regarding his authority to captain the now-Stateless ship, he undermined his own leadership. The officers and men became insubordinate, openly hostile, and increasingly mutinous as time passed and conditions worsened. Eventually, a mobocracy reigned in what was described as “a perfect hell afloat.”

In the event, SHENANDOAH's November return to Liverpool was an anticlimax: "The war has been over so long that people have got through talking about it," the Merseyside harbor pilot told them as Captain Waddell lowered the Stainless Banner for the very last time in history and surrendered his ship to the British authorities.