Picture of the "Alabama: Contemporary engraving" taken from The Life and Times of Queen Victoria, Volume 2, 1903, by Robert Wilson, published by Cassell & Company, is in the public domain. Out of print. Personal collection of the writer. The author, Robert Wilson (1846-1893), has been deceased for more than 100 years, making the work free to use and reuse.
The Alabama in song
When the Alabama’s keel was laid
Roll, Alabama, roll!
It was laid in the yard of Jonathan Laird
Oh, roll, Alabama, roll!
It was laid in the yard of Jonathan Laird
It was laid in the town of Birkenhead
Across the Mersey river she sailed then
And Liverpool fitted her with guns and men
From the Western Isles she sailed forth
To destroy all commerce of the North
Down to Cherbourg came she straight one day
For to take her toll in prize money
There many a sailor lad met his doom
When the ship Kearsarge hove in view
And a shot from the forward pivot that day
It shot the Alabama’s stern away
In the three-mile limit, in sixty-five
The Alabama sunk to her grave
(English sea shanty, 19th century)
Daar kom die Alabama
Daar kom die Alabama,
Die Alabama kom oor die see
Daar kom die Alabama,
Die Alabama kom oor die see.
Nooi Nooi die rietkooinooi,
Die rietkooi is gemaak
Die rietkooi is vir my gemaak,
Om daarop te slaap
Nooi Nooi die rietkooinooi,
Die rietkooi is gemaak
Die rietkooi is vir my gemaak,
Om daar op te slaap
O Alabama, die Alabama,
O Alabama kom oor die see
O Alabama, die Alabama,
O Alabama kom oor die see
(Traditional Afrikaans song)
There can’t be many Capetonians who haven’t heard this famous ditty. As a boy in Cape Town I first heard “Daar kom die Alabama”* during the colourful carnival which used to be held in the streets of the Bo-Kaap. It’s still a favourite at the annual carnival or “Jol” time in the stadium – if you can’t recall the song, then catch it on YouTube, especially as performed by the Pensylvanians Klopse and another Cape Town group, Die Kaapse Affodille playing with a view of Table Bay where the Alabama captured a Yankee ship behind them in 1863.
Anyway, it’s a cheerful, catchy tune that has a surprisingly deep and serious reach. The song was inspired by the legendary American civil war confederate warship the CSS Alabama, which put in to Cape Town from time to time during the bloody civil war struggle (1861–1864) between the southern slave-owning states and the states in the north which supported the abolition of slavery.
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The song was inspired by the legendary American civil war confederate warship the CSS Alabama, which put in to Cape Town from time to time during the bloody civil war struggle (1861–1864) between the southern slave-owning states and the states in the north which supported the abolition of slavery.
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South African writer Roy Macnab has described1 the Alabama as the star of the confederate raiders, the most destructive surface warship in the history of maritime conflict: In 22 months at sea, under Captain Raphael Semmes she arrested 294 ships; 65 merchantmen were destroyed, numerous others valued at millions of dollars placed under ransom bonds; she sank the superior Federal warship Hatteras, and eluded 25 others sent to find her.
Hugely effective, the Alabama virtually destroyed the "carry trade” of the northern states under President Abraham Lincoln, and so neutralised the effectiveness of the blockade on confederate exports of cotton to Britain, vital to the British economy. She was not the only confederate warship, but she was by a mile the most devastating.
Britain, as a professed neutral country in the dispute on American soil, was herself anti-slavery, having been the first country in the world to abolish the practice in 1833.
I recently dipped into a voluminous biography of Queen Victoria, published after her death.2 The biographers had full access to all her private papers. Kept me reading into the small hours.
What I hadn’t fully appreciated was the extent to which Queen Victoria, in person, became involved in the Alabama saga, an involvement which eventually led, at the conclusion of the war, to the American government’s accusing her and her government of violating Britain’s neutrality status.
The accusation was based on the friendly reception of the Alabama in supposedly “neutral” Cape Town on the one hand, and on the other because the vessel had allegedly been fraudulently passed off as a merchant ship under construction, in a British yard, thereby allegedly prolonging the civil war by two years and causing untold financial damage to the USA.
The Alabama Claims, which in essence, was a demand for massive reparations from Her Majesty’s government of billions of dollars, including the whole of Canada as compensation, about which more later. Suffice it to say the eventual settlement in 1871 established the first ever Geneva-based international agreement.
At the core of everything was the powerful CSS Alabama, captained by the extraordinary Raphael Semmes, who was destined to be feted in Cape Town, whose citizens (expecting a sea battle and crowded Lion’s Head to watch it) he entertained by capturing another American ship in Table Bay after a single warning shot.
A bit of a back story to Queen Victoria’s involvement is important, and begins immediately after her young husband, the German-born Albert, died from typhus in 1861.
They had been a German-speaking couple for 21 years (“Es ist kleines Frauchen” – “’Tis your own little wife” – Victoria whispered to him when she kissed him on his deathbed), and as her biography tells us, she had been "submissive to Albert in all matters great and small". A classic German Hausfrau, one might say today. He was complete master in his house, and the active centre, with Queen Victoria, of an Empire whose power extended to every quarter of the globe. In practice this young German prince ended up acting for all these millions of British subjects. For 21 years not a single dispatch was sent from the Foreign Office which the young prince and his wife Victoria had not first, side by side, seen, studied, and if necessary, altered. She read every dispatch, but his was the opinion which prevailed.
His reach in government was absolute. Not one senior appointment in Church, State, army and navy was made without his approval. He was almost a dictator by the lights of modern-day democracy in Britain where the King is above politics and neutral. But at Victoria’s Court not the smallest thing was done without Albert’s order, and it was in this context that Queen Victoria took over all Albert’s duties in 1861 when he died, and had to govern on her own. She slavishly continued his management style with, one might almost say, Germanic zeal. She was forceful and decisive in her comments, and the prime minister of the day would have no option but generally to defer to her wishes.
Victoria thus inherited the shoes of a German royal notable for irritating the British establishment and press by his convictions and what they saw as his interference in affairs of state. A contemporary print shows the couple receiving Lord Campbell. They sit side by side, while the elderly politician remains on his feet.
Albert’s immaturity (he was younger than Victoria, and they married in their early twenties) led him to important errors which the government felt unable to correct. He erred during the Crimean War, and undervalued the potency of the great movement which led to Italian independence. He feared the ungovernable ambition of the Bonapartist dynasty and the aggressive instincts of France, as he saw it, and this Germanic mindset had for two decades contributed to the young Queen’s own world view.
From the outset, as Victoria, now a young widow, stepped into the policy cockpit of British government on her own, she was caught up in the entrails of the American civil war. Given her initial instinct to preserve the status quo of cotton imports from America and so preserve the textile industry in the north of England and tens of thousands of jobs of her subjects, she soon found herself at odds with her own government in the matter of Britain’s neutrality in the American conflict.
Britain, in those days, was one of the world’s largest shipbuilders, and the confederate government had decided to build their warships, such as the Alabama, in Britain. But neutrality obligations by Britain required a sleight of hand – the ships should seemingly be built as cargo ships, and passed off as such. The scheme was that the completed “cargo ships” would then be spirited away to other less visible ports, the Azores, perhaps or even Cape Town, where they might be refitted as warships.
The northern Yankees were, of course, wise to this stratagem, and appointed northern Federal spies to make sure the British government exercised "due diligence" and put a stop to the practice. It was the first use of the expression “due diligence”, commonplace today in business and governance circles.
Under Victoria, whose sympathies were wholly with the confederates, given the importance of cotton supplies to the Lancashire mills, this diligence was observed in the breach.
The American Federal ambassador to Britain had long been a public critic of Britain’s failure to curb their shipbuilding yards, and petitioned Victoria’s government to bring a test case to trial to force Britain to discharge its obligations under the Neutrality Act and international law, and not thus aid a rebel belligerent.
The test case would involve a particular ship – the Alexandria – then being built in a British yard, on the grounds that the ship’s reinforced structure, more suitable in a man-of-war, provided enough suspicion to do so.
With no legal precedents to guide him to establish a test case, Lord Russell, the British prime minister, was obliged to order the ship seized on the sole suspicion that her owners intended to use her as a warship against the United States federal government.
Queen Victoria was then petitioned by the owners of the yard, who wanted to retain the assistance of George Mellish to defend them. Mellish was at that time the counsel for the confederate government in England. In the only known document relating to the civil war signed by Queen Victoria herself, she swiftly granted the petitioners the necessary licence to proceed with Mellish. He won the case for the defendants, on the grounds that the evidence had been supplied by spies on the federal government’s payroll.
The outcome of all this was going to have far-reaching consequences, which would shape the basis of international dispute resolution for the next 170 years – indeed to our own day. The CSS Alabama’s rise to posthumous fame was just beginning.
Cape Town in the frame
For a warship destined to be as famous in Britain as in America, the Alabama originally started out somewhat ignominiously as “hull number 290”, being built in secrecy in John Laird’s Birkenhead shipyard on the River Mersey. The sea shanty at the head of this article summarises it accurately.
Federal spies were determined to stop her escaping into international waters through legal means, and just as she was ready for sea trials, the owners of the shipyard received a mysterious tip-off alerting them to the risk. Did the tip-off come from the pro-confederate Queen herself through a court emissary? I would not be surprised if it had. There is a strong presumption in that direction in her biography.
The Birkenhead shipyard responded in an original fashion. In July 1862 they announced that the new “merchant” ship (temporarily named Enrica) would undergo sea trials, and a large party was organised on board to mark the occasion. Dozens of fashionably dressed guests duly arrived and the ship put to sea out to the three-mile limit from shore where she would be in international waters. A legal writ was to be served on the ship on her return. But after having quaffed buckets of champagne the guests were transferred to another ship and ferried back to shore. The ruse had wrong-footed the Federal spies, and the Alabama, which in reality she was, now made a run for the Azores.
At the Azores, Captain Semmes took command of the ship while she was being armed. In late August the CSS Alabama set off into the wide Atlantic to cement a new reputation as a fighting warship.
One dramatic success followed another, with no notable casualties either on the Alabama or on captured ships, whose passengers and crew were always well treated by Captain Semmes with old-fashioned Southern courtesy. The Alabama then captured the Conrad, a 350-ton Union bark, on 20 June 1863. Semmes renamed her the Tuscaloosa and considered her a confederate navy ship of war henceforth. The two ships sailed together towards Cape Town for a refit.
On 29 July 1863 the Alabama anchored in Saldanha Bay – and for a week the officers and crew went hunting. Sadly, Assistant Engineer SW Cummings from the Alabama died of an accidental gunshot wound during this outing, and was buried at Saldanha Bay. Quite recently his remains were disinterred and repatriated to the USA.
Captain Semmes transferred prisoners from the Alabama to a British ship, with the request that they be put ashore in Cape Town. Then Semmes proceeded to Cape Town as planned, only to discover that a southern Yankee ship, Sea Bride, had simultaneously arrived in Table Bay. Thousands of Capetonians thronged Green Point, Signal Hill and Lion’s Head in the hopes of seeing a naval battle, but were disappointed when Semmes captured his prey close to Robben island with a single warning shot.
Neutrality violation?
Almost immediately he was accused of violating the neutrality laws, having captured the Sea Bride within three sea miles of land – in other words not in neutral waters. Semmes argued that Robben Island was in fact four miles off the mainland, and therefore he was in the clear.
But the American consul in Cape Town insisted the capture was less than two miles from land and called on the Cape Town authorities to return Sea Bride to the Federal Union and to hand over the Tuscaloosa, now at Simonstown being refitted with guns. The British governor-general refused to do so, and Semmes was welcomed into Cape Town with enormous acclaim. Local sentiment (especially the ladies) was entirely for him.
Captain Semmes anchored his glamorous warship close to land and received visitors by small boat. He was overwhelmed with gifts of fruit and flowers and greeted his callers with all the genteel soft-spoken manners of the “old South” and Constantia wine, to which he remained partial all his life.
After Cape Town, the Alabama set sail for the Indian Ocean, Singapore, the Indies and Hong Kong, capturing and burning northern Federal ships along the way. She returned once more, six months later, to Cape Town on 20 March 1864, and stayed for five days. Captain Semmes then headed for Europe and the coast of France, hoping to catch more northern cargo ships.
Shoot-out at high noon
The Alabama’s story was coming to a close, however. Roy Macnab’s superb account of the Alabama’s end (see footnote 1) after Semmes’s two years at sea tells us the warship finally put in at Cherbourg, a French coastal town, for a sorely needed refit. She needed new copper plating, among other things.
Alabama entered Cherbourg after gaining permission from the French emperor. Under the terms of France’s adherence to the neutrality protocols, however, Captain Semmes was not allowed to take on any extra crew from shore nor equip his vessel with arms and ammunition.
He didn’t seem to mind these restrictions, however, and his crew were able to rest up and enjoy a spot of shore leave. Captain Semmes himself became a friend of the controversial French painter Edouard Manet, who had caused a near riot with his nude Olympia among other pictures. Manet was fascinated by Semmes, by his command of poetry and his photographic memory for prose. The artist captured him in several sketches and promised that he would incorporate him in a proper oil painting one day. He was as good as his word and his very last picture, The bar at the Folies Bergere, today to be seen at the Courtauld in London, captures Captain Raphael Semmes as the lone customer placing an order at the counter.
The Alabama’s arrival in Cherbourg was as big an event as it had been in Cape Town, with swarms of people crowding the harbour to have a gander. Everyone wanted to meet the Captain, it seemed. But no one was as happy to see the Alabama as the northern Federal agent, whose urgent communications back to Washington resulted in the northern warship Kerseage’s anchoring just beyond the three-mile neutrality line, from where Captain Winslow could investigate the Alabama’s fighting fitness at his leisure.
The sinking of the Alabama
What Winslow saw pleased him: Alabama was worn out. His old naval college pal, and now enemy, Captain Semmes, was almost certainly exhausted as well. The Kerseage, on the other hand, had been secretly reinforced with armour in the form of chains to protect her boilers from cannon fire.
Captain Winslow sent a duelling challenge to Captain Semmes, promptly answered in the affirmative, and the CSS Alabama left Cherbourg for the three-mile limit. The battle would take place in international waters.
Crowds of French flocked to the coast for a good view, packing picnic baskets, just as spectators had done in Cape Town.
The two warships circled each other cautiously. The battle was over within the hour, and Alabama began sinking by the stern after a lucky shot from the Kerseage.
It was a sad conclusion to an illustrious career; as Rear Admiral B Eiseman, US Naval Reserve, recounts,3 the Confederate man-of-war Alabama, during her "guerre de course", had “captured and burned Union ships, from whaling vessels near the Azores to merchant shipping in the Caribbean. She engaged Union ships in Galveston, Texas, and off Martinique. With consummate timing, Semmes always kept one jump ahead of the Northern ships sent after him."
Eiseman says Semmes always paid careful attention to saving the lives of the luckless passengers and crew of the ships he sank. He also strictly avoided attacking neutral vessels: "By 1863, when the Alabama shifted her activities to the coast of Brazil, she was already a legend, rating comment and progress reports in the London Times. She put to sea and once again dropped out of sight just as Union ships, dispatched to catch her, closed in on Brazil. There was speculation all over the world as to where next she would strike or be sighted."
The aftermath
But now destiny had caught up with her, and Captain Semmes gave the order to abandon ship. Close at hand was a British yacht, the Deerhound, which had somewhat mysteriously arrived in Cherbourg a few weeks previously and which went out to sea with the Alabama, remaining incautiously close to the action – close enough to rescue Captain Semmes and a good many of his men as they floundered about in the water, half drowned.
Deerhound refused to hand over Captain Semmes as a prisoner to the Kerseage – he would probably have been hanged if he had been captured. The usual Federal complaints followed, but it is difficult to escape a suspicion that Deerhound, with aristocratic British connections, had not found herself in Cherbourg by accident. After all, Captain Semmes can be said to have single-handedly saved the British cotton mills from closure during a critical time for the British economy. Was he saved by Queen Victoria? One will never know for certain, but perhaps wheels within wheels turned ...
What is certain, however, is that the moment the great man set foot in England, every door opened for him; he was the hero of the hour, feted and dined by the good and the great of Britain’s establishment.
Nor was he forgotten in South Africa. In Admiral Eiseman’s words: “This fabled man in his legendary ship had carried out one of her most dramatic and certainly most widely witnessed actions in Table Bay. No wonder the Alabama is still remembered in legend and song by the inhabitants of Cape Town, South Africa."
The Alabama Claims, 1862–1871. The reckoning
But now came the reckoning.
The diplomatic dispute between the USA and Great Britain was formally named the Alabama Claims. It centred on the confederate warships disguised as merchant vessels during their construction in Britain. Together with the Alabama there were five such warships, and they caused enormous destruction, although the Alabama was far and away the main culprit. The United States demanded compensation from the British government for the damage caused by the Alabama which it said had prolonged the civil war by two years and had indirectly cost the United States $2,125 billion – an immense sum in those days. There was a demand from senior Americans involved in the dispute that Britain should offer Canada to the United States in compensation.
The American contention was that Britain had allowed the Alabama to be built and equipped in its neutral ports, thereby violating international neutrality laws.
After seven years of dispute, during which relations between Britain and the “new” USA had sunk to a low, agreement was finally reached with the Treaty of Washington in 1871. An arbitration commission was established which rejected American claims for “indirect” damages, but it did order Britain to hand over $15 million in gold for the direct damage claims. In today’s money this is roughly $1,5 billion.
This was a big moment in the history of international law. By resolving this dispute through so-called binding law instead of through military conflict, a legal precedent had been established which endures to this day. The tribunal which America and Britain agreed on consisted of neutral arbitrators from the USA, Italy, Switzerland, Brazil and Britain; by agreement the Tribunal convened in Geneva, Switzerland, also something of a first.
Rules agreed on as part of the Washington Treaty specified that neutral governments must henceforth exercise “due diligence” to prevent the outfitting of ships suspected of being deployed against belligerents.
The British swallowed hard, but accepted the ruling of the Tribunal that strict neutrality protocol in the case of the Alabama had not been followed – she had in fact taken on new crew in Cape Town, which was a clear violation of the neutrality agreement originally signed up to by Queen Victoria’s government, among other things
To this day, the neutrality obligations of the Washington Treaty are followed; in fact, Britain’s refusal to allow official observers from Israel to attend an arms fair next month in the neutral UK could be seen as just such an example.
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Moreover, we can see that at the World Trade Organisation in Geneva there are now dispute resolution panel tactics designed precisely to defuse tension between states on trade in a peaceful manner. The United Nations also makes use of such panels to defuse conflicts where they can.
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Moreover, we can see that at the World Trade Organisation in Geneva there are now dispute resolution panel tactics designed precisely to defuse tension between states on trade in a peaceful manner. The United Nations also makes use of such panels to defuse conflicts where they can.
Overall, the spirit of the Alabama negotiations in Geneva illumined the path to the eventual League of Nations, then the United Nations Organisation, and the broadening of the concept of international law to the establishment of an International Court of Justice at The Hague.
So when you next hear “Die Alabama” being sung in the streets of Cape Town, pause and reflect awhile on the extraordinary legacy of the ship behind the song, and Queen Victoria, who may just have been the invisible hand behind this nautical legend.
* The most common spelling in Afrikaans song, eg by Nico Carstens, is Alabama, but it is sometimes colloquially spelled with an i, thus Alibama.
1 The Cherbourg Circles, by Roy Macnab, Robert Hale, London (1994)
2 Life and times of Queen Victoria, 3 volumes, Cassel and Company, London (1903)
3 April 1975 Proceedings, Vol 101/4/866, US Navy Rear Admiral B Eiseman
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