Memoirs of Service Afloat During the War Between the States

By ADMIRAL RAPHAEL SEMMES, of the late Confederate States Navy. Baltimore: Kelby, Piet, & Co.

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

AN ingenious nobleman of La Mancha, whom a low mercenary scribbler of his time attempted to turn into ridicule, had a gift of beholding the encounter of Christian knights and Paynim giants in very ordinary fisticuffs or no fisticuffs at all ; and in his mind the opposing forces of life simplified themselves into chivalry and its adversaries. This gave the nobleman the greatest comfort while he lived; and if Admiral Semmes, instead of Cervantes, had had the writing of his history, we should no doubt have been led to believe it was his supreme satisfaction in death. Admiral Semmes we are sure will go down to the grave in a persuasion similar to that of the nobleman of La Mancha ; and we suspect that he keeps an epitaph written to the effect that, in junketing from port to port, and to and fro about the high seas, burning merchantmen and taking chronometers, he was a Cavalier fighting the Puritans. The idea possesses him throughout the book ; the Cavalier and the Puritan cannot live in peace, he tells us; Captain Maury in his treason was a Southern gentleman, and not a Puritan; the Puritan is at last in the city of the Cavalier when the Federal army enters Richmond ; Jefferson Davis was “ the Cavalier endowed by nature with the instincts and refinements of the gentleman,” and his foes “were of the race of the Roundheads, to whom all such instincts and refinements were offensive.” In fine, “ the New England Puritan, so far as we may judge him by the traits which have been developed in him during and since the war, .... with all his pretensions to learning, and amid all the appliances of civilization by which he has surrounded himself, is still the same old Plymouth Rock man that his ancestor was, three centuries ago. He is the same gloomy, saturnine fanatic ; he has the same impatience of other men’s opinions, and he is the same vindictive tyrant that he was when he expelled Roger Williams from his dominions.”

This is pretty, it is even flattering, but we fear it is not like ; for, without indulging a vain regret, we are persuaded that if the Puritan still lived, our author would scarcely have survived to produce the present history ; and upon the same ground we must express a doubt whether Admiral Semmes’s adversaries were in any considerable number Saracens or Vandals. We say this without fear of shattering his illusion, which is a fine bit of poetry in itself, and lends its own charm to his pages. All air of romance, caught from Captain Marryat’s elegant novels, mingles with his pleasant fallacy, and we have a book often as gallant in sentiment, as patrician and haughty in tone, as a young girl could desire, and as beauteous in diction as an old girl would have made it. The Admiral is a friend to the apostrophic form of narration, and uses it with an effect which can be appreciated only by those who have tried the apostrophe, and learnt from a sad experience how hard it is to manage. “ Alas ! poor Louisiana,” he sighs, in sailing away from her coasts, “ once the seat of wealth and of a gay and refined hospitality, thy manorial residences are deserted and in decay, or have been levelled by the torch of the incendiary ; thy fruitful fields that were cultivated by the contented laborer, who whistled his merriment to his lazy plough, have been given to the jungle ; thy fair daughters have been insulted by the coarse and rude Vandal; and even thy liberties have been given in charge of thy freedmen; and all this because thou wouldst thyself be free ! ” In a style like this, which is cavalier, and gentlemanly, and everything that is hightoned, we see what a blow letters received in the overthrow of the Confederacy. The South has not only a lost cause, but a lost literature to lament; for when Admiral Semmes and his generation have passed away, who will have the daring to present such a picture as that of the fruitful fields cultivated by the lazy plough of the contented laborer, or of a State deprived of her liberties when struggling to be free, and given over to the power of her freedmen ? Nothing can compensate for the suppression of this heroic strain, or notes like these in which he hails a famous Spanish city:—

as Byron calls thee, thou art indeed lovely! with thy white Moresque-looking houses, and gayly curtained balconies, thy church domes which carry us back in architecture a thousand years, and thy harbor thronged with shipping. Once the Gades of the Phoenician, now the Cadiz of the nineteenth century, thou art perhaps the only living city that canst run thy record so far back into the past.”

It is hard to believe that a city thus handsomely saluted, whose history even is turned into apostrophe, could have it in her to become the scene of so much vexation to Admiral Semmes as Cadiz did. But at Cadiz he was subjected to every annoyance: the authorities were vulgar fellows, trembling for the loss of Yankee trade and favor; and here, as elsewhere, throughout the dominions of warm, romantic Spain, they treated Admiral Semmes with as little courtesy as possible. Here also continued that unchivalrousness with which the American Consuls invariably acted towards him. Unchivalrousness may be said to be the chief quality of the consular mind, and it was the more pity Admiral Semmes should have to do with such people, because he was by nature unfitted to bear unchivalrousness in anybody, much less an enemy. To avoid it he always kept out of the way of our coarse naval force with the Sumter ; and it was hard that he should have to encounter it in our consuls. At St. Anne’s, Curaçoa, the consul prevented him from entering port for some time, and “ gave him a foretaste of the trouble which Federal consuls were to make for him in the future” ; at Parimaribo, a negro who sold the Sumter coal behaved himself much better than the consul who tried to prevent him, and who finally stole away the Admiral’s black cabin-boy and presently enslaved him; (and the author “ takes great pleasure in contrasting the coal-dealer’s conduct with that of the consul, who appears at a disadvantage every way, for the deluded cabin-boy, escaping to Europe, returns home to “ die miserably of the cholera, in some of the negro suburbs of Washington,” and bequeaths to the author the fact that the consul at Parimaribo had a mulatto wife and held slaves;) the machinations of the consul at Gibraltar prevented him from getting coal there, and obliged him to lay up and sell the Sumter ; the consuls everywhere “ descended to bribery, trickery, and fraud, and to all the other arts of petty intrigue, so unworthy an honorable enemy ” ; and at Tangiers the consul even imprisoned his paymaster, and the English consul would not advise the Morocco government to release him, and the other foreign consuls “behaved no better”; at the Cape of Good Hope the low consular person pestered the Alabama with all manner of unchivalrous annoyances as long as she remained in port. In a word, Admiral Semmes gives the best report of the consular force everywhere, and his book is high testimony to the efficiency and zeal of a body of men selected at random from the people, poorly paid, snubbed by the local authorities, and acting half the time in the dark with very limited functions. What may we not expect of the consular system when it is served by a well-trained force, salaried at least above the starvation points, as Mr. Jenckes’s bill proposes?

In testifying to the activity of the American consuls, our author bears witness to the fact, which we are likely to forget, that he was the object of English and French courtesies wherever they could be unofficially shown. He is always dining and wining with colonial governors and naval commanders ; and where he appears in the ports of those friendly powers, he has little less than an ovation from the citizens. Perhaps these experiences grow vaster as well as brighter in his remembrance ; they seem somewhat incredible to us now ; but it is certain that we piped for much dancing and gayety, and are still to be paid by England for our piping. The history of the Alabama’s cruise is suggestive, if not pleasant reading, at a moment when we are tempted to compromise that little score,

Otherwise, we could not allow that Admiral Semmes had written a very useful book, though a big one, and covering the whole period from the beginning of the war till the author’s arrest in 1866. Of course, being the man he is, he travels even beyond these comprehensive limits at times, and he introduces the story of his adventures with a discussion of the nature of the compact between the States, and the question whether secession was treason. You turn at first with some curiosity to see what mind a man writes from who pursues in the temper of a knight-errant a career of freebooting unmolested by the slightest danger; but you soon weary of arson and burglary on the seas, described, every case, in as high a strain as if it involved a perilous combat and victory. When he first fired upon an American vessel, he felt a mingled joy and sadness. “The stars and stripes seemed now to look abashed in the presence of the new banner of the South, pretty much as a burglar might be supposed to look who had been caught in the act of breaking into a gentleman’s house; but then the burglar was my relative and had erst been my friend,— how could I fail to feel some pity for him along with the indignation which his crime had excited?” It was in this pathetic humor that Admiral Semmes did us a great deal of damage. It was his business, of course, to destroy our whale-ships and merchantmen, but it is not important to know that he nearly always felt a reluctance to do so, which he could overcome only by reflecting that our soldiers were at the same moment desolating Southern fields and burning Southern homes. Neither is it essential to an understanding of history that he should combat the newspaper attacks upon him in these pages; but he has really very little to tell that is not already known about the Sumter and the Alabama, and a man must fill eight hundred pages with something.

The Admiral develops himself as a type of intellect with which we have been made well acquainted by the Southern press and the Southern stump, and suggests anew the doubt we have often felt whether the Southerner was not created with some important mental difference from other men. No human being, we think, except one who had his nature entirely inverted by the effort to believe right such a wrong as slavery, could argue from such premises to such conclusions as Admiral Semmes does, or, after eight hundred pages narrating the destruction of defenceless merchantmen, could have what we may call the brazenfaced innocence to complain of the unchivalrousness of the Kearsarge for fighting in chain armor against his wooden vessel.

In regard to that famous action itself he does not add much to our information. His account of the fight is contained in the despatch sent two days afterwards from Southampton to Flag-Officer Barron at Paris, and is followed by extended discussion of the question whether he and the others of the Alabama’s crew picked up by the Deerhound were properly prisoners of war. This gives him occasion to be very severe upon Mr. Adams, Mr. Seward, and the American people, and nothing but his unsparing severity upon all other points prevents one from feeling it here with peculiar keenness. As it is, the reader has become so hardened in his unchivalrousness and lowness generally, that he is disposed to smile at the Admiral’s heat; and he quite forgives him for getting away. The truth is, our people have not a gift for the disposal of prisoners of state : of all the eminent traitors who fell into our hands at the end of the war, not one has been a source of honor or profit to us. Admiral Semmes is himself an evidence of our national incapacity to deal with offenders. If he had fallen into our power when the Alabama went down, we should have threatened him horribly, and should have furnished him with rations for a considerably longer period than, as it happened, we did.

We will own that we do not feel called on to alarm ourselves much at our author’s menaces of another rebellion as an effect of bringing the Puritan and Cavalier elements into too intimate relations under a strong central government. At the same time we think it a pity that the Southern mind should be still further abused by the influence of such books as his. Accounting always for a certain literary vulgarity, the history of the Sumter and Alabama has passages of description and adventure which will attract young readers especially, and it is impossible not to contemplate with sadness the prospect that it may teach many heirs of desolation and misery to cherish themselves as the “gentle” blood of the land in the idle and truculent patricianism of their fathers, instead of learning enterprise and thrift.

We of the North can have no reasonable objection to Admiral Semmes’s hating us ; he did us a great deal of harm, and we crushed him; but we could conceive of his writing—or rather of some one else’s waiting—a book upon the episode of the war he has treated, which would be a valued addition to our literature. There is a fine completeness in the passage of history enacted which fits it for graphic and effective treatment. Calmness and clearness of narration would have been quite consistent with the utmost bitterness towards us ; Mr. Seward and Mr. Welles could have been used with sufficient cruelty, and yet not been so fatiguingly pursued; the newspapers might have been safely left alone. Obviously, however, Admiral Semmes had no idea of such a performance as this, and his book, so far as literature is concerned, must pass to the hands of boys. As far as politics are concerned now or hereafter, we cannot believe that the question of the Roundheads and Cavaliers will be brought prominently forward by it.