page_title: Raphael Semmes
section_title: Confederate service
hierarchical_section_title: Raphael Semmes / Career / Confederate service
caption_attribution_description: Sinking of the CSS Alabama, engraving.
context_page_description: Raphael Semmes was an officer in the Confederate Navy during the American Civil War. Until then, he had been a serving officer in the US Navy from 1826 to 1860.
  During the American Civil War, Semmes was captain of the cruiser CSS Alabama, the most successful commerce raider in maritime history, taking 65 prizes. Late in the war, he was promoted to rear admiral and also acted briefly as a brigadier general in the Confederate States Army. His appointment or arrangement to act as a temporary brigadier general from April 5 to April 26, 1865, was never submitted to or officially confirmed by the Confederate Senate.
context_section_description: After appointment to the Confederate Navy as a commander and a futile assignment to purchase arms in the North, Semmes was sent to New Orleans to convert the steamer Habana into the cruiser/commerce raider CSS Sumter. In June 1861, Semmes, in Sumter, outran the USS Brooklyn, breaching the Union blockade of New Orleans, and then launched a brilliant career as one of the greatest commerce raider captains in naval history.
  Semmes's command of CSS Sumter lasted only six months, but during that time he ranged wide, raiding U.S. commercial shipping in both the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic Ocean; his actions accounted for the loss of 18 merchant vessels, while always eluding pursuit by Union warships. By January 1862, Sumter required a major overhaul. Semmes's crew surveyed the vessel while in neutral Gibraltar and determined that the repairs to her boilers were too extensive to be completed there. Semmes paid off the crew and laid up the vessel. U.S. Navy vessels maintained a vigil outside the harbor until she was disarmed and sold at auction in December 1862, eventually being renamed and converted to a blockade runner.
  Semmes and several of his officers traveled to England where he was promoted to captain. He then was ordered to the Azores to take up command and oversee the coaling and outfitting with cannon of the newly built British steamer Enrica as a sloop-of-war, which thereafter became the Confederate commerce raider CSS Alabama. Semmes sailed on Alabama from August 1862 to June 1864. His operations carried him from the Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico, around Africa's Cape of Good Hope, and into the Pacific to the East Indies. During this cruise, Alabama captured 65 U.S. merchantmen and quickly destroyed the USS Hatteras, off Galveston.
  Alabama finally sailed back to the Atlantic and made port in Cherbourg, France, for a much-needed overhaul; she was soon blockaded by the pursuing Union steam sloop-of-war, USS Kearsarge. Captain Semmes took Alabama out on June 19, 1864, and met the similar Kearsarge in one of the most famous naval engagements of the Civil War.
  The commander of Kearsarge had, while in port at the Azores the year before, turned his warship into a makeshift partial ironclad; 30 feet (9.1 m) of the ship's port and starboard midsection were stepped-up-and-down to the waterline with overlapping rows of heavy chain armor, hidden behind black wooden plank covers. Alabama's much-too-rapid gunnery and misplaced aim, combined with the deteriorated state of her gunpowder and shell fuses, enabled a victory for both of Kearsarge's 11-inch (28 cm) Dahlgren smoothbore cannon. While Alabama opened fire at long range, Kearsarge steamed straight at her, exposing the Union sloop-of-war to potentially devastating raking fire. In their haste, however, Alabama's gunners fired many shells too high.
  At 1,000 yards (910 m), Kearsarge turned broadside to engage with deliberate fire. Soon the heavy 11-inch (28 cm) cannon began to find their mark. After receiving a fatal Dahlgren shell to the starboard waterline, which tore open a portion of Alabama's hull, causing her steam engine to explode from the shell's impact, Semmes was forced to order the striking of his ship's Stainless Banner battle ensign and later to display a hand-held white flag of surrender to finally halt the combat.
  As the commerce raider was going down by the stern, Kearsarge stood off at a distance and observed at the orders of her captain (John Ancrum Winslow); Winslow eventually sent rescue boats for survivors after taking aboard Alabama survivors from one of the raider's two surviving longboats. As his command sank, the wounded Semmes threw his sword into the sea, depriving Kearsarge's Captain Winslow of the traditional surrender ceremony of having it handed over to him as victor. Semmes was eventually rescued, along with forty-one of his crewmen, by the British yacht Deerhound and three French pilot boats. He and the forty-one were then taken to England where all but one recovered; while there they were hailed as naval heroes, despite the loss of Alabama
  From E
caption: 1864 engraving of the sinking of CSS Alabama
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