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Note: This article is adapted from a presentation made by the author to the North Central Ohio Civil War Roundtable at Bucyrus, Ohio in March 2002.

When the Union sloop of war Kearsarge and the Confederate commerce raider Alabama clashed off the coast of Cherbourg, France, it was a last glimpse of chivalry in what had otherwise become a deadly serious and unromantic war. On June 19, 1864, was waged the last naval duel of American naval history: the last time two equally-matched ships would meet in a prearranged fight to the death.

Admiral David Glasgow Farragut himself, the hero of Mobile Bay, declared, "I had sooner have fought that fight than any ever fought upon the ocean!"

It has become a cliché, but is true just the same, to say that the Civil War marked a turning point in naval warfare. The Civil War saw the world's first battle between ironclads, the first submarine sink a ship, and the first effective underwater-mine - then called a "torpedo" - used defensively. Highlighting the transition through which naval technology was then passing, both the Kearsarge and the Alabama were equipped with sails and steam-driven propellers.

As Bruce Catton wrote, "The Civil War came while one revolution in naval affairs was underway, and it hastened the commencement of another ... the transition from sail to steam [was already underway, and] by the time it ended, the transition from wooden ships to ironclads was well along… by 1865 naval warfare would resemble the twentieth century much more than it resembled anything Lord Nelson or John Paul Jones had known."

For all those changes, though, the battle between the U.S.S. Kearsarge and the C.S.S. Alabama hearkened back to a more romantic, more gallant era. Many people remember the clash of the ironclads Monitor and Virginia, but that battle was essentially a draw. There was a clear winner in the clash of the Kearsarge and the Alabama.

When it started, the Civil War caught the navies of both sides completely unprepared. Years of prewar neglect had taken their toll on the U.S. Navy. When war broke out and President Lincoln ordered a blockade of the 3,500 miles of Confederate coastline, U.S. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles found that he had at his disposal just 8,900 officers and sailors, and 89 ships, only 42 of which were in commission. Of these, 28 were on station in foreign waters, 26 were available but not in commission, and 21 were rated unserviceable. Welles immediately made arrangements for the purchase of 136 other vessels to be altered and put into service - including harbor ferryboats, tugboats and passenger liners - and he ordered the construction of 52 others, just for starters. Among these would be the Mohican-class steam sloop U.S.S. Kearsarge. By December 1861, the U.S. Navy had 264 ships mounting 2,557 guns and carrying 22,000 crew. By the end of the war, the Navy would boast 671 ships and 52,000 men - among the largest in the world.

A third of the Navy officer corps of Southern birth headed south to serve the Confederacy: 16 captains, 34 commanders, and 76 lieutenants in the first wave alone. The U.S. Navy high command so feared sabotage or invasion in the simmering border state of Maryland, that the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis was moved for the first and only time in its history: to Newport, Rhode Island, where it stayed until after the war. Along with the cadets, the faculty and the books went the U.S.S. Constitution, "Old Ironsides" of War of 1812 fame, which continued to serve as a training ship.

The Confederacy's young navy was in even worse shape. Confederate Navy Secretary Stephen Mallory had just 35 ships, mostly small, by December 1861; only 21 were steamships, and the majority had fewer than five cannon. Some were "cottonclads," relying on the dubious protection of bales of cotton rather than iron plating. The Confederacy was not too much better off in terms of an industrial base with which to build more. The Confederacy had only two naval yards, three rolling mills, and just a single foundry for the casting of heavy cannon. The Confederacy initially had to rely for its naval ordnance upon arms captured at Gosport Navy Yard in Norfolk, Virginia. They also captured the half-burned hulk of the Union steam frigate Merrimac, which would be refit and rebuilt as the fearsome Confederate ironclad C.S.S. Virginia, and go on to its fateful battle with the U.S.S. Monitor. Mallory did good work with few resources, and he would be the only member of the Confederate cabinet to hold the same post throughout the entire war.

On April 17, 1861, President Jefferson Davis issued an offer of letters of marque and reprisal under the great seal of the Confederacy to attack U.S. ships and property. It was an open invitation for privateers to do what the infant Confederate Navy could not then do for itself: to carry the war to U.S. merchant ships on the high seas, anywhere and everywhere throughout the world.

Cotton was key to Southern prosperity. Cotton cost about eight cents a pound in the port of Wilmington, N.C. at the start of the war, but could fetch up to eighty cents a pound in Europe. The money from that trade could buy a lot of war materiel; hemmed in by the Union, the Confederacy badly needed foreign commerce. Blockade runners, sleek, swift, quiet ships, soon appeared to slip through the Union blockade and bring much needed supplies to the Confederacy. The blockade was very porous in its early days, and it's been estimated that eight out of nine blockade runners made it through at first. For those who bankrolled blockade runners, profits started at 100-200 percent at the beginning of the war.  The successful-passage ratio was to drop, however, and by war's end the blockade was nearly impermeable; profits rose to 1,500-2,000 percent for each successful cruise. With 1,500 blockade runners captured by April 1865, however, the flood of supplies brought across the high seas to Confederate shores slowed to a trickle. The Confederate Congress passed a law requiring one-third of all shipping capacity be set aside for government cargoes, but the rule was not strictly enforced. There was far more money to be made in secretly importing European perfumes, silks, tea, liquor, and exotic foods.

U.S. amphibious assaults on Cape Hatteras, Port Royal, and Hilton Head early in the war set the stage for the slow strangulation of Confederate shipping, and the often boring blockade duty also occasionally paid rich dividends for those who enforced it. U.S. Navy crews preferred to capture rather than sink blockade runners, wherever possible, and for good reason: a capturing crew got shares of the proceeds from the sale of the cargoes. In one case, the acting ensigns of a capturing Union ship received $9,589.67 each, and the cabin boys each received the equivalent of six years' pay.

James Bulloch (left), Confederate agent in London during the war who arranged for the construction of the Alabama, and his half-brother Irvine Bulloch (right), who served as an officer on the Alabama.  Their sister, Martha Bulloch, was Theodore Roosevelt's mother.

Confederate Navy Secretary Mallory realized that he could not rely on Confederate shipyards alone to build his fleet. He also sent James D. Bulloch, a business and shipping genius, to Great Britain to arrange for the construction of commerce raiders there. Soon, the ships that would become the C.S.S. Florida and her more famous compatriot, the Alabama, were under construction - both under the alert eye of U.S. spies and informants, to be sure. U.S. minister to England Charles Francis Adams kept up a steady stream of diplomatic letters and complaints to the British government, criticizing what he saw as the gross violation of British neutrality by Bulloch's clandestine shipbuilding. Bulloch had to be very careful. As he wrote to James M. Mason, the Confederacy's diplomatic agent in London, "I cannot exaggerate, sir, the caution and tact required to get a ship to sea with even the external appearance of a man-of-war."

An historical sidelight: Bulloch's nephew was none other than the young Theodore Roosevelt, who idolized his mother's brother. Although of strong Union sympathies, T.R. always relished the role his family played in the creation of the Confederacy's most famous commerce raider. Campaigning in the South in the 1904 election, President Roosevelt told the story of the Alabama's last battle with such gusto that, it was said, it sounded like he'd fired the cannon himself.

Historian James McPherson has written that this was a "contest of lawyers, spies and double agents that would furnish material for an espionage thriller," and so it was. The British were no strangers to shipbuilding for the Confederacy; the small, shallow-draft Clyde River steamers were already popular and effective blockade runners. A correspondent for the London Times noted in late 1863, "Should the demand continue at this rate, there will soon be scarcely a swift steamer left on the Clyde." British-U.S. relations were already cool. Many members of Parliament made no attempt to hide their Confederate sympathies, and Adams had his work cut out for him.

The eight Confederate commerce raiders, the Sumter, the Nashville, Georgia, Tallahassee, Chickamauga, Alabama, Florida and Shenandoah, captured or sank a total of 295 Union steamers, 44 large sailing ships, and 683 schooners by the war's end. As McPherson noted, "Although their exploits did not alter the outcome of the war, they diverted numerous Union navy ships from the blockade, drove insurance rates for American vessels to astronomical heights, forced these vessels to remain in port or convert to foreign registry [eight times as much tonnage as the Alabama and her sister ships actually destroyed], and helped topple the American merchant marine from its once-dominant position, which it never regained." Who benefited most from this? You guessed it: the British.

Raphael Semmes had begun the war as secretary of the U.S. Lighthouse Board in Washington, but he soon made himself useful to the Confederacy by shopping for naval supplies in the north. Born in Maryland but a longtime resident of Alabama, Semmes was lean and wiry, with piercing blue eyes and a rakish moustache, looking every inch the pirate captain that the northern press later accused him of being. He kept the moustache so heavily waxed that his crew dubbed him "Old Beeswax."

Raphael Semmes (center, seated) and his officers from the CSS Sumter

Semmes had a good naval record in the Mexican War, despite losing one ship, the U.S.S. Somers, which capsized in a squall. He secured a Confederate combat command for himself first as master of the C.S.S. Sumter, a passenger ship converted to a raider, which sank or captured 18 ships in a seven-month voyage. After several adventures, he was given command of the Confederacy's finest commerce raider, the C.S.S. Alabama. Bulloch had wanted her command for himself, but he was providing a greater service to the Confederacy ashore, so Semmes got the Alabama and a better-known place in the history books.

Semmes' ship sailed from Liverpool in the summer of 1862 on a "practice cruise," named the Enrica, never to return to British shores. It was just as well for him, as the British government ordered him not to sail just hours before. Semmes took his ship to the Azores, west of Spain, and the ship was armed there with cannon and ammunition brought aboard another ship from Britain. Semmes thus technically complied with the British Foreign Enlistment Act, which forbade the construction and arming of warships in Her Majesty's territory for a belligerent power. Semmes formally commissioned his ship the C.S.S. Alabama on August 24, 1862, and the hunt was on.

Immediately, the Alabama wreaked havoc among the U.S. whaling fleet in the Azores, destroying ten ships in two weeks. She sailed for Newfoundland and the New England coast, capturing, burning or sinking another 11 ships. By now, the Atlantic was aswarm with U.S. Navy ships hunting for her; none found her until the Alabama encountered the U.S.S. Hatteras in the Gulf of Mexico near Galveston, Texas. By a ruse in which Semmes pretended that his ship was the British warship H.M.S. Petrel, the Alabama got close enough to the Hatteras to loose a fatal broadside, and soon the smaller Union warship was sinking. Semmes had painted in Latin on the Alabama's stem the motto, "God helps those who help themselves," and he was not above resorting to such ploys in order to win. It was to be the only victory of a Confederate raider over a Union warship in the entire war.

The CSS Alabama

By now, the U.S. Navy had 25 ships looking for the Alabama, at a cost of $7 million. Navy Secretary Welles, seething, confided to his diary, "The ravages of the... Alabama are enormous. England should be held accountable for these outrages. The vessel was built in England and has never been in the ports of any other nation. British authorities were warned of her true character repeatedly before she left." Destined never to put in at a Confederate port, the Alabama's crew was also almost entirely English, although most of her officers were Southerners.

Semmes, perhaps sensing that the U.S. Navy was closing in on him, sailed down the coast of South America, around the Cape of Good Hope and westward across the Pacific, continuing to prey on American ships as he went. The Alabama sailed across the Indian Ocean and then to Singapore, but the news of her coming had raced ahead, and no U.S. ship would leave port and run the risk of encountering her. By then, Semmes had developed a routine, checking the papers of each ship he stopped, burning or sinking any of U.S. registry, and confiscating their valuables and ship's chronometers. Semmes periodically wound up these expensive ship's clocks, as Shelby Foote put it, "by way of keeping tally or counting coup." When in doubt, Semmes always erred on the side of burning a captured ship. He sometimes would hoist false colors or identify his ship as another in order to gain an advantage or win the confidence of another ship, a practice which also led to his denunciation as a pirate by the Northern press. After a visit to India and South Africa, Semmes and the Alabama continued their swath of destruction up through the center of the Atlantic.

Semmes put in at Cherbourg, France, on June 11, 1864, for repairs and coal. The Kearsarge appeared three days later, steaming briefly into harbor to look over the Alabama before leaving again to blockade the harbor mouth, beyond the breakwater. France was then neutral, and the Kearsarge's captain, John A. Winslow, was careful not to cause a diplomatic incident by engaging the Alabama then and there. Semmes immediately challenged the Kearsarge to a duel, writing to Winslow, "My intention is to fight the Kearsarge as soon as I can make the necessary arrangements. I hope these will not deter me more than until tomorrow evening, or after the morrow morning at the furthest. I beg she will not depart before I am ready to go out."

Winslow had no intention whatsoever of leaving before he tangled with the Alabama. In one of those great ironies for which the Civil War is so remarkable, Semmes and Winslow had shared a cabin as young naval lieutenants during the Mexican War, 17 years earlier and 5,000 miles to the west. Each had lost early commands in unavoidable storms. While with the Lighthouse Board, Semmes had signed Winslow's appointment as inspector of the second lighthouse district. Now, the two officers had their own rendezvous with destiny.

John Ancrum Winslow was a native North Carolinian who had remained loyal to the Union when the war came. He married his not-so-distant cousin, a Boston socialite, causing a minor scandal. He was a graduate of the Naval Academy, having received his appointment as midshipman with the help of a family friend, Daniel Webster. Winslow served in the U.S. fleet on patrol in Brazilian waters, fought in the Mexican War and was recognized for his courage in trying to save the U.S.S. Missouri from a sudden shipboard fire. He commanded the U.S. Navy ironclad U.S.S. Benton on her maiden cruise down the Mississippi River, and was severely injured when an anchor chain broke, whipsawed and struck him during efforts to free the ship from the thick river mud.

Winslow was a stout, seasoned sailor who always spoke his mind. He caught malaria in the Mississippi swamps and partially lost vision in his right eye. He once told a reporter that President Lincoln was "an old chowderhead," and loudly criticized the sometimes-aimless Union war effort in the west; this may have led to his appointment to command one of the U.S. Navy's most cantankerous new steam sloops, the Kearsarge.

The USS Kearsarge

Built and launched in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the Kearsarge was named for a mountain in New Hampshire. The name is of Pequawket Indian origin, meaning "notch-pointed mountain of pines." Winslow was not entirely pleased with his ship, feeling that sometimes she handled like a mountain, too. After a shakedown cruise to Cadiz, Spain, the Kearsarge needed a complete engine overhaul. A Navy board of inquiry pronounced her machinery unsafe, but Winslow saw to the repairs and in time whipped her - and her crew - into shape.

The Kearsarge was anchored off the Dutch coast, in the mouth of the River ScheIdt near Flushing, when word came from U.S. Minister to Paris William L. Dayton that the hated Alabama was in port in Cherbourg. It was Sunday, June 12, 1864. Winslow lost no time in raising anchor and steaming down the English Channel.

Soon the Kearsarge stood guard outside Cherbourg, her quarry still within the harbor. Word of the forthcoming battle between the Kearsarge and the Alabama traveled fast. The French railway authorities arranged for special excursion trains from Paris for the public to watch the great naval duel. Adding to the excitement was the fact that a new casino had opened in Cherbourg that weekend. The hotels were jammed, and many people had to sleep on the docks. Even the great French Impressionist painter Edouard Manet made his way to the coast to observe, producing a notable painting of the battle. Peddlers sold cheap binoculars, camp stools and small Confederate flags at outrageous prices to the crowds, who would be able to tell the ships apart even at a distance: the Kearsarge was burning bituminous coal from Newcastle, leaving a dark smoke trail, while the Alabama was burning Welsh anthracite coal that left only a faint trail. Betting among the 19,000 some spectators was brisk, and the Alabama was heavily favored.

In the next few days, Semmes and Winslow both put their affairs in order, drilled their crews and thought of the battle to come. Semmes was 55; Winslow less than two years younger; they were two southerners who had chosen different sides in a war that divided the nation. As Shelby Foote observed, "Both had close to 40 years of naval service, having received appointments as midshipmen in their middle teens." Winslow's biographer, John M. Ellicott, wondered almost 40 years later,

What were the feelings of the two commanders, Semmes and Winslow? - shipmates, messmates, and roommates in a previous war, in which each had won commendation for brave deeds. In that they had fought side by side with all the ardor of youth; now in the maturity of years and experience, they had come together again, grim if not bitter opponents in a far more stupendous conflict, duelists as equally equipped as can ever be in naval warfare. Each was familiar with the other's characteristics. Semmes knew that he would be blockaded with ceaseless vigilance; Winslow felt sure that his opponent would ultimately fight his way out rather than be smothered in a hole.

Just after the Kearsarge's arrival, Semmes wrote in his journal, "The combat will no doubt be contested and obstinate, but the two ships are so evenly matched that I do not feel at liberty to decline it. God defend the right, and have mercy on the souls of those who fall, as many of us must." One of his English crewmen was considerably more upbeat, composing a chantey for the crew:

We're homeward bound, homeward bound,
And soon shall stand on English ground.
But ere that English land we see
We first must fight the Kearsargee!

Just in case, Semmes put ashore four sacks containing the loot collected on the Alabama's long cruise: 4,700 gold sovereigns, six million francs in currency and $20,000 in ingots, comprising the ransom bonds of ten ships he had released earlier in his cruise because he had no room aboard the Alabama for their captured crews, and - of course - the Alabama's burgeoning chronometer collection.

Sunday, June 19, 1864, dawned bright and clear, with a gentle breeze and perfect visibility. A cheer went up from the crowd ashore when, at 9:45 a.m., the Alabama weighed anchor and was escorted out of Cherbourg harbor by the French ironclad Couronne. His moustache bristling, Semmes climbed atop a gun carriage to give his first speech to the crew since the Alabama's commissioning. He said:

Officers and seamen of the Alabama! You have, at length, another opportunity of meeting the enemy - the first that has been presented to you since you sank the Hatteras… The name of your ship has become a household word wherever civilization extends. Shall that name be tarnished by defeat? The thing is impossible! Remember that you are in the English Channel, the theater of so much of the naval glory of our race, and that the eyes of all Europe are at this moment upon you. The flag that floats over you is that of a young republic who bids defiance to her enemies, whenever and wherever found; show the world that you know how to uphold it. Go to your quarters!

At 10:20 a.m., Winslow had just begun to conduct divine services at the stern of the Kearsarge when the lookout called, "She's coming out and she's headed straight for us!" Winslow said, "Amen!" in the middle of a sentence, snapped the prayer book shut and ordered the crew to battle stations. He took the Kearsarge from her station three miles off the French coast to a post roughly four miles further out; he did not want to give Semmes the chance to flee back into French waters if the Confederate ship was losing.

The Kearsarge displaced 1,031 tons, and the Alabama, 1,016 tons. Winslow had 163 officers and men in his crew; Semmes had 149 men. The Alabama's officers were more experienced; all but one of Winslow's subordinates were volunteers from the merchant marine. Both ships were fairly new, and both had roughly equivalent firepower: the Kearsarge had seven cannon capable of hurling 366 pounds of iron in a broadside; the Alabama had eight cannon capable of flinging 296 pounds. Both were barkentine-rigged ships over 200 feet long.

How closely matched were the two ships, in actual combat? That depends on whom you ask. Winslow's biographer wrote, "It seems scarcely probable that two ships more equally matched will ever fight [again] in single combat." The consensus among naval historians is that the ships were generally evenly-matched. However, Southern-oriented writers, beginning with Semmes himself, have charged that the Kearsarge was the more powerful ship, or held some 'unseemly advantage.'

In keeping with standard U.S. Navy practice by that point in the war, Winslow had on May 14 draped 120 fathoms - about 720 feet - of spare anchor chain along the Kearsarge's sides. The chains were boxed in place as a kind of crude chain armor. For his part, Semmes arranged for the loading of an extra hundred tons of coal in Cherbourg harbor so that the Alabama would ride lower in the water and provide less of a target to the Kearsarge's gunners.

Semmes later claimed that he did not know of the Kearsarge's extra protection, protesting in his memoirs, "It was the same thing as if two men were to go out and fight a duel, and one of them, unknown to the other, were to put on a suit of mail under his outer garment." However, U. Arthur Sinclair of the Alabama said afterwards that the French port admiral told Semmes about the Kearsarge's armoring when the Union warship arrived earlier that week. Complaints such as Semmes' ring hollow, in any event, particularly from one as used to sly misrepresentations of his ship's identity as Semmes. As Foote noted, Semmes was "one of the trickiest skippers ever to prowl the ocean lanes [and] was scarcely in a position to protest the use of a stratagem that had been common in all navies ever since Farragut employed it, more than two years [before], to run past the forts below New Orleans."

In addition, as Bruce Catton noted, "The raider's victories had been over unarmed merchantmen, and her crew had been denied practice ammunition… the unpracticed gunners of the Alabama were no match for ... Winslow's well-drilled Yankees." Winslow's hours of drilling paid off. As Foote wrote, Semmes' crew fired far more, but "Winslow's gunnery was methodical by contrast, and a good deal more effective; he would get off a total of 173 shots in the course of the engagement... the accuracy in both cases, a tally of hits and misses would show, was in inverse ratio to the rate of fire."

Semmes was also at a comparative disadvantage because his ammunition had not been replenished in almost two years; his gunpowder was weakened, as Shelby Foote wrote, "by exposure to various climates on most of the seven seas." Before the Kearsarge's arrival, Semmes had intended to put the Alabama in dry-dock for a two-month overhaul, including scraping off the barnacles from her hull, without which her maneuverability was somewhat impaired.

Of such differences are battles decided, and wars won.

The Kearsarge drew first blood, when a 32-pound shell burst through the port of the Alabama's forward pivot gun, crushing the leg of a tacklerman, ricocheting and killing a man at another cannon. Winslow toyed with the idea of ramming and boarding the Confederate ship - he had even trained his men with that in mind - but he gave it up when the Alabama skipped out of range. Winslow then tried to "cross the T," taking his ship across the Alabama's stern while bringing a full broadside to bear, but Semmes anticipated him and turned his ship on a port heading.

The two ships then began circling each other on opposite headings, moving in concentric circles around one another at a distance ranging from a quarter- to a half-mile, firing furious broadsides as a three-knot current carried them westward. They circled each other seven times that day, but it was clear almost from the outset who was winning.

Estimates vary, but of the roughly 370 shots fired by the Alabama, only 28 hit the mark. These did little damage to the Kearsarge and wounded only three men, one of whom, William Gowin of Michigan, later died of his wounds. The Alabama suffered dozens of hits and over 40 casualties. A l00-pound shell from the Alabama lodged in the Kearsarge's sternpost, but did not explode. If it had, the battle might have gone far differently. President Lincoln later received the sternpost, with the dud shell still lodged in it, as a souvenir of the battle; it can now be found in the U.S. Naval Academy museum.

As the battle went against him, and as the Alabama's deck began to fill with wounded and dying sailors, Semmes tried to turn his ship back toward neutral French waters, but Winslow anticipated him and closed off that route of escape. Semmes turned to his first officer, saying, "Go below, Mr. Kell, and see how long the ship can float." Kell checked below decks, including the sickbay. There he saw Assistant Surgeon David Llewellyn standing, stunned and horrified: moments before, an 11-inch shell from the Kearsarge had snatched the "table, [a] wounded seaman, and all his instruments from under the ministering hand of the doctor, who stood there, abruptly alone" (Foote). Kell continued his hasty tour, and reported to Semmes that the engine room was flooded and the ship would probably sink within ten minutes.

Edouard Manet's depiction of the climax of the battle between the sinking Alabama (center) and the victorious Kearsarge (center, background).  In the right background is the British yacht Deerhound and in the foreground one of two French pilot boats that came to the rescue of Alabama crewmen. (from the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art)

"Then sir," replied Semmes, "cease firing, shorten sail, and haul down the colors. It will never do in this nineteenth century for us to go down, and the decks covered with our gallant wounded." His orders were carried out. A cheer went up on the Kearsarge, but two of Semmes' crew either did not hear of the surrender or chose to ignore it; they fired another cannon barrage at the Kearsarge. Winslow, furious at what he saw as Confederate duplicity (perhaps remembering the fate of the U.S.S. Hatteras?) ordered another broadside into the Alabama. “Those sneaking bastards,” he said, "let them have another!" Semmes at last hoisted a white flag and hung the Confederate naval ensign upside-down at the Alabama's stern.

An hour and a half after the battle started, the Alabama sank beneath the waves, her raiding days over forever. Semmes later wrote that he was glad, at least, that "she was safe from the polluting touch of the hated Yankee." The sea was filled with the bobbing heads of the Alabama's crew. Winslow discovered that three of his lifeboats were smashed by cannon fire, and only two were usable.

The British yacht Deerhound was nearby, owned by John Lancaster, a wealthy British industrialist. Lancaster and his family had enjoyed ringside seats to the naval duel. Winslow shouted to Lancaster, "For God's sake, do what you can to save them!" Semmes had thrown his sword into the water to prevent its capture, and he lay along the bottom of a Deerhound lifeboat, as if dead, hiding his identity from a Kearsarge rescue party. Kell, his first officer, was by now dressed in a simple crewman's uniform; he said that Semmes "is drowned," when asked by a Union officer. Semmes and Kell soon boarded the Deerhound, Lancaster asked him, "Where shall I land you?" to which Semmes replied, "I am now under English colors, and the sooner you put me, with my officers and men, upon English soil the better."

Winslow had expected that the Deerhound would turn over those she rescued to his custody, and was angry to learn that Semmes had escaped. Lancaster later had to defend himself against unfounded Union charges that he had expected all along to help out the Alabama's crew, and had lingered in the area just to make good Semmes' escape. In a letter to the London Daily News, he wrote, "My own opinion is that a man drowning in the open sea cannot be regarded as an enemy at the time to anybody, and is therefore entitled to the assistance of any passerby." As Winslow's biographer John M. Ellicott wrote, "Confederate sympathizers gloated over [Semmes' escape] as marring the Kearsarge's victory and the Federals magnified this by a good deal of thoughtless wailing."

The Deerhound rescued 42 men from the Alabama, and another dozen were picked up by two French pilot boats; the Kearsarge brought aboard 70 more and took them captive. Semmes' escape was the only blot on an otherwise perfect day for Winslow and the Kearsarge. A great Confederate predator of the seas was no more. In two years, the Alabama had boarded 386 ships, released 232 neutral vessels, and destroyed or captured 66 U.S.-registered merchant ships valued at $6,547,000. Even with inflation, that's a lot of damage!

After the battle, Winslow conducted a thanksgiving prayer service aboard the Kearsarge. The Union warship then steamed into Cherbourg harbor "with flags aflutter from every mast [and] was promptly surrounded by boatloads of people out to greet the ship whose victorious crew had somehow been transformed into the home team," as Shelby Foote wryly noted.

Northern public reaction to the Kearsarge's victory was overjoyed. President Lincoln exulted, "Semmes the pirate has been scourged from the sea." Navy Secretary Gideon Welles - no fan of Winslow's after the Navy captain's earlier outspoken criticism of the war effort - nevertheless sent a gracious letter of commendation. Welles wrote, "I congratulate you on your good fortune in meeting the Alabama, which had so long avoided the fastest ships and some of the most vigilant and intelligent officers of the service, and for the ability displayed in the contest you have the thanks of the Department.... The battle was so brief, the victory so decisive, and the comparative results so striking that the country will be reminded of the brilliant actions of our infant Navy, which have been repeated and illustrated in this engagement." As one popular song had it,

The Alabama's gone, hurrah!
To Davy Jones' locker far,
There's nothing left of her
to mar our commerce on the sea!
The 'hero of chronometers'
was vanquished by the stripes and stars;
He'll long remember Yankee tars
on board the ship Kearsarge!

At President Lincoln's request, Congress voted its thanks to Winslow and promoted him to commodore, backdated to the day of the battle.

Semmes and his men were celebrated in England - "a set of first-rate fellows," the Times declared. The Alabama crew, "were given a welcome as hearty as if they had won," Shelby Foote wrote. Several admiring Royal Navy officers presented Semmes with an elegant, gold-mounted sword to replace the one he'd pitched into the English Channel.

The victorious John Winslow (third from left) and crew aboard the Kearsarge following the battle

Winslow got the same red carpet treatment at home. He was guest of honor in Faneuil Hall and Revere House in Boston, sitting dourly through several public receptions, parades and speeches. Boston's shipping tycoons presented him with a check for $21,000; a plaque in the Massachusetts Statehouse still commemorates Winslow and the crew of the Kearsarge. The New York Chamber of Commerce gave Winslow $25,000, and the New York Union League and the Philadelphia Merchants' Exchange threw huge parties for Winslow and his men. Washington society welcomed them.

The Kearsarge's triumph was another bit of good news for President Lincoln at a time when he badly needed it. Along with Grant's slow but steady progress in Virginia, Sherman's triumphs in Georgia, and Sheridan's smashing victories in the Shenandoah Valley, the naval victory carried Lincoln to comfortable reelection that fall, and doomed Confederate hopes that the war might be negotiated to a close.

Winslow went on to command the Mexican Gulf Squadron of the U.S. Navy, and in 1870 was promoted to Rear Admiral and given command of the Pacific Squadron. He died on September 29, 1873, after several heart attacks. Funeral services were in St. James Episcopal Church in Boston; his coffin was draped with the Kearsarge's battle flag. Winslow is buried in Boston's Forest Hill Cemetery, and his grave is marked by a granite boulder from Kearsarge Mountain.

After savoring English high society, Semmes managed to slip back into the Confederacy via Cuba and Mexico. He was promoted to admiral and placed in command of the tiny James River Squadron. As U.S. forces closed in on Richmond in early 1865, however, he had the unhappy duty of torching the fleet to prevent its capture. Arrested after the war, he was briefly jailed but was then pardoned by President Andrew Johnson. He died in 1877.

The Kearsarge and Alabama's duel had been a memorable clash of two ships and two captains - but what did it all mean? The end of a Confederate menace on the high seas, true, but the commerce raiders also established an important point of maritime law. The U.S. government pressed its claims against the British government after the war for the damage done by the Alabama and her sister ships, since they had been built on British soil with at least the tacit consent of the British Crown. In the 1871 Treaty of Washington, Great Britain expressed official regret for the escape of ships fitted out by, or built in, British ports. The obligations of a neutral country were clarified, and the "Alabama claims" were referred to international arbitration. In 1872, an international Tribunal of Arbitration meeting in Geneva, Switzerland awarded the U.S. $15.5 million in gold, declaring that the United Kingdom had failed in its obligations of neutrality by encouraging Confederate privateers. The sole dissenting vote was that of the British member of the panel, but the British paid up.

The names of both the Kearsarge and the Alabama were later commemorated by the U.S. Navy. The South Dakota-class battleship Alabama, a veteran of World War II, is now moored and open to the public in Mobile, Alabama. Taken off the Naval List in 1962, she was the fourth American warship to bear the name. Today the Ohio-class Trident ballistic missile submarine U.S.S. Alabama, SSBN 731, prowls the seas; you may have seen it in the Gene Hackman/Denzel Washington movie Crimson Tide. The wreck of Semmes' Alabama was found by a French Navy diving team in 1984, forty fathoms down, and some artifacts have since been recovered by a joint U.S.-French scientific committee. Several items, including samples of the ship's porcelain and the bronze rim of the ship's wheel, were displayed at the U.S. Naval Museum in Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1992.

In 1894, thirty years after the battle off Cherbourg, the original Kearsarge was lost in a storm on Roncador Reef in the Caribbean, 250 miles east of Nicaragua. Other U.S. naval vessels bearing the name Kearsarge were a battleship of the "Great White Fleet" of the early 20th century, and an aircraft carrier of the mid-20th century. Launched a month too late to take part in World War II, that ship was later noteworthy for having been a recovery carrier for some of the Mercury orbital flights. An amphibious assault ship, commissioned in October 1993, now bears the name Kearsarge, LHD 3. General Colin Powell, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke at the christening ceremonies in Mississippi, and was tactful enough not to mention the original Kearsarge's role in sinking the pride of the Confederate commerce raider fleet. The most recent Kearsarge gained some attention when Marines stationed aboard her rescued the downed U.S. Air Force pilot Scott O'Grady in Bosnia in early June 1995.

And, in late April 1994, in the episode "Firstborn," the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation (which has previously commemorated such Civil War battles and ships as the Monitor, the Merrimac, Gettysburg and the Cairo), referred in passing to the starship Kearsarge. Some 500 years in the future, it seems, there will be another Kearsarge and, perhaps, even another Alabama, too.

And so, the great flow of history continues.

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