Books: Rebel Raider

SEMMES OF THE ALABAMA—W. Adolphe Roberts—Bobbs-Merrill ($3.50).

Even admirers of the old South usually do not like to talk about Confederate naval policy. It scarcely helped the South, did not greatly injure the North in a military sense. But it ruined the U. S. merchant marine. Rebel raiders and privateers sank or destroyed 200 ships worth $30,000,000. Since merchants would not ship in Northern vessels for fear of raiders, almost the entire fleet, totaling 6,000,000 tons, was sold to English interests for the bargain price of $42,000,000, leaving the U. S. at the end of the Civil War with only 1,000,000 tons, largely obsolete.

Most effective Confederate raider was Raphael Semmes of the Alabama, who captured 86 vessels, burned 62 of them. In Semmes of the Alabama, Author Roberts, a devoted, “unreconstructed” Southerner, tries hard to make Semmes a heroic figure. But Semmes’s exploits, unlike those of most Confederate leaders, seem almost as shabby now as they did to Unionists of 1864. The fast, heavily armed Alabama merely overhauled unarmed sailing vessels, stripped and burned them. Semmes fought only two battles, sank the Hatteras and was soundly whipped by the Kearsarge. Giving none of the background of British and American maritime rivalry.

Author Roberts leans heavily on Semmes’s autobiography, gives no clearer picture of Semmes than of the times. For all his tributes to Semmes’s greatness, the raider is likely to be remembered as the destroyer of the graceful clipper ships that carried with them to the bottom U. S. hopes of becoming a leading maritime power.