(Image source: WikiMedia Commons) Ironclads, Blockade Runners and Commerce Raiders For the crew of Alabama, the Confederacy’s most successful raider, it was their last chance to escape before additional U.S. He had also created a rudimentary global surveillance network to support them.įor the crew of the Kearsarge, this was the payoff for more than two years of searching the Atlantic for Confederate warships. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles was using his most capable ships in the effort. Navy ships searching for the handful of Confederate cruisers that were preying on U.S. Kearsarge, like Alabama, was a modern steam-powered sloop-of-war. merchantmen and one Union warship in a cruise that had taken her from Great Britain, where she was built, to the American east coast, the Gulf of Mexico, across the South Atlantic, through the Indian Ocean, into the South Pacific, and now back to the English Channel. During that time, the Confederate vessel had destroyed 65 U.S. Navy had been chasing Alabama since her commissioning 22 months earlier. When the Confederate warship CSS Alabama glided out of the French port of Cherbourg, her captain, Rafael Semmes, and her crew knew that the USS Kearsarge was waiting just offshore.
(Image source: WikiMedia Commons) “For the crew of the Kearsarge, this was the payoff for more than two years of searching the Atlantic for Confederate warships.” Navy warship Kearsarge engages the Confederate raider CSS Alabama off the French port of Cherbourg, June 19, 1864.
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