Aftermath at Arms

The last shot of the Civil War was a blank. It was fired eleven weeks and three days after Appomattox.

The scene was a most unlikely seascape, the ice infested Bering Straits, at the entrance to the Arctic Ocean.

The sea, was calm when a strange black hulled steamer, heavily armed, came upon a fleet of Yankee whalers. It was the 28th June 1865.

The big craft flew an American flag but soon fired a warning blank, doffed her colours and ran up the true symbol of her trade, the confederate flag.

CSS Shenandoah in dry dock in Australia, 1865

The whaling ships had run afoul the fabled Shenandoah at the end of her eight month career in which she had left a trail of burned U.S. shipping over 60,000 miles. With the day's catch of eight burned ships and two captives she ran her total to 38 ships and more than 1,000 men taken or destroyed in the Confederate cause. She did more than $1.000,000 in damage to the enemy.

Some of the whalers protested on the war's final day of action, and one captain, in his cups, threatened to fight the big raider alone with his little bomb gun, ordinarily used against whales. He was carried bodily from deck by his comrades, who thoughtfully unloaded his gun in advance.

Five days earlier, burning a trading ship not far away, the Shenandoah's skipper had been shown newspapers from San Francisco bearing accounts of Lee's surrender. The skipper was Captain James Iredell Waddell, a fighting man from Carolina who limped from an old duelling wound. His eye had caught other items in those papers, and they were enough to, send him against Federal shipping once more: Though Lee had given up his army, Jefferson Davis issued defiant orders in flight and Colonel John Mosby vowed that he would never surrender.

Waddell's career had been desperate in this ship from the start; he pillaged with an international crew, in a craft stealthily launched under false colours in England. One of his officers was Sidney Smith Lee, Jr., nephew of Robert E. Lee.

Waddell burned the first whaler of his Arctic catch, the Waverly, of New Boston, Massachusetts and turned to the others. He spared one because of the tears of a widow, a Mrs Gray, of the James Maury. Captain Gray had died at sea and was packed in a whiskey barrel, preserved for burial at home. One more ship was tolled off to carry prisoners and the other put to the torch.

Eight men were so taken by the Shenandoah that they signed on and sailed with the raider.

She bore down on the California coast now the object of a world wide search pressed through the British Foreign Office at the insistence of James D. Bulloch chief of Confederate secret service in Europe. "Someone must find The Shenandoah" he said and convince her that the war was over. Only the British Navy was so wide ranging as to be likely to find her.

On the 2nd August Waddell hailed a British barque, the Barracouta which was two weeks out of San Francisco and asked how the war was going. When he learned that peace had broken out, Waddell sadly pulled his guns, put them below decks, and made for Liverpool. He reasoned that, since he was now defenceless his chances of justice tempered with mercy might be better in a British court.

His navigator, Irvine Bulloch, took him the 17,000 round about miles to Liverpool in 122 days without sight of land, and dropped anchor on the 4th November. On that day the last sovereign Confederate flag was furled for the last time.

With little stretch of the imagination, the boarding of the raider by admiring British officers may be considered the end of the Civil War.

The Shenandoah, a magnificent ship of 1,160 tons with sails and a detachable screw propeller, had copper sheathed teak planking, but seemed to be no prize once surrendered. One crew attempted to take her to America to be turned over to United States authorities but her sails were torn in a storm and she was forced to turn back. She lay in dock in Liverpool for months until the Sultan of Zanzibar bought her for $108,000, about a quarter of the price the Confederates had paid for her.

She went into the sea trade, and during a storm in the Arabian Sea stove in her hull on a coral reef and sank with but a half dozen survivors.

Waddell had one more battle left to him. Ashore, he took command of Maryland's Oyster Navy to enforce conservation laws in the Chesapeake and with a crew of ten and two guns on his flagship. Once met a fleet of oyster thieves in the bay. He sank one boat, drove three others ashore and captured three. It was his final fight before his death in 1886. The Maryland legislature adjourned in his memory.

The above article first appeared in the ACWS Newsletter, Winter 2007