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Review
| The Alabama, British Neutrality, and the American Civil War, by Frank J. Merli, edited by David M. Fahey. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. 248 pages. $29.95, cloth.
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| This book is somewhat unusual in its provenance and composition. After publishing his 1970 book Great Britain and the Confederate Navy, Frank J. Merli continued to work on the diplomatic and naval history of the Civil War. He had ambitious plans for a trilogy dealing with the raider C.S.S. Alabama and its role in the war and Anglo-American relations, and he compiled extensive research material for that purpose. He also wrote several essays, some of which were intended as prefaces to future volumes, but when he died in 2000 at the age of seventy-one, his great work remained unfinished. David M. Fahey has undertaken to gather and edit Merli's various writings on the subject of the Alabama and publish them in this slim volume Given their origin as fragments intended for separate volumes, the several chapters of this book hold together remarkably well. Their central theme is that previous historians of Civil War diplomacy E.D. Adams and Frank L. Owsley were egregiously wrong about (among other things) British government complicity in the escape of vessel 290—the future Alabama—from the Laird dockyards and British waters in violation of Britain's neutrality. |
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Merli presents a wealth of factual information and a detailed chronology about the days and weeks leading up to the Alabama's dash for the open sea, including a brief memoir by the British captain who took her out of port. Merli accuses U.S. minister Charles Francis Adams of being too slow in bringing the necessary information to the attention of the British authorities, who were justified in declining to take action earlier—despite the fact that Alabama's escape and future career proved Adam's allegation to have been 100 percent correct. Merli gives great credit to the brilliance of Confederate agent James D. Bullock for outwitting his Union counterparts and successfully evading British law. Merli's argument against E.D. Adams and Owsley centers on his new evidence that most of the decisive evidence Charles Francis Adams presented to the British government was submitted not on July 26, 1862—as claimed by the former historians, based on a speech by a British official at the time—but rather several days earlier. He argues that this renders it less probable that a mysterious warning telegraph from someone in London to Bullock on that day originated from a source inside the British government. This argument may not necessarily prove convincing to all scholars of the Civil War, but the extensive information Merli gathers will undoubtedly enrich historians' understanding of the origins and career of the famous Confederate raider. |
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The final two chapters deal with other aspects of the Alabama's career and British neutrality. One chapter deals with the Alabama's final battle with U.S.S. Kearsarge off Cherbourg in June 1864, particularly with Confederate Captain Raphael Semmes's decision to seek a showdown with the United States man-of-war waiting outside the breakwater. He concludes that Semmes was a creature of his time and a victim of his romantic notions of courage triumphing over firepower. The final chapter deals with several war vessels constructed in Britain for the government of China to use in its civil war, contemporary with that in the United States. When this deal went awry, the British government purchased the vessels in order to rule out the possibility of their falling into the hands of the Confederacy. Merli suggests—almost seems to complain—that the British followed a different standard of neutrality toward China than they did toward the United States. This is a mild departure from the generally Anglophile tone of much of the book but is in keeping with its mildly sympathetic view of the Confederacy The book's unusual organization, highly specialized subject matter, and detailed treatment probably make it inappropriate for assignment to students in most courses below the graduate level. However, its detailed information may be useful in enriching the presentation of Civil War diplomacy and naval developments. |
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| Texas Christian University |
Steven E. Woodworth |
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