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Sunday, April 09, 2006
* Emory University scholar, Tom Chaffin, charts the contentious course of the Confederate raider Shenandoah
- Savannah Morning News, 4-8-06
'Sea of Gray' an invigorating plunge into Civil War history
Emory University scholar, Tom Chaffin, charts the contentious course of the Confederate raider Shenandoah.
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Click to view the Slideshow In late June of 1865 - as Jefferson Davis stewed in a federal cell - a Confederate raider rampaged through the Bering Strait, torching Yankee whalers and delivering a devastating strike to the New England shipping industry.
The cruise of the CSS Shenandoah was just what Confederate agent James Dunwoody Bulloch (Teddy Roosevelt's uncle) had hoped it would be, even though much of its success came months after the Civil War had ended.
The jubilation of June 29, 1865, when the Shenandoah burned and sank eight vessels and ransomed two others, was jettisoned on Aug. 2 when the ship received irrefutable word of the South's defeat. As one of the ship's officers despairingly recorded in his diary: "We are in the broad Pacific, the nation we represent over run, are now called 'Pirates' and will be picked up by any man-of-war that happens to see us."
Tom Chaffin, a visiting scholar at Emory University, has done yeoman work to trace the ship and its transformations from Scottish freighter to fearsome raider to vex-filled evader.
"Sea of Gray" is, of course, a Civil War story. The Shenandoah was the successor to the famed Alabama. In all, Shenandoah sank 32 Union vessels, sailed 58,000 miles and circumnavigated the globe, the only Confederate ship to do so.
But its real-life feats will resound with fans of fictional heroes Jack Aubrey, Horatio Hornblower and Captain Ahab. Chaffin has entered such rare company by meticulously mining diaries, journals and other accounts, and then melding them into a taut tale of a conflicted captain and an often-contentious crew.
"Sea of Gray" is a complete voyage. It tracks the Shenandoah from its launching to its briny grave. It follows the captain and crew as they sought to resume normal lives after the war.
And it has a rare element for Civil War accounts - rapprochement.
The U.S. Navy never caught the captain of the Shenandoah, but it commemorated his exploits by naming a ship for him. The USS Waddell, a guided-missile destroyer, was commissioned in 1964, 100 years after the Shenandoah began its perilous voyage.
the book
"Sea of Gray: The Around-the-World Odyssey of the Confederate Raider Shenandoah."
By Tom Chaffin
Publisher: Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Details: Hardcover, 432 pages, $25.
Laurels: "Sea of Gray" has been a selection of the Book of the Month Club, the History Book Club, the Military Book Club and the American Compass Book Club.