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A Confederate Raider Fired the Final Shots of the Civil War in the Arctic, Two and a Half Months After Robert E. Lee Surrendered
The CSS “Shenandoah” only learned of the Confederacy’s defeat in the summer of 1865. That June, the cruiser’s crew sank 24 American merchant vessels, unaware that the conflict had already ended
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Key takeaways: The final shots of the Civil War
- Between October 1864 and June 1865, the Confederate raider Shenandoah sank or captured 38 enemy vessels, 24 of them in just one week.
- The Shenandoah fired the final shots of the Civil War on June 22, 1865, while in pursuit of the Sophia Thornton, a whaler from New Bedford, Massachusetts.
As they basked in the glow of burning Yankee whaling ships near the Bering Strait in June 1865, the captain and crew of the Confederate raider CSS Shenandoah didn’t yet realize that their mission had already been rendered futile. Two and a half months earlier, on April 9, Confederate General Robert E. Lee had surrendered at Appomattox, Virginia, near the ship’s namesake Shenandoah Valley. The end of the Civil War marked a death knell for the men’s compatriots fighting on land, but here, on the fringes of the Arctic, their ship was gaining momentum.
The capture of this first whaler on June 22 inaugurated the Shenandoah’s most spectacular run, unlike any the raider had enjoyed during its eight months seeking out and destroying Union merchant vessels. Over the next week, the sailors doomed two dozen enemy ships, amassing a bounty whose value the Shenandoah’s captain estimated at nearly $1 million (more than $18 million today).
When irrefutable news of the Confederacy’s collapse caught up to the crew in August, their devastation was compounded by the realization that they were now fugitives, not belligerents of an ongoing war. The specter of capture and possible execution spurred them to another maritime feat, this time fleeing instead of chasing Union ships on a 17,000-mile, nonstop sail to Liverpool, England. For months, the men carried the dread of what might await them there—if they made it at all.
The voyage had started with great expectations, shrouded in secrecy and intrigue. The 230-foot-long Shenandoah was christened on October 19, 1864, off Portugal’s Madeira Island, “the day a bright and lovely one,” its newly minted captain, James I. Waddell, a North Carolina native and Naval Academy graduate, later recalled. Purchased in Liverpool as a commercial ship called the Sea King, the craft’s fast sails and steam power capabilities made it “well suited for conversion into a vessel of war,” according to James Dunwoody Bulloch, the Confederate naval agent who engineered the acquisition.
Evading the efforts of American diplomats, who claimed such sales violated England’s neutrality agreement, the Sea King sailed to Madeira to meet the Laurel, a supply ship carrying cargo and Confederate officers who were in Liverpool under assumed names.
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“The ultimate aim of your cruise must be the destruction of the New England whaling fleet,” Bulloch instructed Waddell. The captain would have to fulfill this mission while bearing “isolation from the aid and comfort of your countrymen.”
During the Civil War, Confederate naval forces had to rely on unconventional tactics. President Abraham Lincoln had imposed a blockade on Confederate ports after the attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861, which kicked off the conflict. With the shipbuilding industry concentrated in the American North, the Confederates turned to those willing to flout neutrality laws and sell them ships despite pressure from American diplomats.
“The Confederate Navy is going to start the Civil War with basically nothing,” says Laura June Davis, a historian at Columbus State University. “They have Confederate officers—men who had resigned from the U.S. Navy—and that’s it. There is not a single ship to their name, and they don’t have any regular sailors to begin with. So they literally have to build a navy … from the ground up.”
Prior to the Shenandoah, Bulloch’s most notable success was the CSS Alabama, which raided more than 60 vessels over its two-year career. (The Alabama sank off the coast of France on June 19, 1864, in a battle with the USS Kearsarge.) Though they were few in number, Confederate raiders had an outsize effect, driving up insurance rates and forcing American-built commercial vessels to register as foreign ships so they wouldn’t be targeted by raiders. “In terms of economic warfare, commerce raiders like the CSS Shenandoah are very, very successful,” Davis says.
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Following the surrender of the CSS Florida to the USS Wachusett in a Brazilian port on October 7, just a few months after the loss of the Alabama, the Confederacy pinned its hopes on the Shenandoah. A handful of Alabama men were on board when the repurposed Shenandoah set sail from Portugal, intent on waging economic warfare against the Union.
Enthusiastic as the officers were, they remained badly undermanned. Most of the sailors on the Laurel declined to join the rechristened raider’s crew. The Shenandoah had only 46 men, far short of a full cohort, and it lacked the proper gun tackles to fire its weapons. “Never I suppose did a ship go to sea so miserably prepared,” wrote executive officer William C. Whittle in his diary. Waddell summed up the situation by saying, “The enemy must supply [our] deficiencies.”
The crew didn’t have to wait long. Days into the journey, they came upon the American bark Alina and raised the English flag—a ruse used throughout their voyage. They then imprisoned or conscripted those aboard and availed themselves of the ship’s stores before scuttling it.
Because the Shenandoah was targeting commercial ships, the sailors were of varied nationalities and often didn’t speak English. Still, the easily conveyed prospect of being placed in irons influenced many would-be prisoners’ decisions to join the Shenandoah’s crew, regardless of the sentiments of Yankee captains.
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Six more ships fell to the Confederate raider before it crossed the Equator on November 15; the whaler Edward, captured in early December, offered the Shenandoah even more crew members—as well as prisoners. Waddell opted to relieve himself of this added responsibility by placing the captives under the care of the self-styled governor of Tristan da Cunha, a British-controlled island group west of Cape Town. The captain provided six weeks’ worth of rations, which he deemed “sufficient, for no doubt a vessel would touch there soon after my departure and would give a passage to the unfortunates.”
By then, the Shenandoah needed repairs, which the crew sought in Melbourne, Australia—still part of the British Empire at the time. Once again, the situation presented a thorny scenario for the neutral power. The American consul pressured Victoria’s colonial governor, Charles Darling, to seize the Shenandoah for piracy. While in port, some prisoners left for good, including John Williams, a Black crew member whom Whittle had treated particularly harshly.
The sailors who’d joined the Shenandoah’s ranks caused the most controversy, as signing up to fight for another nation was prohibited under the terms of Britain’s Foreign Enlistment Act. When local police attempted to search the ship, however, Waddell refused. The Shenandoah sailed out of Melbourne on February 18, 1865, with some 42 new stowaways on board who promptly came out into the open and enlisted. The ship was now well-manned in its hunt for whalers.
In early April, the Shenandoah’s crew seized four vessels off Ascension Island (now Pohnpei), in modern-day Micronesia. While they were gathering their bounty and Waddell was negotiating “leaving to the care of the king and his tribe 130 disappointed whalers,” Lee, commander of the Confederate forces, was meeting with Union General Ulysses S. Grant to discuss the terms of surrender. The Shenandoah departed Ascension on the morning of April 13. The following day, Lincoln, the fractured nation’s commander in chief, was fatally wounded by an assassin’s bullet.
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By the end of May, the Shenandoah was in the Sea of Okhotsk, off the coasts of Russia and Japan. There, it captured the Abigail, a whaler from New Bedford, Massachusetts, before pressing north toward the Bering Strait.
On June 19, Bulloch, the Confederate agent responsible for the Shenandoah’s commission as a raider, sent an urgent letter to Waddell via the British consul to inform him of bad news from home. European powers had withdrawn the crew’s belligerent status, and the new American president, Andrew Johnson, had excluded them from the general amnesty offered to Confederate soldiers. Bulloch warned the men not to return to the newly reunited U.S., but beyond that, he deemed it “impossible to give specific instructions in regard to the disposal of the ship.”
As the letter slowly wound its way through diplomatic channels, the Shenandoah’s officers were focused on the increasing frequency of ice floes and heavy fog, which periodically closed in on their abundant daylight. “We had now advanced so far north that night and day were mere arbitrary terms,” Master’s Mate Cornelius E. Hunt recalled in his 1867 memoir.
Against this backdrop of ice, fog and sun, the crew began spotting something else, too: the trail of blubber left in the water by whalers.
On June 22, the day’s haul began with the Shenandoah’s capture of two New Bedford whalers, the William Thompson and the Euphrates. Next, the raider’s crew bonded the Milo—a practice that obligated the ship’s owner to pay a future ransom to the Confederate government—and unburdend themselves of around 200 prisoners.
The Shenandoah then fired two live shells to compel the Sophia Thornton to halt and surrender. The raider’s crew emptied the ship of its men and cargo before capturing the Jireh Swift that evening, around 6. Waddell later claimed that “the last gun in defense of the South was fired from” the Shenandoah’s deck on June 22, in the Arctic Ocean. (The specter of the raider’s weapons was often sufficient to overtake whaling ships, but when these guns were used, the Shenandoah’s advantage in both firepower and speed was clear.)
Unchallenged and on the prowl, the Shenandoah captured two more ships in the days that followed, and an additional six on June 26 alone. This dizzying success produced “a singular scene,” according to Hunt. Unable to find a place for fresh prisoners quickly enough, the crew towed their captives in smaller boats as they pursued new prey.
“Behind us were three blazing ships, wildly drifting amid gigantic fragments of ice; close astern were the 12 whaleboats with their living freight, and ahead of us the five other vessels, now evidently aware of their danger, but seeing no avenue of escape,” Hunt wrote.
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As the captured ships’ hometown newspaper, the New Bedford Mercury, lamented upon learning about the catastrophe, “In brief space, nearly one-third of the Northern whaling fleet was destroyed. … It is impossible to estimate now the loss which has already fallen upon our city by this disaster.”
The Shenandoah crew’s victorious mood didn’t last long. In addition to offering up prisoners and precious cargo, the American ships shared the first reports of the Confederate defeat. “I am very much cast down by the news, which if true is very bad,” Whittle wrote in his diary. “Charleston, Savannah and Richmond taken. How awful this is.” One element of the story seemed especially incomprehensible: “Lee may have left a portion of his force to protect the retreat of his army … but as to his surrender of his whole army, and of his treating with Gen. Grant for peace, I do not believe one single word,” Whittle concluded.
Waddell, meanwhile, focused on news of Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ April 4 proclamation acknowledging the “calamitous” loss of Richmond, which signaled “a new phase of a struggle” in which rebel forces would be “free to move from point to point” and attack—essentially, using guerrilla tactics in place of head-on battles. Waddell latched onto this statement, unaware that Davis had already been arrested and imprisoned.
Officers like Waddell, who were eager to undertake such last-ditch initiatives, were “what we might consider die-hard rebels,” says historian Davis. “They are fully invested in the Confederate cause, and they are fully convinced that their side will win.” Prolonged stretches at sea and long delays in communications helped insulate these loyalists from reality. “They’re not seeing a lot of the destruction that’s happening at Vicksburg, or at Gettysburg, or as [Union General William T.] Sherman’s marching his way across Georgia,” Davis explains.
The Shenandoah’s final day of destruction, June 28, proved to be its most remarkable. Near the Bering Strait, the crew spotted the Brunswick, incapacitated after striking ice and surrounded by other whalers preparing to buy off its goods. Raising an American flag, the Shenandoah descended on the sailors, who were “unsuspecting as babes,” Whittle noted. He quashed any instinct for pity by reminding himself of the “hellish acts of barbarity” perpetrated by Union soldiers in the South. “We are doing our duty in punishing them,” he concluded, “… for if you touch a Yankee pocket, you wound him in a sensitive and vital part.”
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Waddell, concerned about the ice about to close off the Bering Strait and “the danger of being shut in the Arctic Ocean for several months,” decided to turn the Shenandoah southward, back toward the Pacific Ocean.
It was in the Pacific, on August 2, that the British vessel Barracouta brought the Shenandoah news of the Confederacy’s end with devastating finality. “The darkest day of my life,” Whittle wrote. “The past is gone for naught—the future as dark as the blackest night.”
Realizing the Shenandoah’s perilous situation, Waddell ordered his crew to immediately disarm and cease all commercial raiding against the U.S. He decided to “run the ship for a European port, which involved a distance of 17,000 miles—a long gauntlet to run and escape.”
The raider’s tactical victories were now subsumed by the reality that they had been strategically meaningless. “Suddenly, the Confederates’ cherished list of destroyed prizes, once such a source of pride, now read like a bill of criminal indictments,” writes historian Tom Chaffin in Sea of Gray: The Around-the-World Odyssey of the Confederate Raider Shenandoah.
The escape Waddell had ordered would last three months, with no opportunity to resupply. During this period, the Shenandoah’s deflated crew could only hope for news of their families—and of their own fates, as they could now be hanged for their part in raiding. “We had no longer a flag to give a semblance of legality to our proceedings,” Hunt acknowledged, and their now-victorious opponent had “stigmatized our cruisers as pirates.”
As the raider neared Cape Horn, Waddell acknowledged “the deep, dark and gloomy thoughts that now filled our minds; we were without a home or a country; our cruise contrasted sadly with what it had been a few months before; we now avoided instead of seeking vessels.”
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The crew concealed their weapons in the hopes of looking like a commercial ship, but they constantly feared an encounter with a federal vessel. The long communication lag worked in their favor this time, and the Shenandoah was long gone by the time the USS Saranac and the USS Suwanee—acting on old intelligence from prisoners on the captured ships that had finally reached California—arrived in pursuit.
Months at sea frayed the men’s nerves. Following one shipboard spat, Whittle agreed to a duel with his challenger upon touching land, though the pair never followed through. Some officers petitioned Waddell to stop at Cape Town in late September instead of proceeding on to Liverpool.
“So long as we had a country and government to support and sustain, it was done cheerfully and with alacrity,” the six men wrote. Under the present circumstances, “all these motives for exertion are gone.”
Two of the crew died of illnesses and were buried at sea, marking the voyage’s only fatalities.
Finally, on the morning of November 6—once again ensconced in fog, but this time in Liverpool, far from the icy Bering Strait—Waddell ordered the Confederate flag lowered and offered the Shenandoah’s surrender to the British government via the captain of its ship Donegal. In a letter presented to the foreign secretary, Waddell subtly pressed for leniency given his exceedingly unusual position: “History is, I believe, without a parallel,” he wrote of the Shenandoah’s predicament.
Nearly seven months had passed since Appomattox. Yet these lingering Confederate holdouts surrendered not in America, but on foreign soil. The Shenandoah’s story highlights “the global perspective of the Civil War when it comes to the naval war,” says Davis, “and that things don’t just end with Robert E. Lee surrendering.”
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The English government was disinclined toward vengeance, sparing the men the worst of their fears. But they were pariahs at home and thus began a period of de facto banishment for several years until the American government was more inclined to leniency. Whittle went to Argentina to farm. Hunt wrote his memoirs and later joined a military mission in Egypt, where he died in 1873. Waddell remained in Europe, only returning home in 1875. He died in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1886. The USS Waddell was commissioned in his name in 1964, a century after he set out to destroy Union commercial ships.
After the Civil War, the American government seemed more intent on punishing England than holding former Confederate officers accountable for their wartime actions. In the early 1870s, an unprecedented international tribunal deliberated the Alabama claims, which accused the British of enabling Confederate ships in violation of their neutrality agreement. The British government ultimately paid the U.S. $15.5 million (around $408 million today) in damages, finally putting the matter to rest.
In his memoir, Hunt reflected on the starkly different events that had bookended the Civil War: “The overture was played by the thunder of artillery beneath the walls of Sumter,” he wrote. “The curtain finally fell amid the drifting ice of the Arctic seas.”
As “the burning hulks went hissing and gurgling down into the treacherous bosom of the ocean,” Hunt added, “the last act in the bloody drama of the American Civil War had been played.”