'Kidnapped at Sea' Dispels the Old 'Sea Story' of a Black Sailor in the Confederate Navy

On June 19, 1864, the Union sloop-of-war USS Kearsarge laid in wait outside the French port of Cherbourg for the Confederate commerce raider CSS Alabama. The Confederate warship had wreaked havoc on American shipping and the Union Navy from the Gulf of Mexico to South Africa since it was launched in 1862. It accrued worldwide fame for capturing hundreds of ships, burning over 60 Union vessels and taking hundreds of prisoners. After two years of hunting the rebel ship, Capt. John Ancrum Winslow finally had the Alabama cornered in the French harbor.

The two years of raiding had taken its toll on the Alabama’s screws, boilers and joints when it sailed into Cherbourg on June 11, hoping for complete repairs. Instead, it would get little more than a week. On June 14, the USS Kearsarge arrived and patiently waited just outside of France’s territorial waters. When the two ships met five days later, the Kearsarge handily defeated the Alabama, sending it to the bottom of the Atlantic with 19 of its crew.

While the confrontation between the Alabama and the Kearsarge, more than 160 years later, may seem like an inconsequential action far away from the main theater of the Civil War, it was a famous sea duel then. At the time, the action became known as “the Battle of Cherbourg” and was as memorable to that generation as the Battle of Gettysburg, the Monitor meeting the Merrimack and Adm. David Farragut at Mobile Bay.

Among those killed outside of Cherbourg was David Henry White, a 19-year-old Black man impressed into service aboard the Alabama. In the decades that followed, White’s service aboard the Confederate ship was described as that of a man who served at his own will, was paid wages as a wardroom attendant and was free to leave at any port stop. But a new history of White and the CSS Alabama paints an entirely different view of this old “sea story.”

“Kidnapped at Sea: The Civil War Voyage of David Henry White” tells the tale of a free Black man captured during one of the Alabama’s many raids and forced into serving the racist, self-serving rebel captain Raphael Semmes. After 600 days afloat, White was killed in action as the rebel officers abandoned their ship in the battle with the Kearsarge and escaped to Great Britain. In doing so, they evaded capture and eventually returned to the United States.

In “Kidnapped at Sea,” author and anthropologist Andrew Sillen writes that a handful of British civilian vessels assisted in the rescue of the defeated rebel sailors in the immediate aftermath of the Alabama’s fight with the Kearsarge. Capt. Semmes and other Confederate officers were rescued by a British civilian aboard a yacht; the Brit refused to hand them over to the USS Kearsarge. The rebels were taken to Britain instead, which helped Semmes survive the war and later write his 1869 memoir, “Afloat During The War Between the States.” In it, he wrote about White, a Black man the ship captured from the Union packet Tonawanda in October 1862:

“Dave served us during the whole cruise. He went ashore in all parts of the world, knew that the moment he touched the shore he was at liberty to depart if he pleased and was tampered with by sundry Yankee Counsels, but always came back to us. He seemed to have the instinct of deciding between his friends and his enemies."

But White’s story is one of the most misunderstood of the Civil War. Semmes claimed the teen stayed aboard the Alabama of his own volition, working for wages and was free to leave the crew at any port, as written in his memoir. But from the first day White came aboard the commerce raider, historical documentation tells a different story.

Sillen writes that White was a free man, traveling aboard the Tonawanda as a passenger-cook. When he was taken aboard the Alabama, however, he was entered as a “Slave from Delaware” and notes the Delaware census of 1850, where 5-year-old David H. White was first listed as a “free inhabitant.” At least one crewman from the Tonawanda also recorded that “they forced our passenger Cook [sic] a Negro boy to join them and took him on board his name way Henry White of Lewistown Delaware.”

But because White died aboard the Alabama, his only legacy is that written by his captor, Semmes, whose memoir perpetrated many of the so-called “Lost Cause” myths of the old South that attempted to reframe the war in the decades that followed. Among those myths were the Confederates fighting an honorable war for states’ rights, downplaying the role of slavery in the causes of the war and promoting the fallacy that slaves were happy with their masters and were well-treated.

In telling White’s story, “Kidnapped at Sea” dispels the notion that White was a willing participant aboard the CSS Alabama. He not only uses historical documents to expose Semmes’ story as a lie but also Semmes’ own writing to reveal his memoir as nothing more than perpetuation of the “Lost Cause” whitewashing of history. In doing so, he tells a blockbuster story of battles at sea that naval history fans will devour.

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