"The Confederate Cruisers - Their Status in War" Topic

"THE cruisers of the Confederate navy were the Sumter, the Alabama, the Florida, the Shenandoah, the Nashville, the Georgia, the Tallahassee, the Chickamauga, the Clarence, the Tacony, the Stonewall and the Olustee. These vessels were regular men-of-war and must not be confounded with privateers. Professor Soley says:

It is common to speak of the Alabama and the other Confederate cruisers as privateers. It is hard to find a suitable designation for them, but privateers they certainly were not. The essence of a privateer lies in its private ownership. Its officers are persons in private employment; and the authority under which it acts is a letter-of-marque. To call the cruisers privateers is merely to make use of invective. Most of them answered all the legal requirements of ships-of-war. They were owned by the government, and they were commanded by naval officers acting under a genuine commission ….

A great deal of uncalled-for abuse has been heaped upon the South for the work of the Confederate cruisers, and their mode of warfare has been repeatedly denounced as barbarous and piratical in official and unofficial publications. But neither the privateers, like the Petrel and the Savannah, nor the commissioned cruisers, like the Alabama and the Florida, were guilty of any practices which, as against their enemies, were contrary to the rules of war…"
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Amicalement
Armand

At the risk of starting a dawghouse membership drive, it should be pointed out that the Confederacy was never recognized as a country. Therefore the ships of the Confederacy could be ruled as being pirates under the rules of war. They actually got off pretty easy.

They were recognized as a belligerent by Britain and France, which gave CSA ships the same access to foreign ports as Union ships.

Lincoln did briefly flirt with that idea. But Davis promised to match him hanging for hanging starting with a Congressman captured at 1st Manassas.

hanging for hanging starting with a Congressman captured at 1st Manassas

That was a threat? By the next year Lincoln probably would have take Davis up on his kind offer.

The history of the Confederate Raiders is a very complex one. They were never outright owned by the Confederate government. They were built primarily in English shipyards and had ownership papers indicating they belonged to a group of investors in Belgium or other countries (but paid for with Confederate gold). The Alabama left England as a ship under private ownership. She was fitted out, I believe, in the Azores. She was crewed by English and other Europeans with Confederate officers. English law forbade English seamen from serving on a ship of a belligerent power at that time. The Alabama also flew many different flags from many different countries depending upon the situation in which she found herself in relation with other vessels. This does call into question her status as a "Confederate" Naval vessel. The Europeans almost immediately upon the declaration of secession by the original 7 Southern states declared themselves to be neutral and recognized the Confederacy as a belligerent power, but did not ever recognize the Confederacy as a separate country. The whole question of privateer / pirate was based on the Declaration of Paris of 1856 where European powers agreed that privateers could be considered pirates depending on a set of complicated circumstances and all signators of the agreement had to stop these vessels and treat them as pirates. The recognition of the belligerent status made the question of privateer / pirate moot. The South managed to get a couple of ships out of Britain without trouble. When the U.S. Minister to England complained to the British Government and showed proof that other ships were being constructed for the use of the Confederacy, the British moved to seize the ships and managed to stop some of them. They did this to preserve the pretense of British Neutrality during the war. Eventually the English courts decided that the British government did not have the right to seize the ships, but the British Government, according to their law, accepted the ships into his Majesty's navy and ended the argument as to who owned the ships. I have presented a poor outline of the events above. There are much better and more accurate and detailed sources of information concerning the history of the diplomatic relationship between England and the U.S. and the Confederacy. It is quite involved. I would recommend the book "Great Britain and the American Civil War" by Ephraim Douglass Adams published in 1925. It is extensively researched and well documented in regard to the Confederate "Navy" and many other incidents, like the Trent affair.