Australian Confederates

by Terry Smyth

  Dab Scales also made it home to Memphis in 1866, and by 1869 he had established a thriving law practice in the city. In 1885, he married Susan Winchester, and they had three children. He was elected a State Senator in 1895, served in the US Navy during the Spanish–American War, and was a vestryman at his local Episcopalian church. Dabney Minor Scales died on 26 May 1920, aged 79. His obituary describes him as ‘singularly sincere and just and conscientious; his manner was gentle, but in principle he was firm as a rock.’1

  Jack Grimball arrived back in his native Charleston in January 1867, after struggling to make a success of raising cattle. He had written to his parents the previous year of difficulties hiring labour and of crime in the New Virginia colony. On his return, he studied law, and practised in Charleston and then New York City from 1868 to 1883, before retiring to become a rice planter in South Carolina.

  John ‘Jack’ Grimball died in Charleston on Christmas Day 1922, at the age of 82.

  After departing Liverpool, William Whittle, Sidney Smith Lee, Orris Browne and John Mason had sailed for Argentina, which – like Mexico – welcomed former Confederates. After trying their hand at prospecting for a while, they bought 50 acres at Rosario, on the Rio Parana, where they raised cattle and poultry, and grew vegetables.

  Before leaving for Argentina, John Mason travelled to Paris, hoping to somehow honour the promise he made to Sergeant Canning to deliver his possessions to his family. Since Canning had died without telling him an address, Mason placed ads in newspapers and waited for a reply. Two men responded – one who claimed Canning owed him money, and another who said he was Canning’s brother. Both could have been telling the truth but Mason was unconvinced, and turned them away.

  In 1867, after Orris Browne’s father managed through influential friends to obtain pardons for his son, Browne and Mason immediately returned to Virginia. There Browne spent the rest of his days as a successful farmer. ‘Hollywood Place’, his market garden and orchard in Cape Charles, was said to be the largest in the state. Whittle and Lee left a few months later, having stayed on to sell the Rosario farm. It proved difficult to dispose of the property, and Whittle, who was all but flat broke, worked on a river boat to help raise the money to get home.

  Later in life, Browne, who was a great admirer of William Whittle, wrote to him, ‘You were during the cruise of the ship the real commander of her in many tight places and at times you were the only man who could have directed Waddell.’2 Orris Applethwaite Browne died in Baltimore on 28 September 1898. He was 56.

  Lee returned to work his farm in Stafford County, Virginia, and for a while was also skipper of the steamer Ironsides, plying between Acquia Creek and Washington DC. Sidney Smith Lee Jnr passed away on 14 April 1888. He was 51 years old.

  On his return, John Mason studied law at the University of Virginia, then settled in Baltimore, where he became a highly respected lawyer, and married Helen Jackson of New York, the daughter of a US Navy officer. They had five children. John Thompson Mason died in Baltimore, aged 57, on 9 March 1901.

  Home again, William Whittle served until 1890 as the captain of an Old Bay Line steamer on the Baltimore, Norfolk and Portsmouth run. He then worked as a superintendent for the Norfolk and Western Railway, and in 1902 became a director and vice-president of the Virginia Bank and Trust Company.

  Whittle’s path crossed that of his former captain only once. When returning by rail to Baltimore, while waiting to change trains at Annapolis Junction, he ran into James Waddell, who greeted him warmly. Soon afterwards, however, Whittle read in the press the letter by Waddell that had so offended Cornelius Hunt. Finding himself accused too of ‘nothing less than mutiny’, from then on, Whittle wanted nothing more to with his old skipper.

  And yes, William did marry his beloved Pattie. They had six children. William Conway Whittle died on 5 January 1920. He was 79.

  Whittle’s journal, a 300-page daily record of his adventures on the Shenandoah, was lost until 1980, when a descendant, Mary Whittle Chapman, discovered it while cleaning out her late grandmother’s attic. The Whittle family donated the journal to the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia.

  Curiously, the entries covering the Shenandoah’s visit to Melbourne are missing. Those pages were torn from the journal at the end of the cruise or sometime later.

  Surgeon Charles Lining, too, went to Argentina, where he worked as a government surgeon at Santiago del Estero until 1874. He then returned to the United States and practised medicine in Paducah, Kentucky, until his death at age 63, on 23 February 1897.

  The Shenandoah’s assistant surgeon, Fred McNulty, made his way to Chile after the surrender, and enlisted as a surgeon in the Chilean Navy. In 1869, during Cuba’s battle for independence from Spain – the Ten Years’ War – he attempted to join the Cuban Patriot Army but was prevented from travelling to Cuba by American authorities.

  That same year, after being pardoned, he returned to the United States and settled in Boston, where he took up a position as superintendent of the Boston Lunatic Hospital, and later opened his own private ‘home for the treatment of mental and nervous diseases’, called Pine Grove Retreat, at Roslindale.3

  Frederick J. McNulty died at his home in Boston on 14 June 1897, aged 62.

  Cornelius Hunt had the distinction of being the first of the Shenandoah’s officers to publish a memoir of his experiences – however doubtful its veracity in parts – and in 1869 joined a group of Civil War veterans, both blue and grey, recruited as mercenaries to fight for Ismail Pasha, the Khedive of Egypt. The Khedive, known as Ismail the Magnificent, wanted to expand his country’s interests at the expense of Turkey, but since Egypt was nominally part of the Ottoman Empire, this spelt trouble. Undaunted, Ismail ordered his American troops, led by ex-Union and ex-Confederate generals, to invade the Sudan and Ethiopia.

  It didn’t go well. By 1879, after a series of crushing defeats for Egypt, the war was over and Ismail was forced to abdicate.

  We’ll never know how much action Cornelius Hunt saw. Sometime in 1873 he was thrown from his horse and died – the only American to die in the service of Egypt.

  James Bulloch remained in Liverpool, where he prospered in the merchant trade. Through James’s connections, his brother Irvine Bulloch made a career as a cotton broker there, and both lived out the rest of their days in England.

  For these brothers in exile, in the years to follow, the only strong connection with their relatives on the other side of the Atlantic would be regular visits from their nephew Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt, a future president of the United States, although they returned at least once – secretly and under assumed names – to visit family in America, including Teddy Roosevelt.

  Irvine Bulloch died on 14 July 1898, aged 56, while on a visit to Wales. His Confederate Navy officer’s sword is on display at the Merseyside Maritime Museum, in Liverpool.

  When James Bulloch died, in Liverpool, on 7 January 1901, a dark whisper followed him beyond the grave. To this day, he is suspected of having been involved in a plot to kidnap Abraham Lincoln; that as the controller of covert naval operations in Britain, acting on the orders of the Confederacy’s Secretary of the Navy, Stephen Mallory, he provided secret funds to the blockade runner and Confederate spy Patrick Christopher Martin; that the funds were intended for John Wilkes Booth, who planned to kidnap Lincoln, and who, when the attempt failed, murdered the President.

  There is no evidence that Bulloch ever met or communicated with Martin or any other of Booth’s co-conspirators. And the only document believed by some to support the claim that he provided covert funds to Martin is a request from Mallory to Bulloch, on 24 August 1864, to pay a Captain P.C. Martin $31,507 for a cargo of provisions, clothing and ordnance.

  Clouding the issue is a claim that Booth’s co-conspirator was not Patrick Christopher Martin but Colonel Robert M. Martin, a Confederate agent who had tried and failed to kidnap Lincoln’s Vice-President, Andrew Johnston, in Louisville, Kentucky. Colonel Mart
in also tried and failed to burn down New York City. He planned to start the conflagration by lighting a fire in his hotel room, but when he closed the door on leaving the room, the fire went out.

  In 1905, on a whistle-stop tour of the South, President Theodore Roosevelt told the citizens of Roswell, Georgia – birthplace of the Bulloch brothers:

  It has been my very great good fortune to have the right to claim my blood is half Southern and half Northern, and I would deny the right of any man here to feel a greater pride in the deeds of every Southerner than I feel. Of all the children, the brothers and sisters of my mother who were born and brought up in that house on the hill there, my two uncles afterwards entered the Confederate Service and served with the Confederate Navy.

  Men and women, don’t you think I have the ancestral right to claim a proud kinship with those who showed their devotion to duty as they saw the duty, whether they wore the grey or whether they wore the blue? All Americans who are worthy of the name feel an equal pride in the valour of those who fought on one side or the other, provided only that each did with all his strength and soul and mind his duty as it was given to him to see his duty.4

  Of the 42 Australian Confederates, one, George Canning, was dead, and 12 are known to have made it home to Victoria. The remaining 29 men either resettled elsewhere in Australia or, once ashore in Liverpool, melted into the crowd or joined a ship bound for parts unknown.

  For the 12 returning Melbourne recruits, there was no prospect of a pardon, as there was for the Southerners. Having dodged the hangman in England, surely the wise thing to do would be to assume another identity and start a new life or at least to lie low until the heat died down. But they didn’t do either. They resumed their lives as if nothing had happened. And there is no record of the hamlike fist of the law rapping on anyone’s door – perhaps because the authorities’ handling of the Shenandoah Affair had been so inept that the returning Australian Confederates were left unmolested out of sheer embarrassment.

  Little Sam Crooks, when he wasn’t out fishing, could be found back at his old waterfront haunts in Williamstown, no doubt holding court with tall tales and true of his adventures on the famous rebel raider.

  When Sam, who never married, died at age 52, on 30 June 1876, the passing of such a colourful local character warranted an obituary in the Williamstown Chronicle:

  Samuel Crook, an old identity in Williamstown, died on Thursday night. He was a little clean-shaved, nautical-looking man, who might be seen almost any day down the ‘front’ in the neighbourhood of the steamboat jetty or Pier Hotel.

  He came to Williamstown very many years ago, when it was only a village, and with a few short intervals when he went to sea, he remained here till Thursday night.

  He was one of the few men who joined the Confederate privateer Shenandoah when she called into this port. He got away in her, and followed her fortunes in her destructive career amongst the United States whalers and merchantmen, and was with her up to the time that Captain Waddell discharged his heterogeneous crew in Liverpool. ‘Little Sam’, as he was known, had a fund of interesting reminiscences of the Shenandoah, than whose crew none was better fed or better paid, as it subsequently proved at the expense of the British Government.

  An industrious, peaceable, very un-privateer-looking man was Samuel Crooks, who handed in his checks on Thursday night. In the evening, he was down the front as usual, but during the recent foggy weather his old complaint, asthma, had been more than usually troublesome. He went to his home in Waterman’s Row, or Stanford Place, as it is now called, and at twelve o’clock was taken very ill with the asthma. Dr Figg was sent for, but a quarter of an hour after midnight it was all over – he was dead. His remains will be interred in the cemetery tomorrow afternoon.5

  Of the other sailors, Thomas Strong returned to Melbourne but didn’t stay long. Bold as brass, he asked for his old job back, well aware his former employer, George Washington Robbins, had been a paid informer for US Consul William Blanchard when the Shenandoah was in port. When Robbins refused to hire him, ‘on patriotic grounds’, he shipped on a foreign vessel and left Australia, never to return.6

  John James returned to his home in Williamstown, as did John Kilgower, later listed in local directories as a shipwright. John Spring and John Moss went home to Emerald Hill (now South Melbourne), Thomas McLean to Carlton, Henry Sutherland to Yarraville, James McLaren to Richmond, and John Collins and William Green to Sandridge, where Green was later listed as a bootmaker.

  Of the marines – David Alexander, Henry Reily and William Kenyon – it’s understood that Alexander eventually returned to Australia, but his fate is otherwise unknown, as is that of Reily, and of Canning’s long-suffering servant, Edward Weeks.

  After the surrender, William Kenyon remained in England until 15 June 1867, when he shipped as an ordinary seaman on the Martha Birnie, bound for Sydney. On arriving in Sydney, he travelled home to Melbourne, where he found work as a coal and wood merchant.

  By 1872, Kenyon was the licencee of the Happy Home Hotel, in Sandridge, and had married Sarah Stenniken. He and Sarah would have five children.

  But if contentment had set in for the former Confederate marine, it was about to be disturbed in March of that year, when the past came knocking, albeit politely.

  As repeated demands by the United States for compensation for damages inflicted by Confederate raiders elicited the rote response that Her Majesty’s Government did nothing wrong, American diplomatic correspondence grew more and more fevered. When the total amount claimed reached a staggering $2 billion, the Americans suggest Britain could give them Canada as a down-payment, to which the British response was the diplomatic equivalent of ‘Seriously?’

  At last, in February 1871, both sides agreed to sit down together and thrash out an agreement on the Alabama Claims – so-called because, of the three main Confederate raiders, the Alabama did the most damage. She took 69 prizes and a tonnage of 45,217. The Shenandoah took 38 prizes and a tonnage of 14,958. The Florida took 36 prizes and a tonnage of 19,870. The total of prizes taken was 284, and the total tonnage was 142,899.

  Three months later, Britain and the United States signed the Treaty of Washington. Under the terms of the treaty, Britain officially expressed regret for the damage done by the Confederate raiders, without admitting guilt, and both sides agreed to submit the Alabama Claims to an international tribunal.

  In Switzerland, later that year, a tribunal of five arbitrators – British, American, Swiss, Italian and Brazilian – met at the Hotel de Ville in Geneva. Their brief was to exorcise any devils in the detail, and put a dollar value on the claims.

  Britain was represented by the eminent Scottish judge and notorious rake Sir Alexander Cockburn; the United States by the sepulchral former ambassador to Britain, Francis Adams; Brazil by Viscount d’Itajuba, whose diplomatic credentials were essentially a handsome face and a nodding acquaintance with the Emperor of Brazil; for Italy, and president of the tribunal, Count Sclopis, Italy’s respected Minister for State; and for the Swiss, the no-nonsense senior bureaucrat Jacques Staempfli.

  For over a month, this B-list of the great and the good squabbled over statements, reports and affidavits from assorted players in the Florida, Alabama and Shenandoah sagas. A major point of contention was the liability of the colonial authorities in Melbourne. Sir Alex Cockburn, supported by Viscount d’Itajuba, disagreed with the majority view that the Melburnians were negligent. In the dissenters’ opinion, the colonials were not at fault. Rather, the blame lay with the dishonourable behaviour of Captain Waddell, whose lies the authorities had accepted.

  The majority view prevailed, however, and the cost to Britain of the Shenandoah’s sojourn in Melbourne was estimated at almost $5 million.

  The official tasked with gathering evidence in Australia for the Alabama Claims is the US Consul in Melbourne, Thomas Adamson Jnr.

  William Blanchard had resigned as US Consul in Melbourne in 1866, citing ill health. However, his resi
gnation came just as American merchants in Melbourne were demanding he be sacked for certain improprieties. The traders accused Blanchard of being involved in dodgy deals, an accusation he indignantly denied.

  Thomas Adamson had previously been the American consul in Honolulu, but had been reprimanded and removed to Melbourne after refusing to lower the consulate flag to half-mast on the death of Hawaii’s Queen Dowager, Queen Kalama Hakaleleponi Kapakuhaili. Adamson had grudgingly lowered the flag only after Commander William Truxton, of the US warship Jamestown, sent his marines to lower it by force if necessary.

  In Melbourne, Adamson took testimony from Michael Cashmore, who on 2 February 1865, when aboard the Shenandoah on business, swore that in the mess room, one of the sailors slurping soup called his name. He was surprised to see that the man – who, like the others, was in Confederate uniform – was a gold miner he knew.

  Asked what he was doing there, the miner replied, ‘I joined them this morning.’

  Cashmore then asked the man if he thought joining the Shenandoah would be more profitable than digging for gold.

  ‘The pay is nothing to boast of,’ he replied, ‘but there is a chance of making a good deal in the shape of prize money.’

  The unnamed recruit assured Cashmore the experience would be ‘nothing new’ to him because he had previously served aboard a British man-of-war.7

  Another witness, George Washington Robbins, a Melbourne stevedoring contractor born in Louisiana – and the man who had refused to re-employ Australian Confederate Thomas Strong – swore that back in New Orleans he was acquainted with Shenandoah paymaster Breedlove Smith and one of the ship’s engineers. Robbins, the consul’s former stooge, reported that while spying on the ship he had seen six boatloads of men go aboard. He also claimed to have told the police but they had ignored him.