Australian Confederates Read online

  About the Book

  Summer, 1865. The colony of Victoria is thriving.

  When Confederate States Ship Shenandoah sails into bustling Port Phillip Bay, Melburnians’ curiosity overcomes any squeamishness about the support of slavery. For more than three weeks, the Americans are fêted enthusiastically.

  When the sleek black raider steams back through the heads on 19 February, on board are 42 Australians who have secretly enlisted to fight for the South in the American Civil War. So much for the law against foreign warships recruiting in a neutral port.

  Under the command of the enigmatic Captain James Waddell, the raider proceeds to wipe out almost the entire New England whaling fleet. The Shenandoah fires the last shot of the war, having captured, burned and ransomed 38 Union ships and taken more than 1,000 prisoners.

  Award-winning journalist Terry Smyth paints a broad canvas in the telling of this electric piece of history. He brings to life the 42 Australians who sailed off to adventure and controversy, among them the last man to die in the service of the Confederacy.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  1 Lands of cotton

  2 Daughter of the stars

  3 Welcome strangers

  4 Other men’s battles

  5 The very model of a Southern gentleman

  6 Into the breach

  7 First prize

  8 The grey and the good

  9 Buttons and beaux

  10 The trouble with Charley

  11 A sailor’s farewell

  12 All Confederates now

  13 The last of Charley

  14 The captain and the king

  15 The curious case of Eugenio Gonzales

  16 The way north

  17 The last shot

  18 ‘An old grey-headed devil’

  19 All pirates now

  20 The darkest day

  21 Oh, Pattie!

  22 ‘All hands to bury the dead’

  23 Liverpool and limbo

  24 Bad blood

  25 The long way home

  26 The horse has bolted

  27 The blame game

  28 Requiem for a lost cause

  Acknowledgements

  Afterword

  Notes

  References

  Appendix I Shenandoah complement at Madeira (partial)

  Appendix II The 42 Melbourne recruits

  Appendix III Ships captured by the Shenandoah

  Picture Section

  Index of Searchable Terms

  Copyright Notice

  Loved the book?

  For Kate, Ben, Sophie and Acky

  And for my mother

  We call a ship ‘she’ and other tongues call a ship ‘it’. ‘She’ implies that the ship carries us and is in some manner alive, as a sailor in his heart privately believes.

  – Captain James Iredell Waddell

  Introduction

  This is a tale of two lands: one, not yet a nation; the other, never to be a nation. The destinies of colonial Australia and the Confederate States of America crossed in the watershed year of 1865 – a year of cultural shifts and scientific advances that would change the world. It was also the last year of the American Civil War, and the year Australians became actively involved in that war, when the Confederate raider Shenandoah visited these shores.

  In the Australia of the 18th and 19th centuries, while Europe remained the white man’s Dreaming, American virtues – and vices – were greatly influential on the young societies of colonial Australia. The newcomers desperate to tame the southern continent looked to the New World for inspiration. And whenever Australian history was being made, there often seemed to be an American involved somehow.

  On Australia’s Cape York Peninsula, on 29 June 1770, where the explorer Captain James Cook was forced to beach his ship, the Endeavour, for repairs in a river mouth after she struck a reef, Midshipman James Matra was out shooting when he spotted what he thought was a wolf. Matra, who was probably the first white person to see a dingo on the east coast of the continent, and who shot at it but missed, was an American.

  Matra might have been the first American to leave his mark (or almost) on Australia, but he was certainly not the last. There were Americans among the convicts of the First Fleet that founded Sydney in 1788. Americans were among the earliest sealers and whalers working off the Australian coast. Americans flocked to Australia during the gold rushes of the 1850s and 1860s – mostly to Victoria – and American diggers of the California Revolver Brigade were among the rebels at the Eureka Stockade.

  By the 1860s, there were more than 3,000 Americans living in Victoria alone. When the rush was over, the numbers of American immigrants declined, but their legacy lived on through their progeny, their prejudices and their politics.

  When Australia became a nation in 1901, lessons learnt from America’s political upheavals were enshrined in the new Constitution. The Preamble to the Australian Constitution states: ‘Whereas the people of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland and Tasmania, humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God, have agreed to unite in one indissoluble Federal Commonwealth under the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and under the Constitution hereby established.’ The word ‘indissoluble’ was added to the final draft of the Constitution at the federation convention of 1898, specifically to avoid a calamitous secession such as that which led to the American Civil War.

  Throughout the 19th century, Western Australia made a habit of threatening to secede, and Queensland made the threat at least once. In April 1885, on the eve of an official inquiry into blackbirding, Queensland plantation owners and their supporters, fearful the inquiry could lead to restriction on ‘Kanaka’ slave labour, threatened to split from Queensland and form a new, separate state in the north, with Townsville as its capital. These were no idle threats.

  For the drafters of the Constitution, the American war was within living memory. They had based Australia’s Constitution on the American model, but were mindful that although the United States Constitution of 1787 protected states’ rights while creating a national government, it had not prevented the Civil War. The Southern states considered the Constitution to be no more than a contract that could be broken, and claimed the sovereign right to secede.

  Debate raged over the best way to prevent an Australian civil war, and in the end the delegates came up with a one-word solution – ‘indissoluble’.

  Footprints still appear when the dead man marches. No matter how deep we bury those betrayed by birth and circumstance to be on the losing side of war – the side history and sensibility has proclaimed the wrong side – and no matter how desperately we might try to wipe their very existence from memory, from history, they refuse to be forgotten, evident in the many Confederate memorials and historical societies in the American South today, and in the continuing worldwide interest in that period of American history.

  Now, as then, the conflict that tore America apart in the years 1861 to 1865 excites debate and inflames passions. Even its name remains contentious. Depending on whom you ask, it was the American Civil War, the War Between the States, the War of Northern Aggression, the War of the Rebellion; the War of Southern Independence, the War of Secession, the Freedom War, the Lost Cause.

  Regardless of how you name it, the world has had a century and a half of hindsight to satisfy itself why and how the Confederate cause was lost. We can confidently assure ourselves that the American slave states which proclaimed a sovereign nation in 1861 were at best misguided romantics or, at worst, merchants of evil. But back the
n there were no ready assurances. History makes sense when you’re reading it, but not when you’re living it.

  This story is about 42 Australians who willingly, and well aware they were breaking the law, secretly enlisted in the Confederate States Navy when the notorious rebel raider Shenandoah visited Melbourne in 1865.

  It’s fair to ask what on earth possessed them. If it was adventure that motivated them – well, that’s something we can understand. A thirst for adventure has driven countless reckless Australian youths to fight other men’s wars. But if it was heartfelt sympathy for the Confederate cause which inspired them, that’s quite another matter. That’s something contemporary Australians might find difficult to accept. Upholding slavery doesn’t sit comfortably with our image of ourselves.

  The trouble is, the Confederate cause was not all black and white. And yes, the pun is intended. The effects of the American Civil War on Australia – and there were many, as we’ll discover – must be considered in the context of the institution of slavery. To do otherwise would be to dilute and diminish the evidence of history.

  Since history and hindsight are not always the best of bedfellows, there’s cause for caution here. Looking back on that war with 21st-century eyes, and, for Australians, from the perspective of an outsider looking in, it’s a reasonable assumption that the Confederacy – in seceding from the Union and defending, by force of arms, its right to perpetuate the obscenity of human bondage – was perversely out of touch with tolerant attitudes prevalent not only in the Northern states but in the enlightened wider world. In 1865, when the tide of war was turning against the Confederacy, it’s tempting to see the Civil War in terms of good versus evil; of a backward American South at odds with a forward-thinking Britain – and by default its empire – where slavery had been officially abolished almost 60 years earlier. However, in one far corner of the Empire – colonial Queensland – slavery under another name would continue.

  Like other parts of the British empire, in 1865, when the Shenandoah sailed into Port Phillip Bay and controversy, Australian colonies were obliged to follow the policy of the British Government, which had remained strictly neutral throughout the war. The British people largely backed the North, as did the majority of people in New South Wales and South Australia. In Victoria and Queensland, arguably, opinion was polarised.

  The Northern cause inspired renewed calls for democratic reform in Britain, with faint echoes in Australia. Industrialisation and social change in Britain had seen a shift in wealth and political clout from the landed gentry to the urban middle class. The working class, too, was demanding a bigger say in the running of the country.

  Curiously, though, support for the anti-slavery North did not foster concern for the plight of the slave – quite the opposite, in fact. Earlier in the 19th century, prejudice against people of colour had been rare in Britain, and popular sympathy for abolitionists and missionaries was widespread. By the 1860s, however, racial discrimination was common.

  The reason for the change in attitude in Britain was not the same as in America and Australia, where so-called scientific race theory was cynically used to excuse the exploitation and subjugation of ‘inferior’ peoples. In mid-Victorian Britain, black residents and visitors were rare, and the public’s only sources of information on the nature of black people were soldiers, sailors, explorers and adventurers pushing the boundaries of empire. As white people of the middling sort clawed their way up the social ladder, aping the manners and arrogance of the aristocracy, they viewed black people as another species of humanity but one they could look down upon; one rung below the great unwashed. In lock-step, the great unwashed did likewise, and with relish. At last, someone to feel superior towards! In other words, for the British in 1865, racism was rife but snobbery ruled.

  In Germany that same year, an Augustinian monk named Gregor Mendel was conducting experiments with plants that would earn him the title of the founder of the science of genetics. Not in his lifetime, however. Mendel’s laws of heredity would be ignored until the 20th century.

  Meanwhile, Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, published in 1859, continued to foment controversy. For those who took literally the Bible’s version of creation, Darwin’s theory of evolution was blasphemy. Opponents popularised the claim that Darwin insisted man was descended from apes. Darwin, even though he made no such claim, was met with ridicule and derision. Darwin’s work, like Mendel’s, would one day be generally accepted as the basis for understanding that all humans are the same species, but in the 1860s it was widely believed that differently coloured humans were different species.

  Throughout the Caucasian-dominated western world, many people accepted as scientific fact the view of Swiss zoologist Carl Vogt and other ‘polygenist evolutionists’ that blacks were related to apes but whites were not. In the American South, polygenism was used by prominent scientists such as Samuel Cartwright to justify slavery. Cartwright, a Louisiana doctor and plantation owner, diagnosed runaway slaves as suffering from ‘drapetomania’, a psychiatric disorder that could be cured by whippings and cutting off toes.

  The Great Emancipator himself, Abraham Lincoln, often declared that while he believed the United States must put an end to slavery – and that all men were created equal, with equal rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – he did not believe white and black could co-exist in harmony. ‘God made us separate,’ he said. ‘We can leave one another alone and do much good thereby.’1

  Lincoln, like most white Americans, North and South, and indeed like most white people everywhere, was convinced that blacks were naturally inferior to whites, and that the two ‘races’ could never be on equal social or political terms. In other words, blacks had a perfect right to enjoy the fruits of freedom, but not on the same street, train or public place as whites enjoying the fruits of freedom.

  Before the Emancipation Proclamation – arguably more a war measure than a humanitarian initiative – Lincoln made no attempt to free slaves, and favoured the deportation of freed slaves to Africa.

  Lincoln’s views on slavery were not so different from those of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Both were emancipationists but not abolitionists. Both believed that to abolish slavery overnight would mean social and economic disaster.

  Lee expounded his views on slavery in a letter to his wife, Mary:

  In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge that slavery, as an institution, is a moral and political evil in any country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, and while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former.

  The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially and physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their instruction as a race, and I hope will prepare and lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known and ordered by a wise Merciful Providence.

  While we see the course of the final abolition of human slavery is onward, and we give it the aid of our prayers and all justifiable means in our power, we must leave the progress as well as the result in His hands who sees the end; who chooses to work by slow influences; and with whom two thousand years are but as a single day. Although the Abolitionist must know this, and must see that he has neither the right or power of operating except by moral means and suasion, and if he means well to the slave, he must not create angry feelings in the master; that although he may not approve the mode which it pleases Providence to accomplish its purposes, the result will nevertheless be the same; that the reasons he gives for interference in what he has no concern, holds good for every kind of interference with our neighbours when we disapprove their conduct. Still I fear he will persevere in his evil course.2

  Such attitudes were generally shared by Australians in 1865, no less so than in colonial Victoria, a rich yet raw society where politi
cal disputes with the mother colony of New South Wales, and antipathy towards advocates of federation, echoed those between the antebellum American North and South.

  In Victoria, the gold rush and the Eureka rebellion had forged an anti-establishment spirit that found sympathy with the Confederate cause. It was a cause that in the view of some Australians was not about slavery but about sovereignty, and thus a romantic cause; a cause with which they could identify – for the moment, at least.

  The men who sailed away on the Shenandoah in the summer of 1865 were men of their times. We will never know their thoughts on slavery or sovereignty or secession, but we do know they braved the worst Neptune could throw at them; that they fired the last shot of the American Civil War; that they destroyed 32 Yankee merchant ships worth an estimated AU$1.5 million, ransomed six and captured more than a thousand prisoners; that one of their number would be the last man to die in the service of the Confederacy. And, that while hunted as pirates, they would sail their ship 60,000 miles around the world to make history as the last rebels to surrender.

  This is a tale of the sea, of war, of vainglory.

  Chapter 1

  Lands of cotton

  You might say it was all because of Caty’s cat – the unwitting provider of the Eureka moment that led to the explosion in the cotton industry. That was really what started off the whole sad, terrible business.