Hi, I'm the History Guy, I have a degree in history and I love history and if you love
history too this is the channel for you. On Friday April 12th of 1861 at 4:30 a.m.,
a unit of Confederate siege mortars on the command of Lieutenant Henry S Farley opened
fire on the Union's Fort Sumter. Those were the first shots of the First Battle of Fort
Sumter and are considered to be the first shots of the U.S. Civil War and while the Battle of
Fort Sumter is pretty well known, the obscure last shots of the U.S. Civil War are nearly forgotten.
When Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9th of 1865, it did not end the Civil War,
there were still several Confederate armies in the field. Many considered the last shots of the war
to have been the shots fired in the last battle of the war, the Battle of Palmito Ranch near
Brownsville Texas on May 12th and 13th of 1865. But there is another record, because even after
Palmito Ranch there was still an organized, unsurrendered Confederate unit in the field,
and the last official shots of the Confederacy and the last time the Confederate flag was struck
might not be where and when you expected. The story of the Confederate Raider CSS Shenandoah
is little known but well worth remembering. The naval war is a relatively neglected part of
Civil War history. While there were memorable events like the first battle between ironclad
warships, between the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia at the Battle of Hampton Roads,
or the first successful sinking of an enemy ship by a submarine when HL Hunley sunk USS Housatonic,
there were a few large naval engagements. The federal fleet was much larger than
the Confederate fleet making large scale battle impractical. Much of the naval war centered around
the Union blockade of Confederate ports, and Confederate efforts to circumvent that blockade,
but there was another interesting part of the naval war. In the Civil War,
as the Confederates went abroad to outfit commerce raiders whose job it was to attack the Union
economy and raise funds for the Confederacy by sinking or capturing Union merchant ships.
A central figure in that effort was the Confederates Chief Foreign Agent in Great Britain,
James Dunwoody Bullock, a former U.S. naval officer from Georgia, who happened to be future
US President Theodore Roosevelt's uncle. Creating a fleet of commerce raiders was not an easy task.
While there was some sympathy for the Confederacy among the British government and the population,
the nation was officially neutral and it would have been a violation of that neutrality to outfit
warships to attack the United States. Bullock was, however, clever and was able to procure
and outfit a number of commerce raiders that were able to avoid Union attempts to intercept
them. One of the most successful and arguably the most famous of these was CSS Alabama,
which was built in secret in 1862 in Birkenhead England and outfitted as a warship in the
Azores. During her two years at sea, Alabama claimed 65 Union ships valued of more than
six million dollars as prizes, but Alabama was caught and sunk by the Union sloop-of-war
USS Kearsarge in June of 1864. With the loss of the Alabama,
the Confederate Secretary of the Navy, Stephen Mallory asked Bullock to outfit a replacement.
Built in 1863 by Alexander Stephen and Sons of Glasgow Scotland, the ship originally christened
Sea King was an extreme clipper design with full rigging, as well as a single steam engine. She
had a displacement of eleven hundred and sixty tons, was 230 feet long with a beam of 32 and a
half feet, and was built as a composite passenger cargo vessel for use in trade in the Far East,
and as an auxiliary troop transport. The ship made several voyages to the Far East
including delivering British troops to New Zealand. In October of 1864, Bullock secretly
purchased the vessel for the Confederate Navy. The Union however had become weary of Bullock's
methods and in order to escape the Union ships, the Sea King had to be sent to sea without being
outfitted. There she met another ship masquerading as a British merchant vessel who provided her with
the guns and ammunition that would transform her into a ship of war. But the ship's new Captain,
James Waddell, was in a bind. Waddell was an experienced naval officer from North Carolina
who had graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and had served in the Mexican War but his new command,
quickly rechristened CSS Shenandoah, was incomplete. While she now had guns,
gun ports had not been cut. Even worse, they had not been provided with the gun tackles that are
used on naval guns to manage the recoil. In other words, his guns were useless until he
could procure the right equipment. Even worse, Shenandoah didn't really have a crew. Waddell
had only been able to recruit a few men under the union's watchful eye, and so with less than
half a crew and only two guns outfitted so that they could actually be used, the CSS Shenandoah
set out in search of union merchant vessels. Shenandoah was able to capture a handful of
merchant vessels in the Atlantic and off the coast of South America and from there, Waddell was able
to fully outfit his guns and recruit more crew from the captured ships. But Shenandoah still
had problems. She was still undermanned, and the Union had become aware of her presence.
The Union Navy was searching for her, notably, the sloop-of-war USS Iroquois. What's more, the
Shenandoah was having trouble with her propeller. Shenandoah set sail for Cape Town South Africa,
where Waddell hoped they could make repairs, but the captain of the Iroquois had anticipated the
move, and Weddell, seeing that the Union warship was waiting, had to set sail for Melbourne
Australia some six thousand miles away under full sail since his propeller was no longer working.
The gamble succeeded, as the captain of the Iroquois guessed wrong on Shenandoah's next
move and sailed to the island of Bali instead. Waddell and Shenandoah were able to convince
the authorities in Melbourne to let them dock and repair their propeller, the US Consul in
Melbourne did everything he could to oppose their stay, arguing that it violated neutrality. The
Consul’s pleas became more pronounced when it became clear that Weddell was recruiting
new crew amongst the Confederate sympathizing Australian population. That was a clear violation
of neutrality. As the Consul tried to get the Melbourne authorities to act however, 45 new
crew managed to sneak on board and the Shenandoah slipped away. The failure of the authorities to
act caused a minor scandal at the time and would later cost the British Empire dearly.
Waddell headed to the Pacific while the federal Navy assumed that he would head for the coast of
Chile. They guessed wrong. Weddell was instead headed north to take on the New England whaling
fleet. Although competition from the introduction of kerosene lamp oil had reduced the whaling fleet
some since its peak in the 1850s, in 1865 the fleet still numbered over 150 ships and was a
significant source of revenue for northern states. In early April, Waddell captured
four whaling ships in a harbor off the island of Panay in the South Pacific. He got whaling
maps from the ships showing him the location of the whaling fleet. He was free to attack with no
sign of the federal Navy. What he did not know and could not know at the time was that the situation
had changed at home. Even as Weddell set off north with his new maps, Lee was surrendering
to Grant, and the war was in its final throes. Shenandoah was wildly successful, sailing into
the Bering Strait and ravaging the whaling fleet, capturing some 29 vessels. The whaling crews were
indignant, as they knew the war to be over. Waddell refused to believe and the crews could
produce no hard evidence. Even when faced with a month's old newspaper in late June, reluctantly
surrendered at Appomattox. Waddell noted that in the paper Confederate President Jefferson Davis
had said the south was determined despite on. In fact Davis was already a prisoner having been
captured on may 10th. The Shenandoah destroyed nine whalers on June 27th of 1865. Those are
the last shots fired by an organized unit of the Confederate military. They occurred 48 days after
Lee's surrender and 25 days after the surrender of the Confederate Army west of the Mississippi under
Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith, generally considered to be the end of the war. Surprisingly,
the last shots of the Confederacy were fired in the North Pacific in the Bering Strait.
Shenandoah did not receive final confirmation of the end of the war until August 2nd when
they encountered the British Park Barracuda which carried newspapers detailing the end of the war.
But having found out the war was over, Waddell and Shenandoah are in a bind,
they were afraid that if they surrendered now they would be hung as pirates. They determined that the
best course was to surrender where they had begun, in Liverpool England. Perceived by the federal
navy the crew sailed around the Cape Horn, through the Atlantic and returned to England. In doing so,
they became the only ship of the Confederate Navy to circumnavigate the globe during the war. Once
in Liverpool, they were required to fly a flag in order to get a pilot to the docks. They flew the
incent of the Confederate Navy and surrendered to a British ship HMS Donegal. Thus the last
time the Confederate flag was officially flown and struck was not until November 6th of 1865.
Shenandoah was at sea for a year and 17 days, and in that time sailed more than 58,000 miles.
She cost the union millions of dollars of damages in the ships captured or sunk,
and captured nearly a thousand prisoners without losing a single crewman to combat,
although two did die of disease. She never met a federal warship in combat. She did great damage to
the Pacific whaling fleet although the continued to and for whalebone meant that Whaling continued
through the 19th century. And while the story of the Shenandoah is interesting in its own right,
the legacy of the Shenandoah and her fellow Confederate Raiders is somewhat surprising. In
1869, the United States filed suit against Great Britain demanding damages, claiming that Britain's
support for the Confederate Raiders had violated neutrality. Among the evidence that was offered
was the failure of the Melbourne authorities to act when Weddell was recruiting crew. In 1871,
the dispute was taken to international arbitration with the Treaty of Washington
and eventually settled for the sum of fifteen and a half million dollars and a Treaty of Perpetual
friendship between the United States and Great Britain, setting the precedent for international
arbitration. The so-called Alabama claims set the precedent for codifying international law which
then resulted in the Hague Convention in 1899 and eventually the League of Nations, the World Court,
and the United Nations... a surprising legacy of the forgotten last shots of the U.S. Civil War
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