CSS Sumter

CSS "Sumter", a 473-ton bark-rigged screw steam cruiser, was built as the merchant steamship "Habana" at Philadelphia in 1859 for McConnell's New Orleans & Havana Line. Purchased by the Confederate Government at New Orleans in April 1861, she was converted to a cruiser and placed under the command of Raphael Semmes. Renamed "Sumter", she was commissioned in the Confederate Navy on 3 June 1861 and broke through the Federal blockade of the Mississippi River mouth late in the month.

Eluding sloop-of-war USS "Brooklyn" in hot pursuit, early in July, the pioneering Confederate Navy commerce raider captured eight U.S. flag merchant ships in waters near Cuba, then moved to the south to Maranhão, Brazil coast where she took another pair. Two more merchantman fell to "Sumter" in September and October 1861. While coaling at Martinique in mid-November, she was blockaded by the Federal sloop of war "Iroquois", but was able to escape to sea at night and resume her activities. "Sumter" captured another six ships from late November into January 1862, while cruising from the western hemisphere to European waters. Anchoring at Cadiz, 4 January 1862, she was allowed only to make necessary repairs there, without refueling, she was forced to run for Gibraltar.

Unable to obtain needed repairs, she was laid up in April and remained inactive, watched through the year by a succession of U.S. Navy warships, among them the sloop of war "Kearsarge" and gunboat "Chippewa". Semmes and many of her officers were reemployed in the new cruiser CSS "Alabama".

Disarmed and sold at auction 19 December 1862 to the Fraser-Trenholm interests, "Sumter" quietly continued her service to the Confederacy under British colors as the blockade runner "Gibraltar" of Liverpool.

Though her career as a fighting ship had lasted scarcely six months, "Sumter" had taken 18 prizes, of which she burned 8, released or bonded 9; only one was recaptured. The diversion of Federal blockade ships to hunt her down had been in itself no insignificant service to the Confederate cause.

As "Gibraltar", she ran at least once into Wilmington, NC, under Capt. E. C. Reid, a Southerner. He sailed from Liverpool 3 July 1863 with a pair of 22-ton Blakely guns and other particularly valuable munitions, returning with a full load of cotton. The beginning of this voyage is recorded only because the U.S. Consul at the British port passionately protested "Gibraltar's" being allowed to sail—ostensibly for Nassau, days before formal customs clearance: "She is one of the privileged class and not held down like other vessels to strict rules and made to conform to regulations." The arrival at Wilmington is also accidental matter of record today because of the troop transport "Sumter" tragedy at Charleston the same summer, which, until November, Admiral Dahlgren's intelligence understandably confused with the former cruiser "Sumter", now "Gibraltar".

Mr. Trenholm's son-in-law long maintained "Sumter" finally "went down in a gale near the spot where the "Alabama" was sunk," but supplied no date; one source suggests 1867. The last official report of her seems to have been by the U.S. Consul at Liverpool, 10 July 1864: "The pirate Sumter (called Gibraltar) is laid up at Birkenhead."

References

*Semmes, Raphael, " [http://books.google.com/books?id=uBbhsAs2sWwC&pg=PA7&dq=subject:%22History%22+%22civil+war%22+-spanish+-russian+-bosnia&lr=&as_brr=1&ei=EMDFR5fEK47-igH94byeCQ&sig=wkAV-oPiaFDOSDNxBM2xpSv9Hys#PPP5,M1 The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter] ", Carleton, 1864, Digitized by Digital Scanning Incorporated, 2001, ISBN 1-58218-353-8.