20 Facts About CSS Alabama

CSS Alabama was a screw sloop-of-war built in 1862 for the Confederate States Navy at Birkenhead on the River Mersey opposite Liverpool, England by John Laird Sons and Company.

CSS Alabama was built in secrecy in 1862 by British shipbuilders John Laird Sons and Company, in north west England at their shipyards at Birkenhead, Wirral, opposite Liverpool.

In light of this loophole, CSS Alabama was built with reinforced decks for cannon emplacements, ammunition magazines below water-level, etc.

CSS Alabama offered signing money and double wages, paid in gold, and additional prize money to be paid by the Confederate congress for all destroyed Union ships.

Under Captain Semmes, CSS Alabama spent her first two months in the Eastern Atlantic, ranging southwest of the Azores and then redoubling east, capturing and burning northern merchant ships.

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CSS Alabama then sailed south, arriving in the West Indies where she raised more havoc before finally cruising west into the Gulf of Mexico.

CSS Alabama then continued further south, eventually crossing the Equator, where she took the most prizes of her raiding career while cruising off the coast of Brazil.

CSS Alabama is the subject of an Afrikaans folk song, "Daar kom die Alibama" still popular in South Africa today.

CSS Alabama then sailed for the East Indies, where she spent six months destroying seven more ships before finally redoubling the Cape of Good Hope en route to France.

Union warships hunted frequently for the elusive and by now famous Confederate raider, but the few times CSS Alabama was spotted, she quickly outwitted her pursuers and vanished over the horizon.

All together, CSS Alabama conducted a total of seven expeditionary raids, spanning the globe, before heading to France for refit and repairs:.

CSS Alabama boarded nearly 450 vessels, captured or burned 65 Union merchant ships, and took more than 2,000 prisoners without a single loss of life from either prisoners or her own crew.

CSS Alabama's most telling shot, fired from the forward 7-inch Blakely pivot rifle, hit very near Kearsarges vulnerable stern post, the impact binding the ship's rudder badly.

Little more than an hour after the first shot was fired, CSS Alabama was reduced to a sinking wreck by Kearsarges powerful 11-inch Dahlgrens, forcing Captain Semmes to strike his colors and to send one of his two surviving boats to Kearsarge to ask for assistance.

In 1988 a non-profit organization, the CSS Alabama Association, was founded to conduct scientific exploration of the shipwreck.

CSS Alabama was fitted with eight pieces of ordnance after she arrived at the Azores; six of those were 32-pounder smooth bores.

CSS Alabama is the subject of a sea shanty, Roll, CSS Alabama, Roll which was the basis of a 2014 record of the same name by British contemporary folk band Bellowhead.

Butcher stated The CSS Alabama, which claimed to have sunk 75 merchantmen, was destroyed by the Unionist Kearsarge off Cherbourg on 11th June 1864….

In September 2021 the Birkenhead born geography teacher John Lamb noted that both the hull of the fictional Nautilus and the hull of the real-life Confederate warship CSS Alabama had both been built in secret at the Laird's shipyard in Birkenhead, lying opposite the port of Liverpool.

Well before CSS Alabama was launched as Enrica at Birkenhead, Merseyside in North West England, six more white, 5-pointed stars had been added to the "Stars and Bars" far away across the Atlantic on the Confederate mainland.