Rough Waters. Rodney Carisle

reasons that went far beyond the dip in registry figures during the war. Rehashing of complaints about British aid to the Confederacy, the cruiser attacks, and the question of flag transfer no longer seemed pertinent to the economic problems and technological developments of the 1870s and 1880s, and gradually, more contemporary concerns with cost and government policy eclipsed the wartime issues.

      The proliferation of articles, books, editorials, and reports agonizing over the decline of U.S. shipping in the post–Civil War period is significant in itself. The tone of many articles, even those examining economic and technological factors, showed that the reduction in number and proportion of U.S. shipping continued to be an emotionally charged issue. The statistics, the authors all claimed, reflected “decline,” “depression,” and “disease,” and measures to address the concerns were seen as “remedies.” Rather than simply addressing the decline of U.S. shipping as a dry economic development, the various writers all saw the dip as reflecting poorly on the status, honor, and international standing of the United States.

      Because fewer American merchant ships were flying the U.S. flag, the presence of the U.S. flag overseas had diminished. To the extent that the nation’s power was reflected by its merchant fleet, the decline was a matter of national honor and international respect. At the same time, the remaining but diminished fleet of merchant ships plying the waters of the Caribbean, the Pacific, and beyond continued to encounter challenges at sea. Even as the nation entered the age of enterprise—with railroad expansion; development of agriculture, mining, and timber resources; and a burgeoning industrial base—the issue of the respect shown for the merchant flag abroad remained very much alive.

      Persistence of the Maritime Honor Code

      The issue of national honor, evoked by editorialists and other writers critical of the practice of flagging-out to Britain during the Civil War, continued to shape debates over shipping in the years following the Civil War. During and after the war, naval officers in both the Confederate and Union navies conducted themselves in accord with the maritime code duello and honor code that had characterized the conduct of, and accounts of, ship-on-ship encounters during the War of 1812.

      When the Confederate raider Alabama was finally destroyed by the U.S. naval ship Kearsage off Cherbourg, France, on June 11, 1864, Capt. Raphael Semmes of the Alabama specifically complained that Capt. John Winslow of the Kearsage had violated the maritime code duello by protecting his ship with concealed chain armor. Research shows that Semmes himself had been lured into the battle by French officers who appealed to his sense of honor. Another indication of the persistence of the code duello was the immediate labeling of the battle between the Monitor and the Virginia (formerly, Merrimack), by the popular press, as the “duel of the ironclads.”³⁸

      The issues of personal and national honor in shaping thinking about the international encounters of ships carrying the U.S. flag in the post–Civil War decades is further explored in the following chapter.

      Portions of this chapter, reproduced here with permission, appeared in “Flagging-Out in the American Civil War,” Northern Mariner 22, no. 1 (2012): 53–65.