noted Lieutenant Francis Chew in his personal journal, but if a Yankee man-of-war should appear, they would have to “depend on their heels.”3
Furniture in the captain’s cabin consisted of one broken, plush velvet-bottomed armchair—no berth, no bureau, no clothing lockers, no washstand, pitcher, or basin. A half-worn carpet, which reeked of dogs or something worse, covered the deck. “It was the most cheerless and offensive spot I had ever occupied,” recalled Waddell. A problem with the engines was corrected in a few hours, but left the captain uneasy about their condition. “It would be too great a labor to enumerate the variety of work which was done . . . and those who have undertaken the work on a wide and friendless ocean can only appreciate the anxieties accompanying such an expedition.”
Waddell ran Shenandoah away from the rendezvous, seeking invisibility, lighter winds, and smoother seas. With only four men per watch, sail handling was difficult. No one knew the lead of the ropes, and whenever a brace or a sheet was to be hauled, crewmen wasted minutes just finding the right one. The few coal heavers quickly became exhausted in the stifling boiler room. The captain used the engine during daylight as work continued, then after darkness put the vessel under easy sail while most men rested. “The wind was free; my course was to southward, and as the breeze freshened after night the ship made nearly as much per hour under sail as she did during the day under steam.”
Waddell had promised to wait six weeks before capturing a Yankee, but after a few days, he worried that the heavy work and chaos would dishearten the crew and discourage potential recruits. Applying a common term for sailors, he noted: “Work is not congenial to Jack’s nature; he is essentially a loafer.” The captain decided to take the first enemy vessel encountered. Dr. Lining continued his journal: “I never saw any set of men work better or harder than ours, for the officers set them the example & were always foremost in all work. . . . I am sleeping my mattress right on the deck, not very comfortably.” They sighted ships from neutral nations, but did not speak to them. Whittle thought a great deal was being accomplished under the circumstances, and the men seemed—with one exception—in good spirits. He would trust in God’s aid for the future. “No indeed I never shall regret the advice I gave [to Waddell], which advice, I flatter myself, kept us at sea.” They sighted the first Yankee sail that afternoon but much to their disgust were unable to come up with her before sundown and lost her in the night.
The exception to the mood of cheerfulness was the captain. Waddell himself recalled being somber and withdrawn, weighed down with problems and possible emergencies: “I have no doubt I very often appeared to those with me an unsocial and peculiar man.” He appreciated encouraging remarks from the officers that were intended to lighten his mood, but they had no effect. Command was a new experience. The lieutenants were accountable for the ship only during a four-hour watch as officer of the deck, but the outcome of so vast an enterprise depended on his judgment alone. Success would be shared by everyone, but who would share failure? “The former has friends; what has the latter!” He was responsible to a nation struggling for its very existence.
The ship was not his only concern: “The novel character of my political position embarrassed me more than the feeble condition of my command, and that was fraught with painful apprehensions enough.” As a seaman Waddell had experience and a compass to guide him; he could manage a vessel in stormy weather, he knew from boyhood the dangers of the sea and was well prepared for fighting. But warship captains served as lonely ambassadors in faraway places with no communications to home. Promptly and without counsel, he would have to resolve complex questions of international law “over which lawyers quarreled with all their books.” Waddell brought with him the fundamental principles of law in Blackstone along with Sir Robert Phillimore’s Commentaries on International Law. “Most of my leisure hours were devoted to Phillimore, and I found him a good friend, but requiring [intense] study.”
International relations for the Confederacy were fraught with opportunity and danger, as were the complex and antiquated rules governing activities of a commerce-destroying cruiser. Early in the war, Confederate leaders had anticipated national recognition and support from prospective European allies, particularly Great Britain; however, this hope was essentially dead by 1864. But even then, any false diplomatic step could bring dire consequences for command and country. Waddell had been cautioned accordingly (as had his predecessors) and was determined to persevere. “My admirable instructions and the instincts of honor and patriotism that animated every Southern gentleman who bore arms in the South buoyed me up with hope,” he later wrote; but at the time it appeared that his anxiety predominated.
While the captain ruminated, the first lieutenant carried on managing daily operations and maintenance, supervising junior lieutenants and warrant officers in getting the ship in order. Interaction between the two Shenandoah senior officers was prickly from the beginning. Whittle’s journal leaves the impression of competence and dedication, combined with a somewhat self-absorbed and brittle sense of honor, typical of young men of his class and time. He seldom discusses Waddell except to disagree with him and pointedly assumes all burdens of ship management. Waddell, on the other hand, mentions the first lieutenant only once in his postwar notes, writing with faint praise that Whittle was “always active and intelligent in the discharge of his peculiar duties.”
The problem was not just the age spread (twenty-three to forty)—there was a professional generation gap. When Waddell was sent to the new Naval School at Annapolis in 1847—just the second year of its operation—he had already had six years of active service afloat. He and others like him found themselves among raw cadets in a staid academic environment being taught from books what they believed they already knew from experience. Nevertheless, Waddell demonstrated marked proficiency in mathematics and navigation in the examination for passed midshipman. He met and married Ann Sellman Inglehart, the daughter of an Annapolis businessman, and then went back to sea through the turbulent 1850s. It was a period of crisis in Navy leadership and discipline characterized by the abolition of flogging and a bungled attempt to reform the moribund officer seniority system. In the small, inbred service of the time, Waddell shared the mutual suspicion and distrust that were rife among fellow officers.
In his memoirs, Waddell declared that the place to teach the profession of the sea was at sea on ships, even though he made Annapolis his home with Ann and served two tours as instructor at the school. The second tour, during which his daughter Annie was born, was as assistant professor of navigation and assistant commandant. (With her father away in Confederate service in spring 1863, Annie would die of scarlet fever and diphtheria.) Waddell believed he had become an officer the hard way and the right way—a slow, tedious progression through the ranks, which gave enormous prestige to promotion. He doubted the practicality of classroom learning. Attitudes like these among hidebound careerists held back establishment of the Naval Academy until forty years after the founding of West Point. In Waddell’s mind, his Shenandoah officers did not represent the spectrum of age and experience he was accustomed to seeing in the U.S. Navy. He could not relax for a minute, which exacerbated a sense of isolation and the weight of his responsibilities.4
William Conway Whittle Jr., however, entered training at Annapolis in 1854 with no prior experience. In 1840 he had been born to a prominent Norfolk, Virginia, naval family that was, like Waddell’s, of Irish descent. Whittle’s father had a distinguished career in the U.S. Navy and would become one of the few ranked captains in the Confederate navy. By 1850 the Naval School had been reorganized and renamed the Naval Academy with standards nearly comparable to those of West Point, increasing the professionalism and respectability of a Navy career. Whittle was regarded as an outstanding student and most promising officer, graduating in 1858 with his friend and future shipmate, John Grimball (George Dewey of Spanish-American War fame was another classmate). He served two years at sea in the U.S. Navy before the war. These young men were the new navy; they took their schooling proudly, as would every class that followed; and not a few of them, like Whittle, brought that pride to the Confederate navy.
In 1861–62 Whittle served as acting lieutenant in the CSS Nashville, one of the
