Hunting Confederate Raiders
She was built at Portsmouth Navy Yard in Portsmouth, New Hampshire under the 1861 American Civil War emergency shipbuilding program. The new 1,550 long tons (1,570 t) steam sloop of war was launched on 11 September 1861 sponsored by Mrs. McFarland, wife of the editor of the Concord Statement, and commissioned on 24 January 1862, with Captain Charles W. Pickering in command. Soon after, she was hunting for Confederate raiders in European waters.
Kearsarge departed Portsmouth on 5 February 1862, for the coast of Spain. She thence sailed to Gibraltar to join the blockade of Confederate raider CSS Sumter, forcing her abandonment in December. However, Sumter's commanding captain, Raphael Semmes, soon commissioned Confederate raider CSS Alabama on the high seas off the Azores.
From November 1862 to March 1863, Kearsarge prepared for her fight with Alabama at Cádiz, then searched for the raider from along the coast of Northern Europe to the Canaries, Madeira, and the Outer Hebrides. Arriving at Cherbourg, France, on 14 June 1864, she found Alabama in port where she had gone for repairs after a devastating cruise at the expense of 65 ships of the United States' merchant marine. Kearsarge took up patrol at the harbor's entrance to await Semmes' next move.
Read more about this topic: USS Kearsarge (1861)
Famous quotes containing the words hunting, confederate and/or raiders:
“Signal smokes, war drums, feathered bonnets against the western sky. New messiahs, young leaders are ready to hurl the finest light cavalry in the world against Fort Stark. In the Kiowa village, the beat of drums echoes in the pulsebeat of the young braves. Fighters under a common banner, old quarrels forgotten, Comanche rides with Arapaho, Apache with Cheyenne. All chant of war. War to drive the white man forever from the red man’s hunting ground.”
—Frank S. Nugent (1908–1965)
“Well, you Yankees and your holy principle about savin’ the Union. You’re plunderin’ pirates that’s what. Well, you think there’s no Confederate army where you’re goin’. You think our boys are asleep down here. Well, they’ll catch up to you and they’ll cut you to pieces you, you nameless, fatherless scum. I wish I could be there to see it.”
—John Lee Mahin (1902–1984)
“This is our fate: eight hundred years’ disaster,
crazily tangled like the Book of Kells:
the dream’s distortion and the land’s division,
the midnight raiders and the prison cells.”
—John Hewitt (b. 1907)