Confederate Raider : Raphael Semmes of the Alabama

It is a minor scandal that this excellent biography is the first full-scale treatment of Raphael Semmes, the most distinguished commerce raider not only of the Confederacy but in all American naval history. Semmes, who was born in Maryland, served with distinction in the Mexican War, then went with the Confederacy over the states' rights issue and commanded both the C.S.S. Sumter and the famous Alabama. He emerges from these pages as an extremely able and aggressive sea warrior but in many respects not a very sympathetic human being--an unreconstructed Southerner, something of a martinet, and chivalric to the point of mismanaging his duel with the U.S.S. Kearsarge. Taylor's writing is a model of clarity, of balance, and of filling in the background for the nonspecialist reader. His biography deserves wide readership and certainly a place in Civil War and naval history collections. Roland Green