Kidnapped at Sea: The Civil War Voyage of David Henry White, by Andrew Sillen

David Henry White was born free in 1845 in or near Lewes, Delaware. Like many Black people in his coastal village, he grew up illiterate. White shared with the area’s other African-heritage residents the fear of being kidnapped and enslaved in the South. Also, restrictive Delaware laws, like one requiring free Blacks to work or become indentured servants, hedged in his life.

White found work as a cook in Lewes’s run-down Atlantic Hotel. Later, he signed on as a passenger cook with the Philadelphia-based Cope Packet Lines. Owned by a family of Quaker abolitionists, the company provided service between Liverpool and Philadelphia, among other destinations. White’s first known trip was on June 25, 1862, according to the Cope Family Archives, Sillen writes.

Capture and war

Into this promising picture came the Alabama, a fast Confederate ship that destroyed Union vessels or exacted ransom for them. Raphael Semmes, the scion of fifth-generation Maryland tobacco-growing enslavers, captained the Alabama. Semmes used deception in his attacks, Sillen reports. Semmes flew a British flag but switched to his true Confederate colors when US vessels came within striking range. In this way, Semmes captured the Tonawanda, the Cope Line ship where White was working, on October 9, 1862.

Word of the Tonawanda’s capture ran in the November 14, 1862 edition of the Philadelphia Public Ledger. The Tonawanda’s captain, who struck a deal with Semmes to spare the ship, said that the Alabama’s crew left the Tonawanda and returned to their own ship, “…taking with them a colored boy, named David Henry, [a] … passenger cook …without the protection of free papers.”

Semmes kept abreast of developments in the US by reading newspapers from ships he captured. Anger about the Battle of Antietam and Lincoln’s September 1862 draft of the Emancipation Proclamation, which Philadelphia papers carried, could have led Semmes to single out White for kidnapping, Sillen speculates. Semmes enslaved White on the Alabama for more than 20 months.

Semmes reported in his memoirs that White was “a little alarmed” when first taken aboard the Alabama, but that he later enjoyed life on the ship. Kidnapped at Sea demolishes this image of White as a happy servant.

Besides the Alabama’s exploits, Sillen describes antebellum politics, spotlighting Mexico’s position. Tensions spiked between Mexico, which abolished slavery in 1829, and Texas, a slave-holding Mexican colony until it declared its independence from Mexico in 1836. Enslaved people in the southern US fled there, heightening conflict, as Alice Baumgartner notes in South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War. The drive for more slave-holding land led to the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), in which the US acquired some 500,000 square miles of Mexican territory.

Bringing history to life

Sillen thoroughly researched Kidnapped at Sea. He paints a detailed picture of life aboard the Alabama, mentioning, for example, an episode in which a sailor puts a cat down the barrel of a cannon (the cat escapes unharmed) and how different ports received the Alabama, depending on which side the country favored in the Civil War. Sillen’s smooth prose and skilled storytelling draw readers into tragic facts of White’s life as well as deteriorating conditions on the Alabama.

Illustrations such as facsimiles of newspaper articles, logbooks, diagrams, and photographs, including one of Semmes aboard the Alabama, add vividness to the story. The book has images of many ships, including an oil painting of the June 1864 Battle of Cherbourg, in which the USS cruiser Kearsarge sank the Alabama. That painting, by French modernist Edouard Manet, is part of the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Honoring forgotten lives

Kidnapped at Sea centers on one Black teenager’s maritime experience during the Civil War. For a broader look at African heritage sailors, you could consult W. Jeffrey Bolster’s Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of the Sail. And to buoy your spirits after Kidnapped at Sea’s sad ending, consider Be Free or Die: The Amazing Story of Robert Small’s Escape from Slavery to Union Hero by Kate Lineberry.

Sillen says at the outset that he doesn’t intend to write a biography of White or Semmes, but I had hoped to learn more about White. But White, who was illiterate, could leave no first-hand account of his life. Sillen builds the story on the slender thread of available primary documents like censuses and crew manifests. In so doing, Sillen rescues White from the Confederate captain’s distorted portrayal of him, and honors a life that could easily have been forgotten.