Booknotes: Kidnapped at Sea

New Arrival:

• Kidnapped at Sea: The Civil War Voyage of David Henry White by Andrew Sillen (JHU Press, 2024).

From the description: "David Henry White, a free Black teenage sailor from Lewes, Delaware, was kidnapped by Captain Raphael Semmes of the Confederate raider Alabama on October 9, 1862, from the Philadelphia-based packet ship Tonawanda. White remained captive on the Alabama for over 600 days, until he drowned during the Battle of Cherbourg on June 19, 1864."

Andrew Sillen's Kidnapped at Sea: The Civil War Voyage of David Henry White "is the first book to focus on White's actual life, rather than relying on Semmes and other secondary sources."

More from the description: "In a best-selling postwar memoir [Memoirs of Service Afloat, During the War Between the States (1869)], Semmes falsely described White as a contented slave who remained loyal to the Confederacy. In Kidnapped at Sea, archaeologist Andrew Sillen uses a forensic approach to describe White's enslavement and demise and illustrates how White's actual life belies the Lost Cause narrative his captors sought to construct."