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Confederate Seadog: John Taylor Wood in War and Exile

by John Bell.

Illustrated, notes, appendices, annotated bibliography, maps, index, 178 pp., 2002. McFarland & Company Inc., Publishers, P.O. Box 611, Jefferson, NC 28640, $32.50 ppd.

Canadian archivist John Bell presents a compelling argument in his Preface to Confederate Seadog: John Taylor Wood in War and Exile as to why there needed to be another biography of one of the South’s most daring naval commanders. Bell points out that he had access to “a previously undiscovered autobiographical manuscript by Wood” in order to flesh out Wood’s life before the Civil War, and primary and secondary sources from Canada to do the same with his life as an unreconstructed Rebel living in Nova Scotia after the war.

Even with this additional material, however, Bell covers Wood’s 73 years in roughly 60 pages, something it took Royce Gordon Shingleton over 200 pages to do in John Taylor Wood: Sea Ghost of the Confederacy in 1979.

To be sure, Bell’s Wood seems a more complex character than Shingleton’s, but that has as much to do with what Shingleton chose to ignore as it does with extra sources available to Bell. For instance, both writers had access to Wood’s article about his exploits in the suppression of the African slave trade in the 1840s. After Wood was selected to command a captured Spanish slave ship, Bell quotes Wood as writing he was “most concerned about the poor creatures under hatches, whose sufferings must have been terrible.” Shingleton simply refers in a footnote to Wood’s article about the event.

At the other end of his life while living in Halifax, Wood befriended a black seaman, William Hall, with whom he served aboard the USS Ohio in 1849. Wood’s account of Hall’s life was posthumously published in the Halifax Herald, a source not cited by Shingleton.

These two references by Bell to Wood’s relations with blacks makes Wood’s resignation from the US Navy all the more puzzling. Shingleton does a slightly better job of pointing out that “it is difficult to connect” Wood—who was born in 1830 in Minnesota to a Rhode Island father and a Louisiana mother—“with an individual state or section.”

While it is true that Wood married a young woman from a prominent Maryland family and that his uncle through marriage was Jefferson Davis, he had been a resident of Maryland just over a year with the arrival of large numbers of federal troops after the firing on Fort Sumter caused his blood to “boil...over with indignation,” according to his diary, and he resigned his commission. Both authors claim Wood tried to remain neutral, but by September 1861 he had offered his services to his uncle and broke contact with his father, who remained loyal to the Union.

Shingleton does a slightly better job of addressing Wood’s feelings of betrayal when the US Navy Department backdated his dismissal from the service to April 2. Shingleton called the change “petty, bureaucratic vindictiveness [which] did nothing toward preserving Wood’s neutrality.” Bell simply states that a “spiteful Navy Department later backdated his dismissal to 2 April.”

Wood’s career in the Confederate Navy is covered well in both books: his service aboard the Virginia, and his extraordinary escape to Cuba after his capture along with Davis in Georgia. After the war, he became a successful businessman and leading citizen of Halifax, the port from which he avoided capture by taking the Tallahassee through a narrow passage previously thought to be un-navigable to ships of Tallahassee’s size.

The second half of Bell’s book reprints three of Wood’s articles about the war: “The First Fight of Iron-Clads,” “The Tallahassee’s Dash into New York Waters” and “Escape of the Confederate Secretary of War,” the latter being an account of Wood’s trip to Cuba with John Breckinridge and several other ex-Confederates aboard a small sloop.

Bell also includes in one appendix an account by Confederate naval historian J. Thomas Scharf of Wood’s capture of the USS Underwriter on the Neuse River near New Bern, N.C., in 1864. A second appendix lists the 33 vessels captured by the Tallahassee. The third appendix reprints a song dedicated to the crew of the Tallahassee, and the final appendix presents a checklist of the published and unpublished writings of Wood.

This is a well-researched, well-written biography of a fascinating Civil War officer, one that can be easily read in one sitting. It will leave you perhaps ready for dessert, but you will know you’ve had a solid meal.

Dave Page

Dave Page teaches college journalism and most recently contributed several articles to ABC-CLIO's Encyclopedia of the American Civil War: A Political, Social, and Military History.

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