Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 38.djvu/51

 was pursued and hounded down by Mr. Johnson and Gideon H. Wells and their satelites and every obstacle thrown in the way of his efforts to make a quiet and comfortable support for his family.

Whilst Admiral Semmes was stern and unyielding in the performance of duty, he was, in his family and among his friends, gentleness itself. No one could better express that side of his character than to give the following words of a kinsman—the late B. J. Semmes, of Memphis, Tennessee, who knew him through his entire life: "The dearest love of my boyhood, the highest esteem of my manhood belong to this great and good man, made truly after the image and likeness of his God."

But Admiral Semmes was not only a good sailor—he was a learned scholar of distinguished attainments; he was historian and statesman; more than this, he was a profound lawyer, as an expounder of international law, in controversy with dignitaries and premiers of every nationality. He measured up to that intricate branch of jurisprudence, as familiar with it as Vattel himself, while, as a learned constitutional lawyer, in his exhaustive argument in justification of the South, he ranked by the side of Alexander H. Stephens; with Dr. Bledsoe, in his great work, entitled "Is Davis a Traitor?"; with Jefferson Davis himself, and with the great Carolinian, John C. Calhoun. He was a patriot, he lived, fought and suffered for his county, and, above all, he was a Christian gentleman.

Admiral Semmes' private life was as pure and spotless as his public life was heroic. No one meeting, on our thoroughfares or in the forum of our courts, the blythe, erect, but modest, form of the practicing attorney would for one moment have suspected that there stood before him the renowned and redoubtable "Sea King," whose daring deeds are written in imperishable letters upon every known continent.

It would be doing injustice to his memory to omit mentioning that, besides his deep legal lore, and those attainments which make him the peer of the most distinguished and scientific men of our country, Admiral Semmes ranks high as a writer, and that his last work, "Memoirs of Service Afloat and Ashore," published a few years after the war, is as brilliant in style as it is