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The fascinating true story of Penn Yonge's nephew Clarence R Yonge and how we discovered his whereabouts

Clarence R Yonge is a very colorful character. It appears he was a deserter, a defector, an informer, a traitor, a bigamist, a story teller, and maybe even a spy.

He sailed on the CSS Alabama during the Civil War, then deserted in 1863, at Kingston, Jamaica; married a local girl and took her to England, where he gave testimony against the South Apr 1863. He was later smuggled back to the US to serve as a recruit in the Union 25th New York Cavalry under the alias James Edward Davies.

1833-1861 The Beginning
Clarence was the son of Penn's oldest brother William Phillip Yonge, and Phillip's second wife Margaret Giles, who married 1830 in Wilmington, NC.  So of course this makes Clarence the nephew of Penn and Walter Yonge.

Clarence was born in 1833 in Upson county, GA (per 1860 census).

In the Jul 31 1850 census he is 17 years old living with his parents in Savannah. He is not working, nor is he attending school at the time.

 In a 1901 article it implies that attended Chatham Academy in Savannah and was known as Candy Yonge.

He married Mary Ann Elizabeth Tieney in 1857 in Savannah, GA. They had three children together Robert H 1859, Roberta Brown 1860, Richard Harrison 1861, all born in Savannah.

He worked as a clerk for the Savannah, Albany and Gulf Railroad Company in Savannah at least in the Sep 21 1860 census, has $4000 of property and a servant. He stays in that position until the spring of 1861.

And Mr. Yonge may have had more to do with the North winning the Civil war than most. 




1861-1862 Clarence Joins the Confederate Navy
In 1861 when he offered his services to the newly formed Confederate States Navy. He was assigned the post of clerk at the naval paymaster's office in Savannah also acting assistant paymaster on board the blockade runner CSS Lady Davis , which was then serving on the Savannah Station as part of the fleet squadron under the command of Commodore Josiah Tattnall.

The Lady Davis had one 24 pounder gun and one 12 pounder rifled gun, and on May 19 1861, while out patrolling the southern Georgia and South Carolina coastline searching for the brig USS Perry , she managed to capture the SS A B Thompson instead.

In November 1861 Yonge was serving at the naval Paymaster's office in Savannah. Captain James Dunwoody Bulloch, who had recently arrived by the steamer Fingal from Liverpool, was looking for a paymaster clerk. In January 1862, he was appointed to the position of acting assistant paymaster.

Bulloch and Yonge left Savannah for Wilmington, North Carolina, and shortly after arriving they boarded the blockade-runner Annie Childs on the evening of February 5 1862, for their voyage to England. It was a voyage in which, as Bulloch later recalled in a letter of June 30 1863, he found Yonge to be "a quiet, modest young man, who was light and trivial in character and disposition, and whose conduct was most exemplary".

1862 Yonge in England
The Annie Childs arrived in Liverpool on March 11 1862.

Yonge remained in Liverpool until receiving orders from Commander Bulloch on July 28 1862 assigning him to the '290'. He was instructed to act on board as its purser, under the temporary command of Captain Matthew James Butcher, but was also appointed to the position of acting assistant paymaster with orders that during the cruise to the Azores "he was to move freely amongst the Warrant and Petty officers taking great interest in their comfort and welfare, and to excite their interest in the southern states and their struggle against great odds for freedom and liberty which every Englishman now enjoys".




1862 CSS Alabama (290) to Jamaica
On August 20 1862, Commander Bulloch, Captain Semmes and some of his officers rendezvoused with the '290' off the Azores via the steamer Bahama , and it was here that Bulloch first informed Semmes about his mistrust of Yonge, remarking that "he was an unsteady and unreliable young man, whose judgement and discretion were not to be trusted", though he had "no reason to suspect his honesty". 

After the Alabama's commissioning at the Azores on August 24, Yonge served on board as its paymaster up until her arrival at Port Royal, Kingston, Jamaica on the evening of January 20 1863.

1863 Court Marshal and Desertion
 It was during her stay here that Yonge had been sent on shore with about £400 in order to settle a few of the Alabama's accounts but he failed to return to the ship and was found that evening in one of his regular drunken bouts at a local inn, talking quite openly to the American consul and some recently paroled seamen of the enemy. In company with an armed party from Alabama , Lieutenants Kell and Low arrested Yonge and brought him back to the ship to await the arrival of Captain Semmes, who had been staying for a few days with an old acquaintance of his at his country seat in the mountains.

Yonge's court martial began on board Alabama on January 25 1863 due to the neglect of his duties "and behaving in a most disreputable manner by talking to the enemy". Within half an hour he was found guilty of all the charges put before him. After refusing Captain Semmes' offer "to remain on board, confined to his room, until they reached a Confederate port", he was deprived of his sword and sent ashore in disgrace, turning his back on the country and flag to which he had sworn allegiance.

1863 Bigamy and Return to England
The Alabama sailed from Kingston, Jamaica that evening. Yonge stayed at a local lodging house run by a young mulatto widow and her mother. Before leaving Jamaica he married the young widow, despite the fact that he was still legally married to his first wife; within a few days of their marriage he convinced her to sell the lodging house, and any other property to her name. Along with his wife, her two teenage children, and mother-in-law, he travelled to Liverpool on the steamer Askalon , arriving on March 22 1863. They lodged for a while at the Angel Hotel, on the corner of Dale and North John Street, before Yonge deserted them all on the streets with barely enough money to survive.

Background on Confederate Blockade Runners during the Civil War
Events in London
Captain James D. Bulloch was the most important Confederate naval agent working in Europe.  His experiences as an American naval officer and in the merchant marine proved invaluable  in buying blockade runners that kept war materiel flowing into the South, designing commerce raiders, like CSS Alabama.

Working out of an office of Fraser, Trenholm & Co., the Confederacy's fiscal arm in Great Britain, Bulloch soon made the acquaintance of the Laird Brothers across the River Mersey from Liverpool. The company already was known as a first-rate shipbuilder and a technological pioneer, one that Charles Prioleau, a transplanted South Carolinian and in charge of Fraser, Trenholm in Liverpool had already done business with. He bought blockade-runner Herald and possibly a few others early in the war to operate out of the company's home port of Charleston, S.C. 

Bulloch consistently denied that John Laird, who left the active business for a seat in Parliament in 1860, or any of his sons knew that "No. 290," the 290th ship on their order books, was a warship, violating Great Britain's Neutrality Proclamation concerning the war in North America and its Foreign Enlistment Act. The CSS Alabama.

The CSS Alabama was a wooden ship. But now the Laird shipyards in Liverpool, were building iron-clad rams, heavily armored, much more seaworthy than the monitors and the other ships the Confederates were building at home. Ships that would not simply be commerce raiders, but could form a striking force too strong for the Federal Navy to handle. Their blockade would be overrun.

US Consul in Liverpool Thomas Haines Dudley, US Secretary of State William Seward, and US Minister in London Charles Francis Adams had an intelligence/spy network aiming to stop the Confederates from building and arming ships in Britain.

Everyone knows that the US Naval blockade helped the North win the Civil War. But few know that Dudley's detective work with an testimony from Clarence R Yonge kept the South from getting a fleet of iron-clad rams that threatened that Federal coastal navy.

The CSS Alabama had been taking prizes in the North Atlantic, and Dudley took depositions from the captains whose ships had been seized.

The picture was clear, these Confederate raiding ships were built in British yards, equipped with British guns, and manned mainly with British crew. Her officers alone were from the South.

This led to the British government in April 1863 giving orders to seize certain ships.

Evidence was gathered from Clarence R Yonge testimony was enough to convict the Lairds, and Frazier Trenholm, and Capt. Bullock.

1863 Yonge was a Union Informer? Spy?
Yonge was first in Lancaster before moving to London on April 1, on advice from Thomas Haines Dudley, the American minister in Liverpool. There he informed the U.S. minister, Charles Francis Adams about his duties as private secretary to Bulloch and his service aboard the Alabama, which he later agreed to put down in an affidavit signed on April 2 1863 at the judges chambers, Chancery Lane, London, before John Payne, the acting commissioner.

Yonge didn't stop here. He became a paid informer for the U.S. Minister and was sent to Liverpool on April 5 in search of evidence of the building of the two Confederate steam ironclads, '294' and '295', which was then under construction in the Laird yards. The next day, at the Liverpool Customs House, he signed another affidavit over what he had seen at the Laird yards as well as witnessing the plans, drawings and specifications of the rams the previous year at the offices of Fraser, Trenholm and Co. This would now prove instrumental in destroying Commander Bulloch's chances of purchasing the rams for the Confederate Government.

This caused the Birkenhead to be seized Oct 8 1863 at the Laird yards.

1863 The Alexandra Trial
Meanwhile, Yonge had been recalled to London to appear as the crown witness in the case of 'The Seizure Of The Ship Alexandra ', which began at the Court of Exchequer, Westminster, on June 22 1863. The Alexandra was launched from the Liverpool shipyards of William C. Miller & Sons on March 7 1863, only to be seized on the following month. On June 23, Yonge gave evidence on his service with the Confederate Navy, and as private secretary to Commander Bulloch.

But it was during Yonge's cross-examination from Mr Karslake, QC for the claimants, that his evidence and reliability as a crown witness were to be totally discredited. And this was summed up to the jury at the close of the trial on June 24 by Sir Hugh Cairns acting on behalf of the claimants, when he began by describing Yonge as "this specimen of humanity". Here was "a man who commenced his career by abandoning his wife and child in his native country, who betrayed every one of his friends and fellow officers in the cause of the country to which he had promised allegiance, and who tricked a young widow into marriage in order that he could ruin and plunder her property. And then brought her to Liverpool, where he turned her adrift penniless in the streets before hurrying up to London to pour into the ear of Mr Adams, the American minister, his tale of treachery".






Myers, the paymaster of the Sumter, was, unfortunately for me, in prison, in Fort Warren, when the Alabama was commissioned -the Federal authorities still gloating over the prize they had made, through the trickery of the Consul at Tangier, of one of the "pirate's" officers.

In his place I was forced to content myself with a man, as paymaster, who shall be nameless in these pages, since he afterward, upon being discharged by me, for his worthlessness, went over to the enemy, and became one of Mr. Adams' hangers-on, and paid witnesses and spies about Liverpool, and the legation in London.

As a preparatory step to embracing the Yankee cause, he married a mulatto woman, in Kingston, Jamaica, (though he had a wife living) whom he swindled out of what little property she had, and then abandoned. I was quite amused, when I saw afterward, in the Liverpool and London papers, that this man, who was devoid of every virtue, and steeped to the lips in every vice, was giving testimony in the English 
courts, in the interest of the nation of "grand moral ideas".

This was the only recruit the enemy ever got from the ranks of my officers. 


1864 Yonge's return to the US and Joining the Union Army Under an Assumed Name
with the assistance of the U.S. minister Mr Adams, Yonge was smuggled back into the United States under the assumed name of James Edwards Davies. On September 10 1864 he enlisted in the union army as a private with the 25th Regiment of New York Cavalry, while residing in the town of Ghent, Poughkeepsie, New York.

His military record describes him as a man of 5ft 6in, with blue eyes, brown hair and a fair to dark complexion Though he had enlisted to serve one year with the regiment, he was in fact discharged from the army on November 3 1864 while stationed at Hart Island, New York.

In November of that year 'Davies' received an appointment at the Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C., as a clerk. He worked at the General Land Office under Colonel Chester, with whom he took great interest in the study of law in the hope of taking a position at the bar at some later date, in connection with his normal duties.

1865-1884 This missing Years
Some people reported that he died in 1866, in Washington, D.C.. Other reports showed that he may be in the 1880 census in Baltimore. But where was he in the meantime? We were able to unlock this mystery.

1870s Clarence in Montgomery and Opelika 1870s
Except for the 1880 census record below, this information was not known until we uncovered it. 

In the Aug 12 1870 census, he is Montgomery AL listed as a Draughtsman.

He is included in the 1871 Savannah, GA city directory as Clarence R Yonge nr non resident living on W Broad.

From 1871 to 1878 Clarence R Yonge appears as an architect and paint store owner with office/shop across from Opelika House,which is a hotel and dining hall next to the railroad tracks in downtown Opelika. In an 1871 ad he appends "Esq." to his name, indicating that he is a laywer. 

In 1871 he married Fannie A. Perry in Opelika, AL. I am not able to find anything else about her.

If you recall, this is where Clarence joins our Penn Yonge story. Clarence is living close to his Uncle Walter, who has a fish nursery in Opelika, and also close to his Uncle Penn who lives a few miles away in Spring Villa.




By 1875 Clarence has been telling telling people that he was among the heroes that survived the sinking of the CSS Alabama in France in 1863.

By 1880 Clarence has moved out of Lee County Alabama.

Next he is listed in the Jun 5 1880 Baltimore city census in a "Tenament House" on Camden Street listed as a clerk in a railroad office.

He is listed as Clarence Young in the 1881 Baltimore City Directory p926 as a Clerk living at 123 Camden.

In the 1882 Baltimore city directory C.R. Yonge is listed as a sign writer living at 77 Camden.
In the 1883 and 1884 Baltimore city directory Clarence Young is listed as a painter living at 776 W Baltimore.
He is not listed in the 1885 Baltimore city directory, so I assume he died 1884 in Baltimore.

Sources:

3/24/1871 Opelika Weekly p2 Clarence R Yonge places an ad as an architect with an office across from Opelika House
9/18/1875 Opelika Times p3 Clarence R Yonge claims he is a hero
3/26/1880 Opelika Times p3 CR Yonge has moved out of Lee county
7/15/1963 Philadelphia Enquirer p18
The Savannah Morning News, Sun, 02 Jun 1901 p11 Candy Yonge
CSS Alabama Association 	http://css-alabama.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/crew.html
Dixie Traitor, The life and times of Clarence Randolph Yonge, C.S.N., by Maurice Rigby Dec 26, 2011
Book by Admiral Raphael Semmes in 1869 Memoirs of Service Afloat