Confederate States Navy - Ships

Ships

One of the more well-known ships was CSS Virginia, formerly the sloop-of-war USS Merrimack (1855). In 1862, after being converted to an ironclad ram, she fought USS Monitor in the Battle of Hampton Roads, an event that came to symbolize the end of the dominance of large wooden sailing warships and the beginning of the age of iron and the ironclad warship.

The Confederates also constructed submarines, among the few that existed after the early Turtle of the American Revolutionary War. Of those the Pioneer and the Bayou St. John Confederate Submarine never did see action. However, the Hunley, built in New Orleans as a privateer by Horace Hunley, later came under the control of the Confederate Army at Charleston, SC, but was manned partly by a C. S. Navy crew; she became the first submarine to sink a ship in a wartime engagement. The Hunley sank for unknown reasons a short while after her successful attack on the sloop-of-war USS Housatonic.

Confederate commerce raiders were also used with great success to disrupt Union merchant shipping. The most famous of them was the screw sloop-of-war CSS Alabama, a warship secretly built for the Confederacy in North West England. She was launched as Enrica but recommissioned a short while later just off the Azores, where she began her raiding career. The similar raider CSS Shenandoah fired the last shot of the American Civil War in late June 1865; she did not surrender until early November 1865, five months after the war had ended.

There was an Revolutionary War-era frigate known as USS Confederacy, unrelated to the C. S. Navy. There was, however, a CSS United States, the name of the USS United States in 1861–1862, when she was captured and used by the CSN.