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James Russell Soley, Professor U. S. Navy, Confederate Military History, a library of Confederate States Military History: Volume 7.1, The blockade and the cruisers (ed. Clement Anselm Evans), Chapter 7: (search)
. The work which they had abandoned was then taken in hand by the Confederate Government, and it was carried on by the navy during the rest of the war with results that exceeded the most sanguine expectations. The first, or nearly the first, of the regularly commissioned naval vessels, as distinguished from the privateers, was the Sumter. Indeed, she was one of the first vessels of any kind fitted out for hostile purposes at the South, as Semmes was ordered to command her on the 18th of April, 1861. She was a screw-steamer of five hundred tons, and was lying at New Orleans, being one of a line of steamers plying regularly between that port and Havana. The frame of the vessel was strengthened, a berth-deck was put in, the spar-deck cabins were removed, and room was found for a magazine and additional coal-bunkers. She was armed with an Viii-inch pivot-gun between the fore and main masts, and four 24-pound howitzers in broadside. Semmes had hoped to get his vessel out before