As it almost always happens, I find the most interesting things whilst looking for something else altogether. In any event, I have been sifting through the digitized editions of the Richmond Daily Dispatch that were placed on line by the University of Richmond via an IMLS grant (hie thee hence to our Port of Call […]
On June 15 in 1861, the Rifled Sawyer gun on Fort Calhoun (otherwise known as the Rip Raps Battery) shelled Confederate batteries at Sewell’s Point. The venerable old frigate USF United States has now become the CSRS Confederate States after the Federal abandonment of Gosport Navy Yard. The frigate was organized as a school ship […]
She was so decrepit that she wasn’t even worth burning. The USF United States escaped significant damage in the burning of Gosport and, despite her age and state of disrepair, became the first vessel commissioned in the Virginia State Navy on April 29, 1861. She would eventually be renamed the Confederate States and would serve […]
