The want of proper boilers and engines would have rendered them very inefficient at best.
The amount of work done was marvelous. "Before the war but seven steam war vessels had been built in the States forming the Confederacy, and the engines of only two of these had been contracted for in these States. All the labor or materials requisite to complete and equip a war vessel could not be commanded at any one point of the Confederacy." This was the report of a committee appointed by Congress, Augusts;, 1862. This committee further found that the navy department "had erected a powder-mill which supplies all the powder required by our navy; two engine, boiler and machine shops, and five ordnance workshops. It has established eighteen yards for building war vessels, and a rope- walk, making all cordage from a rope-yarn to a pinch cable, and capable of turning out 8,000 yards per month. . . . Of vessels not ironclad and converted to war vessels, there were 44. The department has built and completed as war vessels, 12; partially constructed and destroyed to save from the enemy, 10; now under construction, 9; ironclad vessels now in commission, 12; completed and destroyed or lost by capture, 4 ; in progress of construction and in various stages of forwardness, 23." It had also one iron-clad floating battery, presented to the Confederate States by the ladies of Georgia, and one ironclad ram turned over by the State of Alabama.
The navy had afloat in November, 1861, the Sumter, the McRae, the Patrick Henry, the Jamestown, the Resolute, the Calhoun, the Ivy, the Lady Davis, the Jackson, the Tuscarora, the Virginia, the Manassas, and some twenty privateers.[1] There were still others, of which a correct list cannot be given on account of the loss of official documents. It will be remembered that on the sounds of North Carolina alone, we had the Seabird, the Curlew, the Ellis, the Beaufort, the Appomattox, the
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- ↑ Scharf's History of the Confederate States Navy, p. 47.
