CSS ''Livingston'' was constructed at
, La., during 1861, a
ferry
A ferry is a ship, watercraft or amphibious vehicle used to carry passengers, and sometimes vehicles and cargo, across a body of water. A passenger ferry with many stops, such as in Venice, Italy, is sometimes called a water bus or water taxi ...
or
towboat
A pusher, pusher craft, pusher boat, pusher tug, or towboat, is a boat designed for pushing barges or car floats. In the United States, the industries that use these vessels refer to them as towboats. These vessels are characterized by a squar ...
converted to a warship on the ways by John Hughes and Co. In January 1862 she was taken up the
Mississippi River
The Mississippi River is the second-longest river and chief river of the second-largest drainage system in North America, second only to the Hudson Bay drainage system. From its traditional source of Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota, it f ...
to
Columbus, Ky., to be fitted for service and during much of that year operated in the vicinity of Island No. 10, with Comdr. R. F. Pinkney, CSN, in command. She formed part of the flotilla, at one time numbering 17 vessels, under command of Brig.
Gen. M. Lovell, CSA. Secretary of the Navy S. R. Mallory wrote General Lovell on 23 January 1862: "The ''Livingston'' you will find to be, I think, a superior steamer, capable of doing capital service. Later she ascended the Yazoo River in Mississippi where she was burned by the Confederates on 26 June 1862 to prevent capture.
An opinion of her somewhat divergent from Sec. Mallory's was expressed by Midshipman
James M. Morgan, CSN, who served in her: "There had also been built (from designs by a locomotive roundhouse architect, I suppose) the most wonderful contraption that was ever seen afloat, called the ''Livingston;'' she carried 6 guns, 3 for'd and 3 abaft the paddle boxes, and she was almost circular in shape. She was so slow that her crew facetiously complained that when she was going downstream at full speed they could not sleep on account of the drift logs catching up with her and bumping against the
stern
The stern is the back or aft-most part of a ship or boat, technically defined as the area built up over the sternpost, extending upwards from the counter rail to the taffrail. The stern lies opposite the bow, the foremost part of a ship. Ori ...
."
References
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Livingston
Ships of the Confederate States Navy
Gunboats of the Confederate States Navy
Ships
Shipwrecks of the Yazoo River