[WellyP]

USS Constellation - Last Civil War Era Vessel Afloat - A Baltimore ...www.baltimore.to/Constellation/index.htmlCached

The last Civil War vessel afloat, the USS Constellation, was built in 1854 and is the last all-sail warship built by the US Navy. After years of restoration, she was ...

USS Constellation - Docked in the Baltimore Inner Harborwww.southbaltimore.com/InnerHarbor/Constellation/index

[davetex]

Thanks for clearing that up for me. I just couldn’t remember.

[tanknetter]

The last Civil War vessel afloat, the USS Constellation, was built in 1854 and is the last all-sail warship built by the US Navy. After years of restoration, she was ...

This probably bears a little more explanation.

The first Constellation was a Humpreys frigate, a smaller and slightly older half-sister to Constitution (36 or 38 gun rating to Constitution's 44 gun rating) and actually the very first of the "original six" Frigates of the USN built in the mid/late 1790s. She gained initial fame by defeating the French L'Insurgente during the "Quasi-War" and was nicknamed the "Baltimore Racehorse".

By the early 1850s the Constellation was in serious disrepair and the USN wanted to scrap her and build a replacement. The problem was that the USN was prohibited from building new ships at that time.

So the USN used a slight-of-hand to get their "new" ship. There were no restrictions on refitting existing ships, so had Constellation undergo a major overhaul/repair. One in which she was broken apart (scrapped) and some of her materials (no one really knows how much) were used to build a brand new "Constellation" a couple hundred feet away.

That "new" Constellation, the second one, was/is the Sloop-of-War/Corvette that now graces Baltimore's Inner Harbor. The hull is of a very different shape, with completely different framing, than the Humphrey's Frigates were.

However, due to the need to preserve the appearance/political fiction that she was really just a seriously-overhauled original Constellation (and thus built "legally"), many of the Navy's records reflected her AS the original Constellation. These records built upon themselves over the years, leading to the eventual recognition - earlier, but certainly by the time she was decommissioned and moved to Baltimore - that she WAS the original Constellation and the first Frigate of the USN.

During the fight to overhaul her in the 1990s the folks up in Baltimore finally had to concede that she really is a second, newer ship; a Sloop-of-War and not a Frigate*. But the longstanding perception, dating back through the decades, that she's the original persists.

(*one additional comment. When she came to Baltimore at the end of her USN service she was viz-modded to look like a Frigate. This actually involved cutting through her upper deck, which on a Sloop-of-War is the strength deck - which seriously compromised her hull integrity. If you look at pictures of her before her 1990s restoration you'll see that her hull is suffering from severe "hog" - a distortion that bends the ship along the keel into a bow with the bow and stern bending downwards from the center. This almost destroyed her, and was something that was corrected in the restoration of her to a Sloop-of-War configuration.)