USS Constellation

For most of a century this ship was taken for a different ship, and the Navy went along with it.

USS Constellation is a sloop-of-war, the last sail-only warship the United States Navy designed and built. She was built at the Gosport Shipyard between 1853 and 1855 and named after an earlier frigate of the same name that had been broken up in 1853. Her primary armament was sixteen 8-inch shell-firing guns and four 32-pounder long guns, with others besides, including two Parrott rifle chase guns.

Her front-line career was short and busy. She entered service in 1855, served with the Mediterranean Squadron until 1858, and in 1859 was made flagship of the Africa Squadron, where she worked with the African Slave Trade Patrol. During the Civil War she returned to the Mediterranean to patrol for Confederate vessels, then came home in late 1864 to be decommissioned because most of her crew's enlistments had expired. She sat out the rest of the war.

Recommissioned in 1871, she spent twenty-two years as a training ship, used for shooting practice and midshipman cruises. In between she carried exhibits to the 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris and food to Ireland during the famine of 1879. In late 1893 she was reduced to a stationary training hulk and moored at Newport for the next twenty years.

That is where the confusion took hold. The mistaken belief arose that this Constellation and the 1797 frigate were one and the same, and she was presented as such in 1914 at the centennial of the writing of The Star-Spangled Banner. She was briefly renamed Old Constellation in 1917 to free the name for a new Lexington-class battlecruiser, and took her own name back afterwards.

Today she is moored at Pier 1 in Baltimore as part of Historic Ships in Baltimore, one of the most impressive collections of military vessels anywhere, alongside a Treasury-class Coast Guard cutter, the Chesapeake lightship, the submarine USS Torsk and the Seven Foot Knoll screw-pile lighthouse. The museum runs history tours aboard her, and lantern-light tours after dark.