CSS Georgia (1862)
screw steamer of the Confederate States Navy
CSS Georgia was a screw steamer of the Confederate States Navy, acquired in 1863, and captured by the Union Navy in 1864.
Construction
The ship was built in 1862 as the fast merchantman Japan. She had a round stern, iron frame, fiddle-bow figurehead, short, thick funnel and full poop. Having an iron hull, she was clearly unsuited to long cruises without drydocking during a period when antifouling under-body coatings were yet unknown. Commander James Dunwoody Bulloch, a key Confederate procurement agent overseas, would have nothing to do with iron bottoms, but Commander Matthew Fontaine Maury settled for Japan because wood (which could be coppered) was being superseded in Great Britain by the new metal; consequently wooden newbuilding contracts were not easy to buy up in British shipyards.
Service history
Confederate States Navy
The Confederate States Government purchased her at Dumbarton, Scotland, in March 1863. On 1 April 1863, she departed Greenock, reputedly bound for the East Indies and carrying a crew of fifty who had shipped for a voyage to Singapore. She rendezvoused with the steamer Alar off Ushant, France, and took on guns, ordnance and other stores. On 9 April 1863 the Confederate flag was hoisted and she was placed in commission as CSS Georgia, Commander William Lewis Maury, CSN, in command. Her orders read to prey against United States shipping wherever found.
“CSS Georgia (1862)” enters the record as screw steamer of the Confederate States Navy. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Georgia, screw and steamer can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 13, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q5014301. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1863, 1864 and 1862.
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This entry incorporates text from “CSS Georgia (1862)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.