Look at the last surviving Civil War–era warship in the United States Navy. The USS Constellation was launched in 1854 at the Gosport Navy Yard in Portsmouth, Virginia, a sloop-of-war built on the traditional lines of wooden sailing warships that had dominated naval combat for centuries. She arrived at the end of that era: by the time she was commissioned, steam-powered ironclads were already being designed.
The Constellation served on the Africa Squadron from 1859 to 1861, intercepting illegal slave ships and liberating over seven hundred enslaved Africans who were about to be transported to the Americas — more than any other American naval vessel in that campaign. During the Civil War she served as a training ship and supply vessel. She later made goodwill voyages to Ireland during the famine, carrying relief supplies while thousands of Irish emigrants sailed in the opposite direction to Baltimore.
The ship went through several restorations in the twentieth century and has been permanently moored here in the Inner Harbor since 1968. Step aboard and you will find three lower gun decks, the captain's cabin, the cramped quarters where sailors slept in hammocks, and the brass cannons that represented the cutting edge of mid-nineteenth-century naval firepower.