Governor Moore had been Southern S. S. Company's Charles Morgan, named for the firm's founder and built at New York in 1854 as a schooner-rigged, low pressure, walking beam-engined, seagoing steamer.

As a gunboat, renamed for Louisiana's Governor Thomas Overton Moore, her stem was reinforced for ramming by two strips of flat railroad iron at the waterline, strapped and bolted in place, with pine lumber and cotton-bale barricades to protect her boilers, but the Governor Moore was never commissioned as a ship in the Confederate States Navy.

With practically her whole upper hamper shot away and 61 men dead or dying, she went out of command, drifting helplessly to shore, where her captain, pilot, and a seaman set her afire.

I hoisted them myself twice; finally every stripe was taken out of the flag, leaving a small constellation of four little stars only, which showed to our enemy how bravely we had defended them.

(It is unclear if the flag referred to was the Confederate Stars and Bars or Louisiana State banner of January 1861; the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships claims the latter.)