Originally a United States Mail Service ship, the USMS Nashville was built at Greenpoint, Brooklyn in 1853.

Under the command of Lieutenant Robert B. Pegram, CSN, she ran the blockade on October 21, 1861, and headed across the Atlantic to Southampton, England, the first ship of war to fly the Confederate flag in English waters.

On November 19, 1861, near the British Isles, she boarded and burned an American merchant ship, the Harvey Birch, the first such action by a Confederate commerce raider in the North Atlantic during the war.

After she ran fast aground on the Ogeechee River, Georgia, the monitor USS Montauk destroyed her with shell fire from 11-inch (279-mm) and 15-inch (381-mm) turret guns on February 28, 1863.

[2] British writer Francis Warrington Dawson (born Austin John Reeks), then a youth of 21, joined the crew of the Nashville in 1862 in order to make passage from Britain to the Confederacy, with whose cause he sympathized.