Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies

It includes selected first-hand accounts, orders, reports, maps, diagrams, and correspondence drawn from official records of both Union and Confederate navies.

[2] on July 31, 1894,[2] the sum of US$15,000 was authorized for printing the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies, the first in a long series of Congressional appropriations provided annually until 1915.

A paucity of source material of Confederate origin (confirmed by appearance in print of these first volumes) resulted in a request that an agent be appointed in the War Records Section to seek out and collect official records of both the Union and Confederate Navies from other than sources available at the Navy Department.

In 1922 as the printing of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion (a work which had begun in 1894) neared completion, a Congressional Committee on Printing forbade further expenditures for this purpose pending a time when the publishing of such historical source material might be undertaken jointly by all concerned.

Permission was granted, however, to complete the printing of a monograph then in the printer's hands but further work on many other proposed subjects was stopped for the next dozen years.