In any case, on 18 December of that year, the South's Secretary of the Navy, Stephen R. Mallory, authorized payment of $1,000 to her owners for the performance of some now unknown service.

The fact that these engines were installed in CSS Tennessee is supported by the Union Navy's inspection of that ironclad ram in August 1864 soon after she surrendered to Rear Admiral Farragut in the closing moments of the Battle of Mobile Bay.

As Major General Ulysses S. Grant and Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter increased the tempo of their operations against Vicksburg, the Southern defenders of that strategic Confederate cliff-side fortress filled Alonzo Child with combustibles to ready her for possible use as a fireship and then moved her down stream so that, as an alternative, she might be employed to obstruct the channel of the Yazoo between Haynes and Snyders Bluffs.

The damage to the former steamer was apparently only cosmetic for, on 25 July, Porter sent her to Cairo, Illinois, with the recommendation that "she will make a good receiving ship or marine barracks."

En route north under tow by Union side-wheeler New National, she came across Sam Young hard aground above the mouth of the White River, "... nearly high and dry" with some 350 captured Confederate soldiers and an armed guard on board.

The Union Navy's de facto possession of the former steamer was ratified by the Federal court in Springfield, Illinois, when it condemned Alonzo Child as a lawful prize on 29 March 1864.

As Confederate defenses were crumbling throughout the South and the Navy slowly began to demobilize its Mississippi Squadron, Alonzo Child was sold at Mound City on 29 March 1865.