USS Vanderbilt was a heavy (3,360-ton) passenger steamship obtained by the Union Navy during the second year of the American Civil War and utilized as a cruiser.

She left New York on 10 November and—after conducting a brief search for CSS Alabama, the most destructive Confederate commerce raider of the entire war—put into Hampton Roads, Virginia, on 17 January 1863.

During the West Indies portion of her deployment, Vanderbilt served as flagship of Commodore Charles Wilkes' Flying Squadron.

However, pursuing leads as to the whereabouts of Alabama, herself, became increasingly frustrating as Vanderbilt would often arrive at a port only to discover that her quarry had departed only a few hours earlier.

The Halifax-Wilmington, North Carolina, route for blockade runners was used heavily at this time owing to outbreaks of yellow fever at Bermuda and Nassau, Bahamas.

She was deployed with the blockade off Wilmington in November and participated in the unsuccessful first amphibious assault upon Confederate Fort Fisher in the Cape Fear River, North Carolina, on 24 and 25 December.

Renamed Three Brothers, she spent most of her time in the grain trade between San Francisco, Le Havre, Liverpool, and New York City where she acquired an enviable reputation for speed and handling.