James Russell Soley, Professor U. S. Navy, Confederate Military History, a library of Confederate States Military History: Volume 7.1, The blockade and the cruisers
Clement Anselm Evans, Ed.

[172] burnt at her wharf, at the Pensacola Navy Yard, by a party of officers and men from the flagship Colorado. The Savannah, a Charleston pilot-boat of fifty-four tons, was captured when three days out by the brig Perry, one of the blockading force, and was carried into New York, where the trial of her crew for piracy led to the threat of retaliation upon prisoners in Southern hands. The Petrel, which had formerly been a revenue cutter, was sunk by a shell from the frigate St. Lawrence, cruising off Charleston.¹

In spite of the successes of the sailing-vessels of the navy against the early privateers, it took some time to drive off or capture all these mosquitoes of ocean warfare. In fact, the practice of privateering may be said to have died out rather than to have been broken up. The blockade was indirectly instrumental in killing it. Its principal object was gain, but there was little to be gained when prizes could not be sent into port. The occupation of commercede-stroying pure and simple, however useful and patriotic, is not lucrative; and it was therefore left to the Confederate naval officers, who took it as a part of their duties. The privateers hitherto employed in it were soon diverted to the more profitable pursuit of carrying contraband. The work which they had abandoned was then taken in hand by the Confederate Government, and it was carried on by the navy during the rest of the war with results that exceeded the most sanguine expectations.

The first, or nearly the first, of the regularly commissioned naval vessels, as distinguished from the privateers, was the Sumter. Indeed, she was one of the first vessels of any kind