USS Yankee (1861) USS Yankee (1861) USS "Yankee" (1861) was a steam-powered side-wheel tugboat acquired by the Union Navy just prior to the outbreak of the American Civil War. The "Yankee"—a side-wheel steamer built in 1860 at New York City—was one of three steam tugs chartered early in April 1861 at New York City for use on the expedition to provision Fort Sumter, South Carolina, the first U.S. state to declare its secession from the Union, which it had done on December 20, 1860. She departed New York on 8 April 1861 and arrived off Charleston Bar on the 15th, a few hours
Second Battle of Fort Sumter one of the fort's guns with 320 infantrymen, who repulsed the naval landing party. Gillmore had reduced Fort Sumter to a pile of rubble, but the Confederate flag still waved over the ruins. Union efforts to retake Charleston Harbor began on April 7, 1863, when Rear Admiral Samuel Francis Du Pont, commander of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, led the ironclad frigate "New Ironsides", the tower ironclad "Keokuk", and the monitors "Weehawken", "Pasaic", "Montauk", "Patapsco", "Nantucket", "Catskill", and "Nahant" in an attack on the harbor's defenses (The 1863 Battle of Fort Sumter was the largest deployment of monitors in action