USS Tristram Shandy (1864) USS Tristram Shandy (1864) USS "Tristram Shandy" (1864) was a 444-ton steamer and blockade runner captured by the Union Navy during the American Civil War. With her Parrott rifle installed, she was used by the Navy as a gunboat to patrol navigable waterways of the Confederate States of America to prevent the South from trading with other countries. "Tristram Shandy" took her name from the hero—and the shortened title—of the novel, "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman", which was written by Laurence Sterne between the years 1759 and 1767. She was a schooner-rigged, iron-hulled sidewheel steamer completed in
USS Tristram Shandy (1864) of the devastated fallen Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia. Two days later, the ship moored at Baltimore, Maryland, where the admiral was greeted with the sad news that the President had been assassinated the previous night in Washington. On 26 April, the ship returned to Hampton Roads to continue her duties as a dispatch vessel, operating off the Virginia Capes, concurrently serving as a lookout and keeping watch for the Confederate ram , believed to be still at sea and unaware that hostilities had ceased. "Tristram Shandy" then conveyed Confederate prisoners of war to Fort Pulaski, Georgia, in late May