7. CSS Robert E. Lee was a successful blockade runner purchased from the British
In 1862 a British blockade running firm, Alexander Collie and Company, purchased a fast steam packet which had been operating on the Glasgow to Belfast route. It was then purchased by the Confederate States Navy, which named the vessel Robert E. Lee. The ship had a short career in the Confederate Navy, though it was a successful blockade runner for most of 1863. It proved fast enough to outrun any ship attempting to pursue it, and entered Wilmington for the first time in January 1863. It delivered munitions from Britain and then steamed for Bermuda carrying cotton. Before its career ended it completed 21 voyages, most of them between Bermuda and Wilmington.
One which wasn’t was a voyage to Halifax, Nova Scotia, in which it delivered cotton in exchange for gold for the Confederate Treasury. Robert E. Lee was captured by the Union Navy after it departed for Bermuda from the Cape Fear River in November 1863, and taken into the Navy under the name Fort Donelson. It served the remainder of the war as a vessel used to run down other blockade runners and bombard Southern coastal defenses, including Fort Fisher on the Cape Fear River. After the war, it was sold to the Chilean Navy. It ended its military career when it was again sold in 1868, thousands of miles from the Clydebank in Scotland where it was built a decade earlier.