USS Fort Jackson was a wooden sidewheel steamer in the United States Navy during the American Civil War. She was successful in enforcing the Union blockade of Confederate ports, capturing five ships carrying contraband. She participated in the battles for Fort Fisher, which effectively closed the port of Wilmington, North Carolina to the Confederacy. Most notably, the surrender of Confederate forces in Texas was signed aboard the ship, formally ending the Civil War in that portion of the country. After the war, she was sold by the Navy. Her new owners named her North America. She spent the rest of her career carrying passengers, cargo, and mail between New York and ports in Brazil. She was idled in 1872 in favor of more modern vessels, and was finally broken up in 1879. Construction and characteristics In the mid-nineteenth century, Cornelius Vanderbilt developed a profitable trade route from New York to San Francisco. His ships sailed from New York to the Caribbean coast of Panama, and from the Pacific coast to San Francisco. Passengers and freight connected from one ocean to the other via the Panama Railroad. In 1862, Vanderbilt ordered the steamer Union from Jeremiah Simonson for one of the ocean-going legs of this route. Simonson built her at his Greenpoint, New York shipyard. She was launched on 30 October 1862. Her original cost was estimated to be $400,000. Her hull was long, with a beam of , and a draft of . She displaced 1,800 tons. Her depth of hold was . She was propelled by her two side-mounted paddlewheels. These were turned by a single coal-fired walking-beam steam engine, which was built by the Neptune Iron Works. It had a single cylinder in diameter with a stroke of . Steam was provided by four boilers, which were heated by fourteen furnaces. It is not clear that Union ever sailed for Vanderbilt. As early as December 1862, before the ship was ready for sea, it was reported that he offered to sell her to the U.S. Government for $350,000. Civil War Service (18631865) Vanderbilt's merchant ship Union was converted into the gunboat Fort Jackson at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. During her time at the Navy Yard she was fitted with eight 9-inch smooth-bore guns, two 30-pounder rifled guns, and a single 100-pounder Parrott rifle. The ship had to be renamed because the Navy already had a USS Union in