Functional Folk Art Department: This beautiful, intricately embroidered seabag has a Bayeux Tapestry–like quality of offering something new to the observer with each viewing. Sailors of old transformed their requisite stitching skills into an outlet for quite impressive creativity. This particular example was the possession and product of a seaman on board the U.S. frigate Congress named J. A. Fort, evidently a wizard with thread and needle; he likely continued to add to his totable masterpiece during long hours at sea. Now in the collection of the Naval History and Heritage Command, it was donated by the wife of a collector in 1967.
The Smithsonian Institution examined it at that time and deemed it to be from the period between the Mexican and Civil wars—the heyday of the 1841-launched Congress. The frigate was deployed to the Pacific Squadron during the war with Mexico; her crew took part in the battles of Rio San Gabriel and La Mesa, and was part of the force that occupied Los Angeles. The Congress bombarded Guaymas and participated in its capture; members of her crew formed a detachment tasked with the occupation of Mazatlán. The Congress subsequently spent the 1850s fighting the slave trade, patrolling the South American coast, and serving as flagship for Commodore Samuel L. Breese in the Mediterranean.
But the frigate’s most famous brush with history, of course, came at the bitter end, when, on 8 March 1862, she went down in flames at Hampton Roads, Virginia, having fallen victim to the Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia. As the Congress and the U.S. frigate Cumberland descended to their watery graves that day, it was the death knell for the Age of Fighting Sail.