Belle—a screw tug completed at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, early in 1864—operated briefly at Boston, Massachusetts, before she was purchased there by the Union Navy on June 2, 1864. Commissioned in the next day or so, the tug headed south on June 8 to join the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron. The Norfolk Navy Yard refitted Belle to serve as a torpedo boat so that she might help defend larger Union warships in the North Carolina Sounds against attacks by the Confederate ironclad ram CSS Albemarle that, the previous spring, had emerged from the Roanoke River and defeated a Union flotilla.
