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| - The ship was long overall, had a beam of and had a maximum draft of . Catawba had a tonnage of 1,034 tons burthen and displaced . Her crew consisted of 100 officers and enlisted men. Catawba was powered by a two-cylinder horizontal vibrating-lever steam engine that drove one propeller using steam generated by two Stimers horizontal fire-tube boilers. The engine gave the ship a top speed of . She carried of coal. Catawba's main armament consisted of two smoothbore, muzzle-loading, Dahlgren guns mounted in a single gun turret. Each gun weighed approximately . They could fire a shell up to a range of at an elevation of +7°. The exposed sides of the hull were protected by five layers of wrought iron plates, backed by wood. The armor of the gun turret and the pilot house consisted of ten layers of one-inch plates. The ship's deck was protected by armor thick. A soft iron band was fitted around the base of the turret to prevent shells and fragments from jamming the turret as had happened to earlier monitors during the First Battle of Charleston Harbor in April 1863. The base of the funnel (ship) was protected to a height of by of armor. A "rifle screen" of armor high was installed on the top of the turret to protect the crew against Confederate snipers based on a suggestion by Commander Tunis A. M. Craven, captain of her sister ship Tecumseh. The contract for Catawba, the first Navy ship to be named after the Catawba River in North Carolina, was awarded to Alexander Swift & Company; the ship was laid down in 1862 at their Cincinnati, Ohio shipyard. She was launched on 13 April 1864 and turned over to the Navy on 7 June 1865. The ship's construction was delayed by multiple changes ordered while she was being built that reflected battle experience with earlier monitors. This included the rebuilding of the turrets and pilot houses to increase their armor thickness from to 10 inches and to replace the bolts that secured their armor plates together with rivets to prevent them from being knocked loose by the shock of impact from shells striking the turret. Other changes included deepening the hull by to increase the ship's buoyancy, moving the position of the turret to balance the ship's trim and replacing all of the ship's deck armor. Completion of the ship was further delayed by the low depth of the Ohio River, which prevented its movement from Cincinnati in December 1864 to finish its fitting out. The river finally rose in March 1865, allowing the ship to reach Mound City, Illinois, on 7 March. Catawba was placed in ordinary there after completion, together with two of her sisters. The ships needed a deep-water berth and were moved opposite Cairo, Illinois, in mid-1865 even though they still had to be anchored in the main channel, where they were often struck by debris, drifting ice, and vulnerable to accidents. Tippecanoe's anchor chain was broken on 27 March 1866 when she was struck by a steamboat towing barges; the monitor collided with Oneota and the two ships were dragged downstream before they could be brought under control. This was a persistent problem and the Navy finally decided to move the ships down to New Orleans in May 1866. In August 1867, the Navy turned over Catawba and Oneota to Swift & Co. contingent on a guarantee that they would be returned in good shape if they could not be sold, and the company began refitting them for Peruvian service. In October 1867, an agent for Swift & Co. negotiated a deal with Peru to purchase Catawba and her sister for a million dollars apiece. Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy, initially indicated that the company could repurchase the pair if it refunded the government's costs to build them, but changed his mind and said that he had no authority to do that. Congress debated the issue and ultimately decided that they would be appraised by a board of officers and that the highest competitive bid in equal to or in excess of the appraised value would be accepted. The ship was appraised at $375,000 and sold for that amount, possibly after a rigged bid, on 11 April 1868.
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