The CSS Mississippi was the brainchild of Nelson Tift, a man raised in Florida as a child, but had moved to Georgia as a young man where he had become locally prominent. (The town of Tifton in Tift County, Georgia, is named for him. His nephew Henry Harding Taft named the city after his uncle, who is regarded as the founder of Albany, Georgia, the state's eighth largest city.)
At the beginning of the war, he realized that the Confederacy would have to build a navy, but faced major problems since there were few major shipyards and a lack of skilled shipwrights to build the ships. To save time, he he came up with the idea of constructing shops on the house-building.
His brother Asa F. Tift agreed to work with him. He had remained in Florida after Nelson moved to Georgia and had become a successful businessman in Key West and had come to know Stephen Mallory before he became a United States Senator and Confederate Secretary of the Navy.
Asa and Nelson showed his model to Mallory, who passed it on to a review board who declared it a feasible idea and Mallory authorized them to go to New Orleans and build the ironclad which would have18 guns and would be driven by three screw propellers.
--Old B-R'er
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