Cumberland began as a line in a bill. In 1816 Congress passed "An act for the gradual increase of the Navy of the United States," providing for new ships-of-the-line and new frigates. She was designed by William Doughty, who drew on older successful American frigates - Constitution and Chesapeake among them - and gave Cumberland and her Raritan-class sister ships a fully armed spar deck on top of the main gun deck. The result was a 50-gun warship, more heavily armed than European frigates of the same size. Construction dragged for decades over funding shortfalls. She was finally launched on May 24, 1842, at the Boston Navy Yard. Her first commanding officer was Captain Samuel Livingston Breese, and her wardroom in those early years included Andrew Hull Foote, future commander of the Mississippi River squadron, and John A. Dahlgren, whose name would later become synonymous with naval ordnance.

Her first commission was the prestigious one - flagship of the Mediterranean Squadron from 1843 to 1845, with port calls at Naples, Genoa, Alexandria, and Toulon. In 1846 the Secretary of the Navy ordered her south to the Gulf of Mexico for the Mexican-American War. She blockaded the eastern Mexican coast as flagship of the Home Squadron under Commodore David Conner, ran aground off Alvarado in July of that year, and her crew was eventually transferred to her sister ship Raritan to take part in the Siege of Veracruz. Two of her officers, Raphael Semmes and John Winslow, would become Civil War enemies - Semmes commanding the Confederate raider CSS Alabama, Winslow eventually sinking him off Cherbourg. From 1857 to 1859 Cumberland served as flagship of the African Squadron, intercepting slave ships off the West African coast. She boarded several dozen merchantmen and came close to seizing the schooner Cortez, on which shackles and other slave-trade paraphernalia were found - though her officers ultimately released the vessel for lack of conclusive evidence. Cortez was captured by HMS Arrow off Cuba a year later.

By the outbreak of the Civil War, Cumberland had been razeed - the spar deck guns removed, the bulwarks lowered, the ship converted from a frigate to a heavier, faster sloop-of-war with twenty-two new Dahlgren smoothbores. She was at Gosport Navy Yard in Portsmouth, Virginia in April 1861 when the war began. Her crew was ordered to spike all 3,000 guns at the yard in just a few hours - an impossible task for 100 sailors - before being towed out by the steam tug USS Yankee on April 20, 1861, escaping the destruction that consumed most of the yard. She went to Boston for repairs, returned to Hampton Roads, and joined the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron. On the morning of March 8, 1862, she was lying at anchor off Newport News Point, sails furled, waiting for the tide. A column of smoke appeared in the Elizabeth River channel.

What came out of the channel was unprecedented. The Confederates had raised the burned hull of the USS Merrimack at Gosport, cut down her upper works, and built atop them a casemate sheathed in two layers of two-inch iron plate over two feet of oak and pine. They had fitted her with a 1,500-pound cast-iron ram below the waterline. They called her CSS Virginia. She moved at perhaps five knots, steered like a barge, and could barely turn. None of that mattered. Cumberland and her companion sloop USS Congress opened fire as Virginia bore down on them. The shot bounced off her armor. Virginia drove her ram into Cumberland's starboard side just below the waterline. The wooden frigate began to sink almost immediately. Her gun crews on the upper decks kept firing as the ship went down. Lieutenant George Morris, Cumberland's executive officer, refused to surrender. The colors stayed up. The last guns fired with water lapping into the gun ports.

Cumberland's masts stuck out of the water for years afterward, marking the grave of her crew. Congress was burned by Virginia's hot shot a short time later. The next morning USS Monitor arrived, and the famous four-hour duel of the ironclads ended in a tactical draw - but the wooden warship's day was over. Congress later recognized that Cumberland inflicted more damage on Virginia than Monitor did the next day; she had cost Virginia two of her guns and her ram, which broke off in Cumberland's hull. Twenty years on, the wreck was salvaged in fits and starts; in 1909 a length of her anchor chain was sent to the Confederate Museum in Richmond. A formal archaeological survey in 1981 located both Cumberland and the wreck of CSS Florida nearby. Her ship's bell, recovered then, is on display at the Hampton Roads Naval Museum in Norfolk. The wreck itself, lying in about 70 feet of water with her bow slightly above the harbor floor, is protected by the Sunken Military Craft Act of 2005. The men who went down with her are still there.