nothing to the one which immediately followed.

The idea of an attack on New Orleans had been conceived in June,
'61, by Commander (afterwards Admiral) D.D. Porter, of the U.S.S.
Powhatan, when he was helping to blockade the Mississippi. The
Navy Department had begun thinking over the same idea in
September and had worked out a definite scheme. New Orleans was
of immense strategic importance, as being the link between the
sea and river systems of the war. The mass of people and their
politicians, on both sides, absurdly thought of New Orleans as
the objective of a land invasion from the north. Happily for the
Union cause, Gustavus Fox, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, knew
better and persuaded his civilian chief, Gideon Welles, that this
was work for a joint expedition, with the navy first, the army
second. The navy could take New Orleans. The army would have to
hold it.

The squadron destined for this enterprise was commanded by David
Glasgow Farragut, who arrived at Ship Island on February 20,
1862, in the Hartford, the famous man-of-war that carried his
flag in triumph to the end. Unlike Lee and Jackson, Grant and
Sherman, the other four great leaders in the Civil War, Farragut
was not an American whose ancestors on both sides had come from
the British Isles. Like Lee, however, he was of very ancient
lineage, one of his ancestors, Don Pedro Farragut, having held a
high command under the King of Aragon in the Moorish wars of the
thirteenth century. Farragut's father was a pure-blooded
Spaniard, born under the British flag in Minorca in 1755. Half
Spanish, half Southern by descent, Farragut was wholly Southern
by family environment. His mother, Elizabeth Shine, was a native