till the fifteenth, the day on which Grant's own "most anxious
period of the war" began on the Memphis-Corinth line, four
hundred miles above.

Farragut, getting very anxious about the shoaling of the water,
was then preparing to run down when he heard firing in the Yazoo,
a tributary that joined the Mississippi four miles higher up.
This came from a fight between one of his reconnoitering
gunboats, the Carondelet, and the Arkansas, an ironclad
Confederate ram that would have been very dangerous indeed if her
miserable engines had been able to give her any speed. She was
beating the Carondelet, but getting her smoke-stack so badly
holed that her speed dropped down to one knot, which scarcely
gave her steerage way and made her unable to ram. Firing hard she
ran the gauntlet of both fleets and took refuge under the
Vicksburg bluffs, whence she might run out and ram the Union
vessels below. Farragut therefore ran down himself, hoping to
smash her by successive broadsides in passing. But the
difficulties of the passage wasted the daylight, so that he had
to run by at night. She therefore survived his attack, and went
downstream to join the Confederates against Baton Rouge. But her
engines gave way before she got there; and she had to be blown
up.

Farragut was back at New Orleans before the end of July. On the
fifth of August the Confederates made their attack on Baton
Rouge; but were beaten back by the Union garrison aided by three
of Farragut's gunboats and two larger vessels from Davis's
command. The losses were not very severe on either side; but the
Union lost a leader of really magnificent promise in its