commanding general, Thomas Williams, a great-hearted, cool-headed
man and most accomplished officer. The garrison of Baton Rouge,
being too small and sickly and exposed, was withdrawn to New
Orleans a few days later.

Then Farragut at last returned to the Gulf blockade. Davis went
back up the river, where he was succeeded by D.D. Porter in
October. And the Confederates, warned of what was coming, made
Port Hudson and Vicksburg as strong as they could. Vicksburg was
now the only point they held on the Mississippi where there were
rails on both sides; and the Red River, flowing in from the West
between Vicksburg and Port Hudson, was the only good line of
communication connecting them with Texas, whence so much of their
meat was obtained.

For three months Farragut directed the Gulf blockade from
Pensacola, where, on the day of his arrival, the twentieth of
August, he was the first American to hoist an admiral's flag. The
rank of rear-admiral in the United States Navy had been created
on the previous sixteenth of July; and Farragut was the senior of
the first three officers upon whom it was conferred.

Farragut became the ranking admiral just when the United States
Navy was having its hardest struggle to do its fivefold duty
well. There was commerce protection on the high seas, blockade
along the coast, cooperation with the army on salt water and on
fresh, and of course the destruction of the nascent Confederate
forces afloat. But perhaps a knottier problem than any part of
its combatant duty was how to manage, in the very midst of war,
that rapid expansion of its own strength for which no government