Blockade was more to the point than any attempt to patrol the sea
lanes. Yet it was even more harassing; for it involved three
distinct though closely correlated kinds of operation: not only
the seizure, in conjunction with the army, of enemy ports, and
the patrolling of an enemy coastline three thousand miles long,
but also the patrolling of those oversea ports from which most
contraband came. This oversea patrol was the most effective,
because it went straight to the source of trouble. But it
required extraordinary vigilance, because it had to be conducted
from beyond the three-mile limit, and with the greatest care for
all the rights of neutrals.

By mid-November Farragut was back at New Orleans. A month later
General Banks arrived with reinforcements. He superseded General
Butler and was under orders to cooperate with McClernand, Grant's
second-in-command, who was to come down the Mississippi from
Cairo. But the proposed meeting of the two armies never took
place. Banks remained south of Port Hudson, McClernand far north
of Vicksburg; for, as we shall see in the next chapter, Sherman's
attempt to take Vicksburg from the North failed on the
twenty-ninth of December.

The naval and river campaigns of '62 thus ended in disappointment
for the Union. And, on New Year's Day, Galveston, which Farragut
had occupied in October without a fight and which was lightly
garrisoned by three hundred soldiers, fell into Confederate hands
under most exasperating circumstances. After the captain and
first lieutenant of the U.S.S. Harriet Lane had been shot by the
riflemen aboard two cotton-clad steamers the next officer tamely
surrendered. Commander Renshaw, who was in charge of the