Admiral Farragut.
330. Farragut prepares for the Attack.—Farragut had about fifty vessels all told: frigates, ships, sloops, gunboats, and mortar vessels. He anchored the mortar boats around a point of land nearly two miles below the forts, and dressed them with evergreens and foliage of trees disguising their position. Then the great thirteen-inch bombs burst inside and around the forts all day, all night, for six days.
Meanwhile two small gunboats went one night up to the chained hulks to break the barrier; and though detected and fired on, the officers worked calmly and persistently. They contrived to get a gunboat through, then steamed up the river, turned and rushed down on the cable with such force as to break it! Daylight showed a wide opening for the Union fleet.
331. The Grand Work done by Farragut and his Fleet.—The next morning at two o'clock, April 24, 1862, the fleet steamed up. The forts fired and the ships fired, but the fleet kept moving in the darkness. Soon one passed through, then another, the swift ones dashing ahead.
But the flagship Hartford, on which was Farragut, having passed through, turned aside to avoid a blazing fire raft, when she ran aground! Then the Confederates, seeing the Hartford stuck fast, pushed a fire raft up against it. Instantly the flames flashed along the rigging and the ports, the big guns of the fort meanwhile pounding her. But the gun crews kept working their cannon as steadily as if on practice, and the rest fought the flames, and soon subdued them. The flagship was saved. Other ships passed up, all fighting, some surviving by hairbreadth escapes; a few were lost.
When the morning sun rose, the astounding work had been done, the gates of fire had been passed, and the Union fleet under Farragut was triumphant. New Orleans was captured and the control of the river secured nearly up to Vicksburg.
332. The Merrimac and the Monitor.—When the war for the Union began, and just before the Confederates seized the navy yard at Norfolk, the commanding officer there contrived to burn or sink all the ships; but the best one, the Merrimac, was soon raised and rebuilt as a powerful ironclad.
When the fine old frigate had been remodeled her entire appearance was changed. She had no longer the appearance of a ship, but seemed like a house afloat. The story is told that an old sailor on board the Cumberland, who first sighted her, reported gravely to the officer of the deck, "Quaker meeting-house floating down the bay, sir."
In anticipation of what harm it might do, the government engaged Captain Ericsson, a Swedish inventor in New York, to build as quickly as possible, after his own plans, an ironclad, a new and very odd-shaped kind of warship—the now famous Monitor. The construction was pushed day and night without an hour of delay.