INSIDE REBEL BREASTWORKS,
Port Hudson, La., After Surrender, July 8, 1863.
CEMETERY BATTERY,
Baton Rouge, La., Looking Toward Port Hudson.
If we observe then the course drained by that river and its tributaries, commencing with Missouri on its right bank and Kentucky on its left bank, we find it to consist of eight or nine large States, large portions of three or four others, and several large Territories, in all a country as large as Europe, as fine as any under the sun, holding at the commencement of the war more people than all the revolted States and destined to become one of the most populous and powerful regions on the face of the globe.
If any at the opening of the war supposed that those powerful States, comprising a great and energetic population, would ever consent to a peace that would put the lower course of that great national outlet to the sea in the hands of a foreign power far weaker than themselves, they were blind indeed to the lessons of history.
The people of Kentucky alone before they were constituted a State gave formal notice to the Federal Government that if the United States did not conquer Louisiana they would conquer it themselves. In the words of a distinguished citizen of that martial State: “The mouths of the Mississippi belong by the gift of God to the inhabitants of its great valley. Nothing but irresistible force can disinherit them.”
Akin to this was the feeling of the men of the Northwest at the outbreak of the Civil War. With them the opening of the Mississippi was an absorbing passion and they entered on that enterprise with alacrity and with a grim determination not to cease from their efforts until that great river which forms a part of the life and very existence of the West should be repossessed, and the insulted ensign of the Republic planted on the last battlements of the Rebellion.