Starting with seventeen wooden vessels, he had passed, with all but three of them, against the swift current of a river, there but half a mile wide, between two powerful earthworks, which had long been prepared for him, his course impeded by blazing rafts, and immediately thereafter had met the enemy’s fleet of fifteen vessels, two of them ironclad, and either captured or destroyed every one of them.
All this was done with the loss of but one vessel from his own squadron. Probably few naval men would have believed that this work could have been done so effectually, even with ironclads.
Captain Wilkinson, who was in this battle as executive officer of the Confederate iron-clad Louisiana, in his “Narrative of a Blockade Runner,” says: “Most of us belonging to that little naval fleet knew that Admiral Farragut would dare to attempt what any man would; and, for my part, I had not forgotten that while I was under his command, during the Mexican war, he had proposed to Commodore Perry, then commanding the Gulf Squadron, and urged upon him, the enterprise of capturing the strong fort of San Juan de Ulloa, at Vera Cruz, by boarding. Ladders were to be constructed, and triced up along the attacking ships’ masts, and the ships to be towed alongside the walls by the steamers of the squadron. Here was a much grander prize to be fought for, and every day of delay was strengthening his adversaries.”
The magnitude of Farragut’s novel enterprise was scarcely realized at the North when the first news was received. It was simply announced that he “had run by the forts.” The Confederates knew too well what resistance and difficulties he had overcome, and what a loss they sustained in New Orleans.
An officer who was in the engagement expressed an opinion that if the passage had been attempted by daylight the fleet would have sustained a fearful loss.
After the fleet had passed the forts Captain Bailey, in the Cayuga, preceded the flag-ship up the river, and at the quarantine station captured the Chalmette regiment, encamped upon the river bank.
On the morning of the 25th, the Cayuga, still leading, encountered the Chalmette batteries, three miles below New Orleans. The Hartford and Brooklyn, with several others, soon joined her, and silenced these batteries. New Orleans was now fairly under Farragut’s guns, and this had been effected at the cost of thirty-seven killed and one hundred and forty-seven wounded.
Farragut appointed eleven o’clock of the morning of the 26th as the hour “for all the officers and crews of the fleet to return thanks to Almighty God for His great goodness and mercy, in permitting us to pass through the events of the last two days with so little loss of life and blood.”
The ships passed up to the city, and anchored immediately in front of it, and Captain Bailey was sent on shore to demand the surrender of it, from the authorities, to which the Mayor replied that the city was under martial law, and that he had no authority. General Lovell, who was present, said he would deliver up nothing, but, in order to free the city from embarrassment, he would restore the city authorities, and retire with his troops, which he did.
Farragut then seized all the steamboats which had not been destroyed and sent them down to the quarantine station, for Butler’s troops. Among them was the Tennessee, which the blockaders had been so long watching for, but which never got out.