[CHAPTER XXV]
Farragut at New Orleans
There was still another man of splendid genius and capacity who about this time came to the front as a winner of victories for the Federal arms, and above all, as a man like Grant, who knew how to do things when officialism permitted him to act. Like Grant on the one side, and Lee on the other, Farragut was at first treated as a negligible factor in the war.
David Glasgow Farragut was a man of Southern birth who had been twice married in Virginia, and all of whose kindred and connections and instinctive sympathies were Southern. He so far sympathized with the South indeed that he openly declared his purpose to go with the Confederacy if by any means the division of the country could be peacefully arranged and accomplished. But, living as he did at the outbreak of the war in a strongly secessionist Virginia town, he frankly declared his lack of faith in the peaceful accomplishment of secession, and his fixed purpose in the event of war to cast in his lot with the cause of the nation, which, all his long life—for he was sixty years old—he had served, and from which all his honors had come. This declaration quickly made Norfolk, in which city he was living, "too hot" for him in its popular sentiment, and accordingly he removed to the North to await events.
At that time Farragut was a captain in the navy. He was by all odds the officer in that service most distinguished for brilliant, daring and competently effective performance. He had entered the navy "through a port hole," as he said, at nine years of age. He had served with such distinction under Commodore Porter, that at twelve years of age he had been intrusted by the great seaman with the command of a richly laden prize ship, navigating her for fifteen hundred miles into the harbor of Valparaiso, and there arranging for her condemnation. He had, while yet a mere boy, distinguished himself for courage in a severely-contested sea fight.
In brief, this Captain Farragut was obviously, and unquestionably, the very fittest man to undertake any difficult naval expedition that the Washington government might plan or contemplate.
But he had the taint of Southern birth and connections, and it was nearly a year after he offered himself unreservedly for any service that might be required of him when the politicians who controlled the Navy Department at Washington ventured to make use of his abilities.
And when at last these people in the Navy Department reconciled themselves to the thought of giving an important command to this brilliantly distinguished naval officer, who shared with Winfield Scott and George H. Thomas the suspicious disadvantage of Southern birth and connections, they did it in a way insultingly suggestive of their doubt as to his loyalty or courage or something else essential.
New Orleans was in every way—in population, exports, imports, and everything else—the chief city of the Southern Confederacy. Moreover its strategic position was one which commanded a vast system of inland waterways constituting the only effective link between the Confederate country west of the Mississippi and that part of the Confederacy that lay east of the great river.
The city lies about a hundred miles, to use round figures, above the multitudinous mouths of the Mississippi. It lies less than half a dozen miles west of the so-called Lake Pontchartrain, which is an inlet from the gulf, with two other bodies of water, Mississippi Sound and Lake Borgne, lying between.
But the passes into Lake Borgne and from that body of water into Lake Pontchartrain, are shallow and difficult, as the British discovered in 1814 in their attempt to approach New Orleans by the "back door," as it were.