[8] George Brinton McClellan was born in Philadelphia in 1826, graduated from West Point, served in the Mexican War, and resigned from the army in 1857, to become a civil engineer, but rejoined it at the opening of the war. In July, 1861, he conducted a successful campaign against the Confederates in West Virginia, and his victories there were the cause of his promotion to command the Army of the Potomac. After the battle of Antietam (p. 363) he took no further part in the war, and finally resigned in 1864. From 1878 to 1881 he was governor of New Jersey. He died in 1885.
[9] Hiram Ulysses Grant was born in Ohio in 1822, and at seventeen entered West Point, where his name was registered Ulysses S. Grant, and as such he was ever after known. He served in the Mexican War, and afterward engaged in business of various sorts till the opening of the Civil War, when he was made colonel of the Twenty-first Illinois Regiment, and then commander of the district of southeast Missouri. When General Buckner, who commanded at Fort Donelson, wrote to Grant to know what terms he would offer, Grant replied: "No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works." This won for Grant the popular name "Unconditional Surrender" Grant.
Andrew H. Foote was born in Connecticut in 1806, entered the navy at sixteen, and when the war opened, was made flag officer of the Western navy. His gunboats were like huge rafts carrying a house with flat roof and sloping sides that came down to the water's edge. The sloping sides and ends were covered with iron plates and pierced for guns; three in the bow, two in the stern, and four on each side. The huge wheel in the stern which drove the boat was under cover; but the smoke stacks were unprotected. Foote died in 1863, a rear admiral.
[10] The islands in the Mississippi are numbered from the mouth of the Ohio River to New Orleans.
[11] Read Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, Vol. I, pp. 465-486.
[12] Farther west the Confederates attacked the Union army at Corinth (October 4), but were defeated by General Rosecrans.
[13] In January, 1862, the Confederate line west of the Mississippi stretched from Belmont across southern Missouri to Indian Territory; but Grant drove the Confederates out of Belmont; General Curtis, as we have seen, beat them at Pea Ridge (in March), and when the year ended, the Union army was in possession of northern Arkansas.
[14] David G. Farragut was born in 1801, and when eleven years old served on the Essex in the War of 1812. When his fleet started up the Mississippi River, in 1862, he found his way to New Orleans blocked by two forts, St. Philip and Jackson, by chains across the river on hulks below Fort Jackson, and by a fleet of ironclad boats above. After bombarding the forts for six days, he cut the chains, ran by the forts, defeated the fleet, and went up to New Orleans, and later took Baton Rouge and Natchez. For the capture of New Orleans he received the thanks of Congress, and was made a rear admiral; for his victory in Mobile Bay (p. 379) the rank of vice admiral was created for him, and in 1866 a still higher rank, that of admiral, was made for him. He died in 1870.
[15] When it was known in New Orleans that Farragut's fleet was coming, the cotton in the yards and in the cotton presses was hauled on drays to the levee and burned to prevent its falling into Union hands. The capture of the city had a great effect on Great Britain and France, both of whom the Confederates hoped would intervene to stop the war. Slidell, who was in France seeking recognition for the Confederacy as an independent nation, wrote that he had been led to believe "that if New Orleans had not been taken and we suffered no very serious reverses in Virginia and Tennessee, our recognition would very soon have been declared." Read Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, Vol. II, pp. 14-21,91-94.
[16] The story of the march is interestingly told in "Recollections of a Private," in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, Vol. II, pp. 189-199.