allantly fought. By superior promptitude and a correct
appreciation of the true strategic objective had been reduced to
powerlessness obstacles not to be overcome by direct assault, except by
a loss of time which would have allowed the enemy to complete
preparations possibly fatal to the whole undertaking. Forts Jackson and
St. Philip, which the fleet could not have reduced by direct attack,
fell by the severance of their communications.

It is not to be questioned that the moral effect of the passage of the
forts, succeeded, as it was, by the immediate fall of the great city of
the Mississippi, was very great; but it was not upon the forts
themselves, nor in the unexpected mutiny of the garrison, that that
effect was chiefly manifested. Great as was the crime of the men, they
showed by their act a correct appreciation of those results to the
forts, from the passage of the fleet, which some have sought to
ignore--results physical, undeniable, fatal. It was not moral effect,
but indisputable reasoning which sapped the further resistance of
men--brave till then--to whom were wanting the habit of discipline and
the appreciation of the far-reaching effects upon the fortunes of a
campaign produced by a prolonged, though hopeless, resistance. They saw
that the fate of the forts was sealed, and beyond that they recognized
no duties and no advantages. On the scene of his exploit Farragut reaped
the material fruits of the celerity in which he believed; and which he
had reluctantly for a space postponed, at the bidding of superior
authority, in order to try the effect of slower methods. These being
exhausted, he owed to the promptness of his decision and action that the
Louisiana, on whose repairs men were working night and day, did not take
the advantageous position indicated to her by the officers of the forts;
and that the Mississippi, the ironclad upon which not only the
designers, but naval officers, founded extravagant hopes, was neither
completed nor towed away, but burned where she lay. The flaming mass, as
it drifted hopelessly by the Hartford, was a striking symbol of
resistance crushed--of ascendency established over the mighty river
whose name it bore; but it was a symbol not of moral, but of physical
victory.

It was elsewhere, far and wide, that were felt the moral effects which
echoed the sudden, unexpected crash with which the lower Mississippi
fell--through the length and breadth of the South and in the cabinets