ritish ministry to exchange confidences in which they agreed on the
expediency of mediation. They did not carry all their colleagues with
them; but who can estimate the effect, when the scales were thus
balancing, if the navy had been driven out of the Mississippi as the
army was from Virginia?

CHAPTER VIII.

THE FIRST ADVANCE ON VICKSBURG.

1862.

The purpose of the Navy Department, as expressed in the original orders
to Farragut, had been to send his squadron up the river immediately
after the capture of New Orleans. The words were: "If the Mississippi
expedition from Cairo shall not have descended the river, you will take
advantage of the panic to push a strong force up the river to take all
their defenses in the rear." When New Orleans fell, the Cairo
expedition, more commonly known as the Mississippi flotilla, so far from
having descended the river to the neighborhood of New Orleans, was still
detained before Fort Pillow, one of the outlying defenses of Memphis,
forty miles above the latter city and over eight hundred from New
Orleans. It was not until the end of May that the evacuation of Corinth
by the Confederates made Memphis untenable, leading to the abandonment
of the forts on the 4th of June and the surrender of the city on the
following day. It became therefore incumbent upon Farragut, after
turning over the command of New Orleans to Butler on the 1st of May, to
go up the river as soon as he possibly could.

Although the flag-officer seems to have acquiesced in this programme in
the beginning, it was probably with the expectation that the advance, up
river and against the current, required of his heavy-draught and
slow-moving ships would not be very far; that the Cairo expedition,
which at the date of the orders quoted, January 20th, had not begun to
move, would, from the character of the vessels composing it, many being
ironclad, and from the advantage of the current, have progressed very
far by the time he had taken New Orleans. Moreover, at that date the
upper river flotilla was still a branch of the army, and its prospective
movements were to be in combination with, and a part of, a great
military enterprise, securing control both of the stream and of the
land; whereas Farragut's was a purely naval operation, to which the army
contributed only a force sufficient to hold the points which were first
reduced by the fleet.

Under the actual conditions, the proposed ascent of the river bore a