very different aspect to the commanding naval officer on the spot from
that which presented itself to the fond imaginations of the officials in
Washington. The question now was not one of fighting batteries, for
there was no reason as yet to expect anything heavier than the fleet had
already overcome with ease; it was the far more difficult matter of
communications, in the broadest scope of the word, to be maintained over
a long, narrow, tortuous, and very difficult road, passing in many
places close under the guns of the enemy. "As I stated in my last
dispatch," wrote Farragut to the department after his first visit to
Vicksburg, "the dangers and difficulties of the river have proved to us,
since we first entered it, much greater impediments to our progress,
and more destructive to our vessels, than the enemy's shot. Between
getting aground, derangement of the machinery, and want of coal, the
delays in getting up the river are great." To take the defenses in the
rear, and in their then state to drive the enemy out of them, was one
thing; but to hold the abandoned positions against the return of the
defenders, after the fleet had passed on, required an adequate force
which Butler's army, calculated by McClellan for a much narrower sphere,
could not afford. Coal and supply ships, therefore, must either run the
gantlet for the four hundred miles which separated Vicksburg from New
Orleans, or be accompanied always by armed vessels. The former
alternative was incompatible with the necessary security, and for the
latter the numbers of the fleet were utterly inadequate. In fact, to
maintain the proposed operations, there would be needed so many ships to
guard the communications that there would be none left for the
operations to which they led.

It must also be observed that not only was this line of communications
four times as long as that which led from the sea to New Orleans, and of
far more difficult pilotage, but that the natural character of the
enemy's positions upon it was essentially different. They were as yet
undeveloped by art; but by nature they were high and commanding bluffs,
having secure land communications with an extensive enemy's country in
their rear over which our troops exercised no control whatever--where
they had not even been seen. To speak of "taking them in the rear" was
to beg the question--to assume that their front was then, as in June,
1863, toward an enemy investing them on the land side. Ne