lowed by the
withdrawal of his army from thence and its transference to northern
Virginia, the defeats suffered by Pope, and the first invasion of
Maryland, occurred either immediately before or during the time that
Farragut was in Pensacola. His own bootless expedition up the
Mississippi and subsequent enforced retirement conspired also to swell
the general gloom; for, although thinking military men could realize
from the first that the position into which the fleet was forced was so
essentially false that it could not be maintained, the unreflecting
multitude saw only the conversion into repulse and disaster of a
substantial success, of a conquest as apparently real as it was actually
phantasmal. In the West, Grant was so stripped of troops that he feared
the possibility of the Union forces being obliged to withdraw behind the
Ohio, as they had in the East recrossed the Potomac. "The most anxious
period of the war to me," he afterward wrote, "was during the time the
army of the Tennessee was guarding the territory acquired by the fall of
Corinth and Memphis, and before I was sufficiently re-enforced to take
the offensive"--from July 15 to October 15, 1862.

The Confederate forces which confronted Grant in northern Mississippi
during these anxious months interposed between him and Vicksburg, and
belonged to the department charged with the defenses of the Mississippi
river. As they touched Grant, therefore, on the one side, on the other
they were in contact with Farragut's command. The summer passed in
various movements by them, threatening Grant's position at Corinth,
which culminated on the 3d of October in an attack in force. This was
repulsed after hard fighting, and re-enforcements to Grant beginning to
come in, the Confederates themselves were thrown on the defensive. The
approach of winter, bringing with it higher water and healthier weather
on the line of the Mississippi, warned them also that the time was at
hand when they might have to fight for the control of the water
communications, upon which they no longer had, nor could hope to have, a
naval force. Reports therefore began to reach the admiral in Pensacola,
from the senior naval officer in the river, that the Confederates were
with renewed energy building batteries above Baton Rouge and strongly
fortifying Port Hudson.

As there seemed no speedy prospect of obtaining the land force, without
whose co-operation an attack upon Mobile would be a fruitless
e