. Within another month Florida was even more
hardly hit when the pressure of the Union fleet and army on Virginia
compelled the South to use as reinforcements the garrison that
had held Pensacola since the beginning of the war.

These were all severe blows to the Southern cause. But they were
nothing to the one which immediately followed.

The idea of an attack on New Orleans had been conceived in June,
'61, by Commander (afterwards Admiral) D. D. Porter, of the U.S.S.
_Powhatan_, when he was helping to blockade the Mississippi. The
Navy Department had begun thinking over the same idea in September
and had worked out a definite scheme. New Orleans was of immense
strategic importance, as being the link between the sea and river
systems of the war. The mass of people and their politicians, on
both sides, absurdly thought of New Orleans as the objective of a
land invasion from the north. Happily for the Union cause, Gustavus
Fox, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, knew better and persuaded
his civilian chief, Gideon Welles, that this was work for a joint
expedition, with the navy first, the army second. The navy could
take New Orleans. The army would have to hold it.

The squadron destined for this enterprise was commanded by David
Glasgow Farragut, who arrived at Ship Island on February 20, 1862,
in the _Hartford_, the famous man-of-war that carried his flag in
triumph to the end. Unlike Lee and Jackson, Grant and Sherman,
the other four great leaders in the Civil War, Farragut was not an
American whose ancestors on both sides had come from the British
Isles. Like Lee, however, he was of very ancient lineage, one of
his ancestors, Don Pedro Farragut, having held a high command under
the King of Aragon in the Moorish wars of the thirteenth century.
Farragut's father was a pure-blooded Spaniard, born under the British
flag in Minorca in 1755. Half Spanish, half Southern by descent,
Farragut was wholly Southern by family environment. His mother,
Elizabeth Shine, was a native of North Carolina. He spent his early
boyhood in New Orleans. Both his first and second wives came from
Virginia; and he made his home at Norfolk. On the outbreak of the
war, however, he immediately went North and applied for employment
with the Union fleet.

Farragut was the oldest of the five great leaders, being now sixty
years of age, while Lee was fifty-five, Sherman forty-two, Grant
forty, and Jackson thirty-eight. He was, however, fit as an ath