day, May 30, and was surprised to find that the defences were mostly shams, mounted with Quaker guns like those found at Munson's Hill. If he had not been so tardy in his advance from Pittsburg Landing he might have struck Beauregard a heavy blow. Indeed, military writers think that if Halleck had stayed a week longer in St. Louis, Grant would have crushed Beauregard's army and captured all his supplies.

After the fall of Island Number Ten Commodore Foote and his gunboats and General Pope with his army on transports moved down the Mississippi to attack Fort Pillow, a very strong work built for the defence of the city of Memphis. Its walls were mounted with forty heavy guns, and it was defended by

General Halleck, who was getting ready to march on Corinth, and Commodore Foote was left to carry on the siege alone. He kept up a bombardment until May 9, when the painfulness of his foot, wounded at Donelson, obliged him to give up duty and he was succeeded in the command by Commodore C. H. Davis.

On the next day after Foote left, the Confederate gunboats and rams attacked the Union fleet. The Cincinnati had her side stove in by the ram McRea, and the Mound City was badly injured by the ram Sumter. The Union gunboat Benton at last sent a shell through the boiler of the McRea, many of the crew of which were scalded by the escaping steam. The ram floated down with the current and succeeded in getting away, the Cincinnati and the Mound City being too much injured to chase her, and the Cincinnati soon after sunk. The remainder of the Confederate boats then left and the battle ended.

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During the next three weeks a slow bombardment of the fort was kept up by the Union mortar-boats, and some rams, under command of Colonel Charles Ellet, Jr., were added to the fleet; but when Commodore Davis was ready for another fight no Confederate gunboats were to be seen. Fort Pillow, too, was evacuated on the night of June 4, and the next morning the stars and stripes were hoisted over its walls. The Union fleet then steamed down to Memphis, where the Confederate fleet, consisting of eight rams and gunboats, was found ready for action. The battle began at half-past five o'clock in the morning (June 6) and lasted only an hour and a half, ending in the destruction or capture of seven of the eight Confederate vessels, only one, the Van Dorn, escaping. Of the others, the General Lovell, the General Beauregard, and the General Price were sunk, the Jeff Thompson was blown up, the Little Rebel was disabled and run ashore, and the General Bragg and the Sumter were taken afloat. The flag of the Union was hoisted on the Bragg and the Sumter, and they afterward came to anchor with the rest of the fleet in front of Memphis. The city was taken possession of, and shortly afterward General Lewis Wallace was sent with his division to take command of it.

CHAPTER XVIII.

NEW ORLEANS.

EXPEDITION AGAINST NEW ORLEANS.-SHIP ISLAND.-FARRAGUT AND HIS FLEET.-DEFENCES OF THE CITY.-MORTAR VESSELS DISGUISED.-FIRE-RAFTS.-A FURIOUS BOMBARDMENT.-FARRAGUT PASSES THE FORTS.-THE VARUNA SUNK.-A BRAVE BOY.-AN AWFUL SIGHT.-THE HARTFORD IN FLAMES.-SINKING OF THE GUNBOATS.-THE MANASSAS EXPLODES.-NEW ORLEANS AMAZED.-SHIPs and CottON BURNED.-GENERAL LOVELL.-MUMFORD AND THE FLAG. THE FORTS SURRENDER TO PORTER.-A FAT MAN GROWS LEAN.-BUTLER IN NEW ORLEANS.-HANGING OF MUMFORD.-BUTLER'S ACCUSERS.-FARRAGUT PASSES THE VICKSBURG BATTERIES,-BATTLE AT BATON ROUGE-THE ARKANSAS DESTROYED.-CAPTURE OF GALVESTON,

URING the month of April, 1862, which witnessed the battle of Shiloh and the fall of Island Number Ten, Fort Pulaski, and Fort Macon, the Confederates met with a far heavier blow in the loss of New Orleans. As carly as September, 1861, General Benjamin F. Butler had been sent to New England to raise men for an expedition the object of which was to be kept secret. He was successful, and in December several thousand men, under command of General J. W. Phelps, were landed on Ship Island, a small sandy island in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Mississippi. Before the war the United States Government had an unfinished fort on this island, which the Confederates had made quite strong and named Fort Twiggs; but they abandoned it in the autumn of 1861, and it was soon after taken possession of by some Union troops and renamed Fort Massachusetts. General Phelps and his troops occupied the fort and remained on the island all winter.

On the 2d of February, 1862, a large fleet, under command of Commodore David G. Farragut, sailed from Hampton Roads for the Gulf of Mexico. A fortnight afterward this fleet was followed by a large number of transports, carrying fifteen thonsand troops under General Butler, who had been appointed commander of the Department of the Gulf. The place of meeting was Ship Island, where the troops were landed, after a stormy passage down the coast, toward the end of March. Commodore Farragut, who had been put in command of the Western Gulf Squadron, was joined by Commodore David D. Porter, with a fleet of twenty-one mortar-schooners, each of which car

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ried a 15-inch mortar-that is, a mortar large enough to fire a 15-inch bomb-shell-and two 32-pounder rifled cannons.

The approaches to New Orleans had been very strongly fortified by the Confederates. The city, which is on the eastern bank of the Mississippi, is about a hundred miles above tho mouths of the river. Seventy miles below, or about thirty miles above the passes, at a bend in the river, are Forts Jackson and St. Philip, each mounted with heavy guns. From Fort Jackson a raft made of the hulls of vessels and of cypress logs, fastened together by six chains, was stretched across to the opposite shore and defended by a battery at each end. Under the guns of the fort lay a fleet of thirteen gunboats, an iron-clad floating battery called the Louisiana, and the ram Manassas.

DAVID G. FARRAGUT.

Fire-rafts, to be sent down to burn the vessels of an enemy's fleet, had also been made ready. Above the forts were many batteries along the river's banks, and in and around the city was a force of ten thousand men, under command of General Mansfield Lovell, a former United States officer, distinguished in the Mexican War.

Commodore Farragut's fleet, besides the mortarschooners, consisted of seven

large steam sloops-of-war, sixteen gunboats, and several other vessels. The flag-ship was the Hartford, a large and powerful steamer. By the 17th of April the whole fleet was in the river. Commodore Porter disguised his mortar-vessels by daubing their hulls with mud and covering their masts and rigging with green boughs, so that they could not be told from the forest-trees, and moored them along the river banks, the nearest ones being a little more than a mile and a half from Fort Jackson. The bombardment opened on the morning of April 18, and was kept up for six days and nights, during which six thousand shells, each weighing nearly three hundred pounds, were thrown. The

forts answered vigorously day after day, and during the night great fire-rafts came blazing down the river, the Confederates hoping that some of the vessels of the fleet, which lay below the mortar-boats, might be destroyed by them; but they were easily caught by small boats sent out from the ships, and towed to the banks, where they burned harmlessly. At last Farragut, thinking that there was but little chance of taking the forts in this way, made up his mind to run by them. The river was very high, and the water was rising all the time. Part of the raft had been carried away by the flood, but enough still remained to keep vessels from passing up when under fire from the forts. On a dark and windy night several of the gunboats ran up to the raft, and succeeded in cutting the chains, so that one end swung round, leaving a clear opening through it.

DAVID D. PORTER.

Commodore Farragut divided his fleet into three parts, one of which, led by Captain Theodorus Bailey, in the Cayuga, was to fight Fort St. Philip; the second, led by himself, in the Hartford, was to fight Fort Jackson; and the third, under Captain Bell, was to pass on and attack the Confederate fleet. Every plan that could be thought of for saving the vessels from the enemy's shot was tried. Bags of sand were packed around the boilers, and chaincables were hung along the sides of each vessel to protect the engines, while the insides of the bulwarks were packed with hammocks and other things to keep splinters from flying in case they should be struck by shot. Commodore Farragut had intended to wait for a dark night before making the attempt, but the Confederates seemed to know what he was going to do, for they kept the river lighted by blazing rafts and by bonfires on shore. The signal for the fleet to move was given at two o'clock in the morning of April 23, and the Cayuga weighed anchor