1883. Vicksburg and Gettysburg, by the Comte de Paris. 513
his squadron from New Orleans, passed it without much difficulty on June 28, 1862, and wrote to the Secretary of the Navy : ' The forts can be passed, and we have done it, and can ' do it again, as often as may be required of us ; ' and though he added, ' It will not, however, be an easy matter for us to do ' more than silence the batteries for a time, as long as the ' enemy has a large force behind the hills to prevent our land- ' ing and holding the place,' still, no one, not even Farragut himself, thought that there would be any special difficulty about reducing it, now that experience had shown how these riverside fortresses were to be captured.[1] It was some months before the peculiar strength of Vicksburg was clearly recognised.
The formation of the valley of the lower Mississippi is described in every treatise on physical geography. By the wearing action of the stream, and by frequent changes of its bed, the existing channel winds through a vast alluvial plain, nearly a hundred miles wide, but barely above the mean level of the water, and whose surface, even where it is not frequently submerged, is deeply furrowed by old river-beds, lakes, creeks, streams and backwaters, which, under the local name of bayous, render it sometimes doubtful whether the tract adjacent to the river should be spoken of as land or water. From this low-lying alluvial plain the adjacent country rises abruptly to a height of from two to three hundred feet, forming, and more markedly on the east side, a line of hills which, when the windings of the river bring it to their base, become steep bluffs, but in other places, and under the gentler conditions of weathering, are of more or less easy ascent. From the mouth of the Ohio to Memphis, the course of the river keeps pretty close to the hills on the east : the bluffs are frequent, and afforded a threatening command to the batteries which the Confederates erected on them. But at Memphis the two lines separate ; that of the hills trends to the east, that of the river to the west ; and they do not again meet for a distance of more than 200 miles in a straight line from north to south. Between them they enclose a tract of the low alluvial land, about sixty miles from east to west in its broadest part : this is traversed by numberless bayous, and by a river which, after receiving several affluents, takes the name of the Yazoo, flows to the south along the base of the hills, and falls into the Mississippi close to where the bluffs again meet the river, and where, on the top of the cliff, stood the fortifications of Vicksburg.
- ↑ Life of David Glasgow Farragut, First Admiral of the United States Navy, by his son, Loyall Farragut (8vo, 1882), p. 279.
