ought to have been a pleasure trip, but we had stormy weather from Sandy Hook to beyond Cape Hatteras; all the passengers except myself were very sick. We arrived on the afternoon of the 18th of January. As we entered the harbor, the forts taken from the rebels, on the right and left of its mouth, fired salutes in honor of the department commander. After we were made fast to the long dock, built out since the Federal occupation, from Hilton Head Island, which formed the south side of the harbor, many army and navy officers at once boarded the Arago, including Brigadier-General Ferry and Fleet-Captain Rodgers, to welcome General Hunter. Captain Gadsden kindly permitted me to remain on the Arago while she stayed in port, thus giving me several days in which to consider and decide upon my future course.
A brief review of the operations of the Union army and navy along the coast of South Carolina and Georgia be fore my arrival will be in place here. A direct and special punishment of the former State, as the hotbed of secession, had been insisted upon by public opinion in the loyal North ever since the first outbreak of the Rebellion. The Federal Government was quite disposed to yield to the popular demand. The occupation of the South Atlantic ports was the subject of special study by a board of officers which sat in Washington in June and July, 1861. In the first days of August, orders were issued to General Thomas W. Sherman to form an expeditionary corps of 12,000 men in the New England States, and to Captain Dupont of the navy to collect a fleet of vessels in Hampton Roads, for a combined aggressive movement down the coast. According to Nicolay and Hay, President Lincoln explained personally at a Cabinet meeting the purposes of the Government in this direction to General Sherman, and expressed to him the desire that the expedition should start early in September. The starting was, however, postponed till October, and did not actually take place before the end of that month. On October 29, between fifty and sixty
