Civil War, Western Theater. On April 25, 1862, the forces of Flag Officer David Glasgow Farragut seize New Orleans, Louisiana. Farragut had commenced actions against the city on April 16. Confederate General Mansfield Lovell and his approximately 4,000 troops had already withdrawn from the city. New Orleans officially surrendered on April 29, 1862.
Following New Orleans’ fall, the attention of the Union’s leadership switched to the campaign against Vicksburg, Mississippi, months before identified as an even more important objective for the Union.
According to David Dixon Porter’s 1885 account of a meeting he attended earlier in the war with President Lincoln to discuss the campaign against New Orleans, Lincoln had said:
The war can never be brought to a close until that key [of Vicksburg] is in our pocket…. [As] valuable as New Orleans will be to us, Vicksburg will be more so…. It means hog and hominy without limit, fresh troops from all the States of the far South, and a cotton country where they can raise staple without interference.*
