Assigned To The Mortar Flotilla
The schooner departed New York Harbor on 4 February 1861 as a part of the Mortar Flotilla assembled to become a part of Flag Officer David Glasgow Farragut's newly established West Gulf Blockading Squadron. Besides sealing off the Confederate coast between Pensacola, Florida, and the mouth of the Rio Grande, Farragut was charged with leading a Union task force from the Gulf of Mexico up the Mississippi River to capture New Orleans, Louisiana. Once he had taken the "Crescent City", the flag officer was to continue on upstream until he met the warships of the Western Flotilla which were fighting their way down from the Ohio River and upper Mississippi River. The Lincoln Administration hoped that, if all went well, this strategy would cut the Confederacy in two and thus hasten the end of the rebellion.
However, two formidable defensive works, Forts Jackson and St. Philip, were located on opposite sides of the Mississippi below New Orleans, protecting the Southern metropolis from seaborne enemies. The Mortar Flotilla — commanded by Comdr. David Dixon Porter — had been set up to neutralize the batteries within these Confederate fortresses while Farragut's deep-draft, salt-water warships dashed past them to take New Orleans.
Read more about this topic: USS Arletta (1860)
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“As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn’t make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting—the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.”
—Saul Bellow (b. 1915)
“As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn’t make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting—the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.”
—Saul Bellow (b. 1915)
“As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn’t make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting—the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.”
—Saul Bellow (b. 1915)
“For the first time I’m content to see
What poor mortar and bricks
I have to build with, knowing that I can
Never in seventy years be more a man
Than now a sack of meal upon two sticks.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)