April 25, 1862---New Orleans is restored to the Union

APRIL 25, 1862:          

Farragut’s fleet reaches the quays at New Orleans and trains its guns on the city. Because the water between the levees is higher than the city itself, the Union ships are looking down on the city from a height, making it an easy target. New Orleans capitulates without a shot being fired. Still, local Confederates remained defiant. Armed mobs within the city defied the Union officers and marines sent to City Hall. Major General Mansfield Lovell C.S.A. refused to surrender the city, along with the city’s Mayor. A Union flag raised over the former U.S. Mint by marines of the U.S.S. PENSACOLA was pulled down and destroyed. Despite these provocations and other hostile acts Commodore Farragut refused to destroy the city in response. 

The capture of this vital southern city was a huge blow to the Confederacy. Southern military strategists had planned for a Union attack down the Mississippi, not from the Gulf of Mexico, and so had concentrated their forces in northern Mississippi and western Tennessee.  These were the troops that fought at Shiloh. For defense from seaward, New Orleans had only Fort Jackson and Fort St. Philip, 3,000 State militiamen, two uncompleted ironclads, and the Mosquito Fleet. Farragut’s fleet consisted of 24 gunboats, 19 mortar boats, and 15,000 soldiers, and it made quick work of the Mosquito Fleet in bypassing the forts.

At New Orleans, Confederate General Mansfield Lovell surveyed his tiny force and realized that resistance was futile. If he resisted, Lovell told Mayor John Monroe, Farragut would bombard the city and inflict severe damage and casualties. Lovell pulled his troops out of New Orleans and the Yankees began arriving on April 25.

Actually, many Confederate loyalists were outraged at the city’s easy surrender, though it is perhaps unsurprising. By far the largest city in the South by the outset of the war, in 1860 New Orleans was one of the greatest ports in the world, with 33 different steamship lines, and trade worth 500 million dollars passing through the city. As far as population, the city not only outnumbered any other city in the South, it was larger than the combination of the largest four other cities, with an estimated population of 168,675.  It was also the South’s only truly international city. Having been settled by Americans only after 1815, much of the population still had French or Spanish roots and spoke those languages daily.

New Orleans had a lenient attitude toward its blacks, many of whom were freedmen or freeborn or mixed-race, and some of whom owned slaves and land. The city had raised both Confederate and Union regiments, and its Louisiana Native Guards were an all-black C.S.A. unit of freemen (later in the war, the Native Guards joined the Union Army). 

As the South’s major commercial port, New Orleans attracted business factors from all over Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean.  The city’s business connections with Europe and the North led a group of City Fathers to call for the secession of New Orleans from the Confederacy, and the establishment of a Free City, just as some City Fathers in New York City had demanded the same in light of New York’s connections with Europe and the South. Unlike New York, however (where the call went unheeded) the Confederate and State government saw fit to arrest some of the New Orleans leadership.

New Orleans suffered economically during its time under the Rebel flag, primarily because of the Union blockade which cut its revenues severely. However, businessmen entering the Confederacy via Mexico and via blockade-runner still enjoyed using the city as a cosmopolitan meeting ground and it remained the C.S.A.’s window on the world.  Its loss was keenly felt by the Confederacy, both domestically (the defeat increased a growing skepticism that the war could be won), and internationally (after the loss of New Orleans overseas business leaders and government leaders both, deemed the Confederacy unable to sustain itself and cut their dealings with it to a minimum). 

The restoration of the city to the United States, though it troubled many locals, meant that the blockade was lifted. Though the city remained under martial law for the next three years, the city immediately began to regain ground it had lost during the Confederate period.