10 August 1864

"Misery upon misery.
Mobile going as New Orleans went.* Those western men have not held their towns as we have held and hold Charleston, or as the Virginians hold Richmond. And they call us frill-shirt, silk-stocking chivalry, a set of dandy Miss Nancys. They fight desperately in their bloody street brawls. We bear privation and discipline best. Brag is a good dog. Holdfast, a better."

*Victories by U.S. Admiral David Farragut preceded the fall of both New Orleans and Mobile. At the battle of Mobile Bay on August 5, Farragut steamed past Confederate shore batteries to enable Union troops to besiege forts protecting the city.

June 1862, the war according to Mr Venable

Charles Scott Venable
(1827-1900)

"Mr Venable* don't mince matters. 'If we do not [strike] a blow—a blow that will be felt—it will be soon all up with us. The Southwest will be lost to us. We cannot afford to shilly-shally much longer.
'Thousands are enlisting on the other side in New Orleans. [Benjamin] Butler holds out inducements. To be sure, they are principally foreigners who want to escape starvation.
'Tennessee we may count as gone, since we abandoned her at Corinth, Fort Pillow, and Memphis. A man must be sent there—or it is all gone.'
In my heart I feel 'all is gone' now."

*Charles Scott Venable, a Virginian, was present at the bombardment of Fort Sumter in April 1861. At the time he was serving in the South Carolina militia. In Spring 1862 he joined Robert E. Lee's staff and remained with him to Appomattox Court House, earning the moniker "Faithful Old Venable" from Lee himself.

27 April 1862, New Orleans, the aftermath

"New Orleans gone—and with it the Confederacy. Are we not cut in two? That Mississippi ruins us if lost. The Confederacy done to death by the politicians. What wonder we are lost. Those wretched creatures the Congress and the legislature could never rise to the greatness of the occasion. They seem to think they were in a neighborhood squabble about precedence.
The soldiers have done their duty.

Panoramic view of New Orleans, 1862,
Federal fleet at anchor in the river

All honor to the Army. Statesmen busy as bees about their own places or their personal honor—too busy to see the enemy at a distance. With a microscope they were examining their own interest or their own wrongs, forgetting the interest of the people they represent. They were concocting newspaper paragraphs to injure the government. No matter how vital, nothing—nothing—can be kept from the enemy. They must publish themselves night and day and what they are doing, or the omniscient Buncombe will forget them.
This fall of New Orleans means utter ruin to the private fortunes of the Prestons. Mr P came from New Orleans so satisfied with Mansfield Lovell and the tremendous steam rams he saw there. While in New Orleans, Burnside offered Mr P five hundred thousand dollars, a debt due from him to Mr P, and he refused to take it.* He said the money was safer in Burnside's hand than in his. And so it may prove—ugly as the outlook is now. Burnside is wide awake. He is not a man to be caught napping."

*John S. Preston sold his extensive Louisiana sugar plantations to John Burnside, a New Orleans merchant, in 1857. These holdings helped make Burnside the greatest sugar planter in the state during the 1860s.