The Fall of New Orleans Revisited

Patrick Young asks:

The largest disaster for the Confederacy in the first 13 months of the war was the Union capture of New Orleans. The city was the largest in the Confederacy, the second largest port in the U.S. in 1860, and the principal likely port for shipment of cotton to Liverpool if exports were resumed. Could Confederate forces engaged in quixotic expeditions into northern Missouri, New Mexico, Arizona, etc. have been moved to Louisiana in time to forestall the capture of the city and thereby deny the Union a choke hold on any possible commercial use of the Mississippi? This would have also substantially complicated Union moves against Vicksburg and denied the Union of the political and manpower advantages that came from capture of the city.

Could the Confederacy have prevented the fall of New Orleans? Was there a serious effort to recapture it? Should there have been?

 

Joseph Hooker in Your Boston Bedroom

My wife is particularly taken by HGTV’s contest this year, in which the channel is giving away an apartment in a modern hi-rise. She forced me to watch a show on the apartment this morning.

The apartment features iconic imagery from Boston, including this rather large picture of a general in the bedroom suite;

The folks in the show identified this statue as being the George Washington monument at the west entrance to the Boston Public Garden.

Washington in Boston

Hooker in Boston

But it is Joseph Hooker … the headgear gives it way.

So, if you want a Hooker in your bedroom, go to Boston and win that apartment.