Farragut's first employment was as a member of a board to recommend officers for retirement from active service, under an act approved August 3, 1861. The object of this act was to assist the Department in the discrimination necessary to be made between the competent and those disabled by years or infirmity, for up to that time there had been no regular system of retirement, and men were retained on the active list past the period of efficiency, because no provision for removing them existed. The duty, though most important with war actually existing, was delicate and trying, and far from consonant to Farragut's active, enterprising character. More suitable employment was, however, fast approaching. [Illustration: SCENE OF FARRAGUT'S OPERATIONS, 1862-1864.] CHAPTER VII. THE NEW ORLEANS EXPEDITION. 1862. The necessity of controlling the Mississippi valley had been early realized by the United States Government. In its hands the great stream would become an impassable barrier between two large sections of the Southern Confederacy; whereas in the possession of the latter it remained a link binding together all the regions through which it flowed, or which were penetrated by any of its numerous tributaries. The extensive territory west of the river also produced a large part of the provisions upon which depended the Southern armies, whose main field of action was, nevertheless, on the eastern side. In a country habitually so unprepared for war as is the United States, and where, of course, such a contingency as an intestine struggle between the sections could not have been provided for, there seemed room to hope that the national forces might by rapid action seize the whole course of the river, before the seceding States were able to take adequate measures for its defense. The Government had the support of that part of the country which had received the largest manufacturing development, and could, therefore, most quickly prepare the material for war, in which both sides were lamentably deficient; and, what was yet more important, it possessed in the new navy built since 1855 an efficient weapon to which the South had nothing to oppose. The hope was extravagant and doomed to disappointment; for to overrun and hold so extensive a territory as the immediate basin of the Mississippi required a development of force on the one side and a degree of exhaustion on the other which could not be reached so early in the war. The relative strengths, though unequal, were not yet sufficiently disproportioned to enable the gigantic work to be accomplished; and the principal result of an effort undertaken without due consideration was to paralyze a large fraction of a navy too small in numbers to afford the detachment which was paraded gallantly, but uselessly, above New Orleans. Nor was this the worst; the time thus consumed in marching up the hill in order at once to march down again