Every Southern officer was then suspected, and it required Porter’s utmost powers to convince the Secretary of the Navy that Farragut was the man for the great effort which was to be made. On Porter’s going to Hastings, he found Farragut thoroughly in accord with the plan and eager for the work. He reached Washington on December 12, 1861, and on January 9, 1862, was appointed commander-in-chief of the West Gulf Blockading Squadron, with his flag in the _Hartford_, a sister ship to the _Brooklyn_, each carrying twenty-two 9-inch smooth-bore guns and two 20-pounder rifles. It is far from the least of Porter’s services to his country that he should have been the instrument of this selection. We all know the story of the passage of the forts by the fleet (numbering seventeen ships, with 179 guns) with the rising of the moon, early in the morning of April 24, 1862; of the fire rafts (one of which set the _Hartford_ afire); of the fight with the eleven Confederate steamers (one an ironclad ram) above the forts; the arrival off New Orleans. Says George W. Cable: “I went to the riverside; there far into the night I saw hundreds of drays carrying cotton out of the presses and yards to the wharves, where it was fired. The glare of these sinuous miles of flame set men and women weeping and wailing thirty miles away on the farther shore of Lake Pontchartrain. But the next day was a day of terrors.... The firemen were out, but they cast fire upon the waters, putting the torch to the empty ships and cutting them loose to float down the river. Whoever could go was going.... My employer left the city. I closed the doors and ran to the river to see the sights.... ‘Are the Yankee ships in sight?’ I asked an idler. He pointed to the tops of their naked masts as they showed up across the huge bend of the river. They were engaging the batteries at Camp Chalmette--the old field of Jackson’s renown. Presently that was over. Ah me! I see them now as they came slowly round Slaughter House Point into full view, silent, so grim and terrible, black with men, heavy with deadly portent, the long-banished Stars and Stripes flying against the frowning sky. Oh, for the _Mississippi_, the _Mississippi_! Just then she came down upon them. But now drifting helplessly--a mass of flames. “The crowds on the levee howled and screamed with rage. The swarming decks answered never a word; but one old tar on the _Hartford_, standing with a lanyard in his hand beside a great pivot gun, so plain in view you could see him smile, silently patted its big black breech and blandly grinned.”[52] The ships anchored, and now came as bold an act as any of these stirring hours. Captain Theodorus Bailey, Farragut’s flag captain, and Lieutenant George Perkins, of beloved memory in the navy, landed and calmly walked through a howling mob crying “Hang them! hang them!” to the city hall and demanded the hauling down of the state flag and surrender of the city.