This powerful gunboat, the _Lafayette_, though accompanying Admiral Porter on the Red River expedition, was not one of those entrapped at Alexandria. Her heavy draft precluded her being taken above the Falls. Here we see her lying above Vicksburg in the spring of 1863. She and her sister ship, the _Choctaw_, were side-wheel steamers altered into casemate ironclads with rams. The _Lafayette_ had the stronger armament, carrying two 11-inch Dahlgrens forward, four 9-inch guns in the broadside, and two 24-pound howitzers, with two 100-pound Parrott guns astern. She and the _Choctaw_ were the most important acquisitions to Porter's fleet toward the end of 1862. The _Lafayette_ was built and armed for heavy fighting. She got her first taste of it on the night of April 16, 1863, when Porter took part of his fleet past the Vicksburg batteries to support Grant's crossing of the river in an advance on Vicksburg from below. The Lafayette, with a barge and a transport lashed to her, held her course with difficulty through the tornado of shot and shell which poured from the Confederate batteries on the river front in Vicksburg as soon as the movement was discovered. The _Lafayette_ stood up to this fiery christening and successfully ran the gantlet, as did all the other vessels save one transport. She was commanded during the Red River expedition by Lieutenant-Commander J. P. Foster. [Illustration: FARRAGUT AT THE PINNACLE OF HIS FAME COPYRIGHT, 1911, REVIEW OF REVIEWS CO.] Leaning on the cannon, Commander David Glasgow Farragut and Captain Percival Drayton, chief of staff, stand on the deck of the "Hartford," after the victory in Mobile Bay, of August, 1864. When Gustavus V. Fox, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, proposed the capture of New Orleans from the southward he was regarded as utterly foolhardy. All that was needed, however, to make Fox's plan successful was the man with spirit enough to undertake it and judgment sufficient to carry it out. Here on the deck of the fine new sloop-of-war that had been assigned to him as flagship, stands the man who had just accomplished a greater feat that made him a world figure as famous as Nelson. The Confederacy had found its great general among its own people, but the great admiral of the war, although of Southern birth, had refused to fight against the flag for which, as a boy in the War of 1812, he had seen men die. Full of the fighting spirit of the old navy, he was able to achieve the first great victory that gave new hope to the Federal cause. Percival Drayton was also a Southerner, a South Carolinian, whose brothers and uncles were fighting for the South. [Illustration: "FAR BY GRAY MORGAN'S WALLS"--THE MOBILE BAY FORT, BATTERED BY FARRAGUT'S GUNS COPYRIGHT, 1911, REVIEW OF REVIEWS CO.]