Having thus completely achieved that "success" which the civilians of the Navy Department had "required" of him, Farragut was ambitious to accomplish more. He proposed further operations of like character against other Confederate ports from which commerce was being carried on in spite of the blockade. It was quite obvious that no blockade could stop this commerce on which the South so largely depended for its supplies. The only way in which the shutting in of the Confederacy could be made effective was to capture the defensive works of every Confederate port. To that task Farragut earnestly desired to address himself. It was his purpose to make himself master of every Confederate seaport, relieve the blockading squadrons of their expensive, perilous, difficult, and ineffective work, and completely to seal the South against all outward or inward commerce with the world. His plan was to substitute the absolute possession of Confederate ports for their manifestly inefficient blockade. He asked permission, therefore, to proceed at once upon this mission, beginning with Mobile. The civilians in control of the Navy Department promptly said him nay. They had other plans of a more spectacular character. So they ordered Farragut to proceed up the Mississippi river and waste precious time and still more precious lives, in a theatric but futile "running of the batteries" at Vicksburg and Port Hudson. Farragut obeyed of course. It was the habit of his long life to obey. But he felt keenly the loss of opportunity which this order of a badly water-logged cabinet bureau imposed upon him. While he was thus, under compulsion of the incapables, wasting his time in the Mississippi, the Confederates were sending out precious cargoes of cotton and bringing in still more precious ship-loads of cloth, shoes, artillery harness, quinine, arms, ammunition and everything else that ministered to the maintenance of their armies in the field. Here was another of those blunders of administration which helped to prolong the war to twice its necessary length and subjected the country, North and South, to needless and intolerable burdens. But how should a civilian Secretary of the Navy understand, as Farragut did, the ways in which the navy could be made most effectively to contribute to the ending of the war? A system that puts a Gideon Welles in control of a Farragut must take the consequences of incapacity on the part of its official head. Welles forbade Farragut to proceed to the conquest and closing of the Confederate ports. He ordered him instead to waste time and energy and human life in futile and fruitless operations in front of Vicksburg, where even the most ordinary intelligence should have seen clearly that the effective work must be done by the land forces, and where Grant and Sherman were ready to do it well.