Events

Admiral David Farragut's Union fleet ran a gauntlet of fire from two Confederate forts on the lower Mississippi on the night of April 24, 1862, and seized New Orleans five days later on April 29 without a land battle. The capture of the Confederacy's largest city and most important port was a strategic blow from which the South never recovered. New Orleans controlled access to the Mississippi River, the interior waterway system, and the cotton trade that financed the Confederate war effort. Its loss cut the Confederacy's connection to the western states and deprived it of irreplaceable economic resources. Farragut's approach was characteristically aggressive. Rather than reduce Forts Jackson and St. Philip through prolonged bombardment, as his orders contemplated, he decided to run past them at night with his entire fleet of 24 vessels. The passage began at 2 AM under heavy fire from both forts and a small Confederate naval flotilla. Fire rafts floated downriver toward the Union ships, and the flagship Hartford was briefly set ablaze. The passage took roughly ninety minutes and cost Farragut one ship sunk and several damaged, a price he considered acceptable. The city itself was defenseless once the forts were bypassed. Confederate General Mansfield Lovell, recognizing that his 3,000 militia could not resist Farragut's guns, withdrew without fighting. New Orleans's civilian population was furious, and the reception was hostile. Women dumped chamber pots on Union soldiers from balconies. Men refused to lower Confederate flags. Mayor John Monroe declined to surrender formally, forcing Farragut to send marines to raise the US flag over government buildings. The occupation of New Orleans under General Benjamin Butler became one of the most controversial episodes of the war. Butler's General Order No. 28, which declared that any woman who insulted Union soldiers would be "treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation," caused international outrage and earned him the nickname "Beast Butler" throughout the South. But the military consequences of Farragut's victory were far more significant than the occupation's indignities. Combined with Grant's capture of Vicksburg in July 1863, the fall of New Orleans gave the Union complete control of the Mississippi, splitting the Confederacy in two.

Patrick Pearse walked out of a shattered building on Moore Street in Dublin on April 29, 1916, carrying a white flag and a letter of unconditional surrender that ended the Easter Rising after six days of fighting. The rebellion had failed by every military measure. Most of central Dublin was in ruins, shelled by British artillery and a gunboat on the River Liffey. The rebel garrisons, cut off from each other and running out of ammunition and food, could not have held out another day. Pearse surrendered to save civilian lives, which were being lost at a rate far exceeding combatant casualties on either side. The final toll was devastating for a conflict that lasted less than a week. At least 485 people died: 260 civilians, 143 British soldiers, and 82 rebels. Over 2,600 were wounded. The civilian dead included men, women, and children caught in crossfire, killed by stray shells, or shot by nervous soldiers who could not distinguish combatants from bystanders in the urban chaos. The material destruction was concentrated along O'Connell Street and in the neighborhoods around the rebel strongholds, but the economic damage spread across the entire city. British authorities compounded their military victory with a political catastrophe. General Sir John Maxwell, given emergency powers as military governor, ordered summary court-martials for the rebel leaders. Between May 3 and May 12, sixteen men were executed by firing squad at Kilmainham Gaol, including all seven signatories of the Proclamation of the Republic. The executions were conducted in secrecy, in small batches, over ten excruciating days, creating a drip-feed of martyrdom that turned Irish public opinion decisively against British rule. James Connolly, too badly wounded to stand, was executed strapped to a chair. The transformation of public sentiment was remarkable in its speed. Dubliners who had jeered the rebels as they were marched to prison after the surrender were mourning them as heroes within weeks. Sinn Fein, which had no connection to the Rising but was blamed for it by the British press, won a landslide victory in the 1918 general election. The Irish War of Independence began in January 1919. By 1922, the Irish Free State was established. Pearse and his comrades had calculated that their deaths would achieve what their arms could not, and they were right.