Port Hudson did not hold out much longer after Vicksburg's fall, as Porter had predicted. The War in the West was won. "The great produce of the Midwest could flow freely down the Mississippi to New Orleans, and the South was severed."
Raphael Semmes later wrote: "This was a terrible blow to us. It not only lost us an army, but cut the Confederacy in two, by giving the enemy the command of the Mississippi River.... Vicksburg and Gettysburg mark an era in the war.... We need no better evidence of the shock which had been given to the public confidence in the South, by those two disasters, than the simple fact, that our currency depreciated almost immediately a thousand percent!"
President Lincoln wrote, "The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea....Nor must Uncle Sam's web feet be forgotten (referring to the Navy). At all the watery margins they have been present. Not only on the deep sea, the broad bay, the rapid river, but also up the narrow, muddy bayou, and wherever the ground was a little damp, they have been and made their attacks.
Way to Go, Navy!! --Old B-Runner
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