David Dixon Porter achieved an eminence second only
to that of David Farragut as a naval officer during
the Civil War. In 1862 he was chosen to command
the Mississippi Squadron and within the year was
assisting Ulysses S. Grant in the Union assault
on Vicksburg. One historian writes that although
Porter’s services “were no way spectacular
nor comparable in popular appeal with those of Farragut,
they had demanded great energy and unusual organizing
and administrative abilities.” He spent the
final weeks of the war in Virginia on the James
River, where, aboard his flagship, the Malvern,
he received President Abraham Lincoln. Porter was
the only naval commander of the war to win the thanks
of Congress three times.
This photograph of Porter was taken on board
the Malvern just after his victorious siege
of Fort Fisher in North Carolina. The fall of
this fortification at the mouth of Cape Fear River
in January 1865 closed off the port of Wilmington,
which was the Confederacy’s last significant
link with the Atlantic.
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