Before the army ever marched on Port Hudson, the navy tried to handle it the navy’s way, by simply steaming past. The man who tried it was Rear Admiral David G. Farragut (North), the most aggressive sailor in the Union fleet, the officer who had already run his ships past the forts below New Orleans and captured the South’s largest city, New Orleans itself, the year before. His problem in March 1863 was the Red River crossing: Confederate supplies were still flowing across the Mississippi above Port Hudson, and Farragut wanted his warships upstream to cut that traffic. To get them upstream, they had to pass under the bluff guns. So on the night of March 14, 1863, two full months before the land siege began, he tried to run them.

He had seven warships, big and small: the heavy sloops-of-war (full-size oceangoing fighting ships) Hartford (his flagship), Richmond, and Monongahela; the side-wheel frigate Mississippi (a frigate being a large warship a notch below a ship-of-the-line); and a cluster of smaller, shallower gunboats, several of them lashed to the larger ships’ sides so a crippled boat could be dragged along by a healthy one. The plan was to slip past in the dark. It did not stay dark. The Confederates lit bonfires on the west bank and set the whole river aglow, and the bluff batteries opened on the fleet as it crawled around the bend.

What followed was about three hours of close-range slaughter on the water. The guns on the 80-foot bluff fired down onto the decks; the ships, fighting the current and the hairpin turn, could barely make headway. The USS Mississippi took the worst of it. She ran aground under the muzzles, stuck fast against the bottom and unable to fight her way free. Her crew set her ablaze to keep her out of Confederate hands and abandoned her. She drifted off the bar burning, swung downriver lighting the water for a mile, and around five in the morning the fire reached her magazine (the ship’s gunpowder store, packed below the waterline) and she blew apart in a single white detonation that men on both banks felt in their chests. Richmond was disabled and drifted back downriver. One by one the ships fell back, all but two. Only the Hartford, with the gunboat Albatross lashed to her side, fought all the way through and continued upstream toward the Red River. Union losses that night ran to roughly 78 killed or missing and 35 wounded; the Confederates on the bluff lost almost no one.

The run made one thing clear. Farragut had gotten a single ship past, but he had lost a frigate and proved the larger point in the worst way: the bluff guns could not simply be steamed past. A fleet could not pry Port Hudson off the river. If the fort was going to fall, it would have to be taken from the land, surrounded, dug out, and starved or stormed by an army. That job belonged to someone else.