NAVAL OPERATIONS IN THE VICKSBURG CAMPAIGN.

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The next day at 1 o’clock the army was reported ready, and the fleetmoved up to a second attack. The same disposition was made of the vessels.All of the casemate-guns were silenced, No. 3, which was in the casemateassigned to the Cincinnati , being reduced to a complete wreck. At the sametime the troops gradually advanced, and were just preparing for a finalassault, when white flags were run up all along the works. Lieutenant Dun-nington surrendered to Porter, and General Churchill to McClernand .

On the 30th of January Grant assumed command of the army before Vicks-burg . The enemy’s right flank rested on the Yazoo Valley, a vast tract ofpartly overflowed country, oval in shape, two hundred miles long, and inter-sected by innumerable streams and bayous. This oval valley was boundedby the Mississippi on the west, and on the north, east, and south by whatWas in reality one long stream, known in its successive parts as the Cold-water, Tallahatchie, and Yazoo rivers. The bounding streams made the val-ley almost an island, the only break in their continuity being at the northernend of the valley, at Yazoo Pass, a bayou which had formerly connectedthe Coldwater with the Mississippi , but which had been closed by the erec-tion of a levee several years before. The greater part of the valley wasimpassable for troops, and the streams were deemed impassable for vessels.The district was a rich storehouse of Confederate supplies, which werecarried in small vessels through obscure passages and channels to YazooCity, and thence to Vicksburg . At Yazoo City also, protected from assaultby torpedoes and by the forts at Haynes’s Bluff, was a large navy-yard,where several gun-boats were in course of erection.

Porter’s plan was to cut the levee at Yazoo Pass, thus restoring theentrance and raising the water in the rivers, and by this means to get in therear of Yazoo City before the enemy could prepare his defenses. Involving,as it did, a circuit of some two hundred miles through the tributary streamsin the enemy’s country, it was an audacious and original conception, but stilla sagacious piece of naval strategy.

General Grant adopted the plan, and on the 2d of February the work ofcutting the levee was begun by Colonel James Harrison Wilson of the Engi-neers . On the evening of the 3d a mine was exploded in the remainingportion of the embankment, and the waters of the Mississippi rushed throughin a torrent, cutting a passage forty yards wide, and sweeping everythingbefore them. The difference in the levels was eight or nine feet, and somedays elapsed before the new entrance was practicable for vessels. The firstreconnoissance developed the fact that the Confederates had already beenvigilant enough to block the way to the Coldwater by felling trees on thebanks of the Pass. The removal of these occasioned a further delay of twoWeeks, when time was of great importance.

The naval expedition, which was commanded by Lieutenant-CommanderBatson Smith, was composed of two iron-clads, the Chillicothe, Lieutenant-Commander James P. Foster, and the DeKalb , Lieutenant-Commander Johnbb Walker, and the tin-clads Battler , Forest Rose , Romeo , Marmora , Signal ,a nd Petrel. To these were added two vessels of the ram fleet, the Fulton and