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David Dixon Porter (1813–1891)


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.


Alexander Gardener (1821–1882)
Albumen silver print, 1865
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

 

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