Aaron Sheehan-Dean
speaker
924 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 24 Aug
Aaron Sheehan-Dean’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
River, St.
Philip and Jackson, on either side of the passage.
And they have a dense field of fire.
And New Orleanians believe no ship will be able to pass through beyond those forts.
So that's our defense.
And what happens in April of 1862 is David Farragut pushes his ships past those.
He takes hits.
And he loses ships, but he is able to move past them.
And once he does, the route to New Orleans is unobstructed.
And as you say, the city is essentially undefended.
Those 8,000 soldiers are evacuated immediately.
And so when the Union arrives, the city is effectively surrendered without firing a shot.
something that creates a great deal of dissension, certainly among the women of New Orleans who complained bitterly and very creatively to their men about the sort of humiliation of having the South's richest place just handed up to the Union Army as it's coming upriver.
Well, it's the next largest city moving upriver.
As you know, Grant is going to be fighting downriver.
And of course, his chief obstacle is Vicksburg, the Confederate Gibraltar, as they called it, a place that Confederates believed was really untakable.
And in fact, the north does get bottled up north of there.
So it puts a lot more pressure on the effort to go south and to move upriver.
Just above Baton Rouge is a small place called Port Hudson, like Vicksburg, an elevated cliff that presents a very thorny obstacle.
So Baton Rouge becomes essential to hold as a launching pad for attacks at Port Hudson and then to move upriver to Vicksburg.
Showing 641–660 of 924 · page 33 of 47
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