Flag Officer Farragut gathered his forces at the mouth of the Mississippi River to commence one phase of the move designed to split the Confederacy asunder along that major waterway.

The steamer USS Westfield took William Bacon under tow on the morning of 11 April and, at 0915, headed upriver; at 1300, the crew on board the mortar schooner began dressing the masts with green bushes in an attempt to camouflage the ship—a standard practice throughout the flotilla as it began to clear for action with the Confederate forces upstream.

William Bacon and the other ships of the mortar flotilla kept up a steady, heavy fire on the two Confederate forts over the next week.

Three days later, the forts—heavily battered by the shells from the mortar flotilla and surrounded on the landward sides by the Army's expeditionary forces under General Benjamin Franklin Butler—surrendered, thus removing a formidable barrier to the Federal operations.

William Bacon, her task in the reduction of the forts completed, dropped down the river to Southwest Pass, where she awaited further orders.

Soon, the blockaders learned the identity of the strange ship: she was the English steamer Nicolai I, bound from Nassau, New Providence, in the Bahamas, for Charleston, South Carolina, with a cargo of dry goods, arms, and ammunition.