Battle of Fort Donelson

• 1. Introduction

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  The Battle of Fort Donelson, fought in February 1862 along the Cumberland River, produced one of the most famous surrender demands in American military history. A single terse note from a Union general named Ulysses S. Grant, refusing anything short of unconditional and immediate surrender, would earn him a nickname that followed him for the rest of his life. But the road to that note ran through snowstorms, botched breakout attempts, and a Confederate command structure so paralyzed by fear of Northern courts that its senior generals fled before the shooting stopped. How did a fort considered more formidable than anything the Union had yet faced become the first great Confederate catastrophe of the war? And how did a general once described by his own superior as reckless end up capturing more soldiers than all previous American generals combined?

• 2. A Fragile Confederate Line

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  Fort Henry fell to Grant on the 6th of February, 1862, and the Confederate high command immediately grasped the scale of the problem. Albert Sidney Johnston's defensive line across Tennessee was now severed. On one side sat Major General Leonidas Polk at Columbus, Kentucky, with roughly 12,000 men. On the other sat William J. Hardee at Bowling Green with around 14,000. Fort Donelson, perched between them, had only about 5,000 troops at the moment Henry surrendered.

  Johnston met with General Pierre G.T. Beauregard and Hardee at Beauregard's headquarters at Covington House in Bowling Green on the 7th of February to decide what to do next. The generals misread why Fort Henry had fallen so easily. They failed to account for the rising Tennessee River, which had flooded the lower gun positions and handed the Union gunboats an artificial advantage. Believing the Confederate defensive strategy was a sham, they chose a course that forfeited the initiative across most of their line.

  Johnston wanted Beauregard to take command of the district, but Beauregard declined because of a throat ailment. Command fell instead to Brigadier General John B. Floyd, who had just come off an unsuccessful assignment under Robert E. Lee in western Virginia. Floyd was also a wanted man in the North. When he served as Secretary of War under President James Buchanan, he had faced allegations of graft and secessionist activities. His background was political rather than military, but he was the senior brigadier general on the Cumberland River, and the command was his.

  Buckner sent Johnston intelligence the following day reporting that Grant's force numbered only 12,000 men. Several officers described the damage to Union ironclads during the Fort Henry fight. Those two reassuring data points convinced Johnston to order Floyd to concentrate his troops at Fort Donelson, confident that roughly 16,000 Confederate soldiers could beat back Grant's army and that the fort's guns could handle the gunboats.

• 3. The Fort Itself

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  Fort Donelson was named for Brigadier General Daniel S. Donelson, who selected its site and began construction in 1861. Where Fort Henry sat on low ground vulnerable to flooding, Donelson rose about 100 feet above the Cumberland River on roughly 100 acres of dry ground. That height gave the defenders a plunging fire advantage against attacking gunboats that Fort Henry had entirely lacked.

  The river batteries contained twelve guns, including ten 32-pounder smoothbore cannons, an 8-inch howitzer, a 6.5-inch rifle known as a 128-pounder, and a 10-inch Columbiad. Surrounding the small town of Dover, three miles of trenches formed a semicircle around the fort. To the west lay Hickman Creek, to the east Lick Creek, and to the north the Cumberland River itself. Dense abatis lined the outer works: cut trees and limbs driven into the ground pointing outward, a tangle designed to break any infantry assault before it reached the Confederate lines.

  The cavalry screening these positions was commanded by Colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest. On the 12th of February, Forrest's troopers spotted a detachment from McClernand's division and opened fire, triggering a brief skirmish before orders from Buckner arrived to fall back within the entrenchments. One weakness in the Union encirclement was already visible: McClernand's right flank did not reach the overflowing Lick Creek, leaving it unanchored and exposed.

• 4. Foote's Costly Gamble

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  Flag Officer Andrew H. Foote arrived on the Cumberland River in the mid-afternoon of the 14th of February, bringing six gunboats and another 10,000 Union reinforcements aboard twelve transport ships. Grant urged him to attack immediately, even though Foote was reluctant to proceed without adequate reconnaissance. By 3:00 p.m. Foote moved his ironclads close to shore and opened fire, repeating the approach that had worked at Fort Henry.

  This time the result was entirely different. The Confederate water batteries sat high above the river, giving them the plunging fire advantage that Fort Henry had lacked. By 4:30 p.m. the assault was over. Foote himself was wounded, in his foot. The wheelhouse of his flagship, USS St. Louis, was shot away and she floated helplessly downriver. USS Louisville was disabled. USS Pittsburg began taking on water. Of the 500 Confederate shots fired, St. Louis was hit 59 times, Carondelet 54, Louisville 36, and Pittsburg 20. Eight Union sailors were killed and 44 were wounded. The Confederates lost no men in the naval engagement, though Captain Joseph Dixon of the river batteries had been killed the day before during Carondelet's earlier bombardment.

  Historian Kendall Gott later suggested Foote would have been better served staying as far downriver as possible and using the fleet's longer-range guns, or attempting to overrun the batteries at night as would be done successfully during the 1863 Vicksburg Campaign. Grant, absorbing the setback, wired his superior Henry W. Halleck that he might have to resort to a siege, and began planning for a harder, longer fight.

• 5. The Breakout That Failed

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  At dawn on the 15th of February, the Confederates launched the assault that their councils of war had been debating for days. Pillow struck McClernand's exposed right flank with the intention of seizing Wynn's Ferry and Forge Roads, the main routes to Nashville. Grant was not there to respond. He had ridden downriver before daybreak to visit Foote on his flagship, leaving orders that no general was to initiate an engagement and designating no one as his second-in-command.

  After two hours of heavy fighting, Pillow's men pushed McClernand's line back one to two miles and cracked the escape route open. McClernand's ammunition ran dangerously low. He sent messengers to Lew Wallace for help, but Wallace had no orders from Grant to respond to an attack on a fellow officer and initially declined. Only when a second messenger arrived in tears crying that the whole army was in danger did Wallace send Colonel Charles Cruft's brigade forward. Cruft's men found themselves flanked by Pillow's Confederates and also began falling back.

  By 12:30 p.m. the Confederate offensive stalled against a defensive line that Wallace's and Thayer's troops had formed on a ridge astride Wynn's Ferry Road. The escape route was open. Nathan Bedford Forrest urged Bushrod Johnson to launch an all-out attack on the disorganized Union troops. Johnson was too cautious to approve it.

  Grant returned to his army in the early afternoon. Riding toward the confusion, he noticed something telling: some of Buckner's men were carrying knapsacks packed with three days of rations, suggesting an army trying to escape rather than win a battle. Grant told an aide: "The one who attacks first now will be victorious. The enemy will have to be in a hurry if he gets ahead of me."

  Then came the decision that stunned Floyd and Buckner alike. Pillow, at 1:30 p.m., ordered his men back to their trenches. He argued that his troops needed to regroup and resupply before any evacuation could begin. The escape route that had cost hours of hard fighting to open was surrendered without the army passing through it. Grant immediately ordered C. F. Smith to seize the Confederate right. Smith replied simply: "I will do it." By nightfall, the 30th Tennessee holding those outer earthworks had been pushed back, and Union troops were positioned to storm the fort at first light.

• 6. The Surrender and Its Price

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  At 1:30 a.m. on the 16th of February, the Confederate commanders held their final council of war at the Dover Hotel. Buckner told the assembled generals that if C. F. Smith attacked again, he could hold for no more than thirty minutes, and he estimated the cost of continued defense at a casualty rate as high as seventy-five percent. Most of the river transports were at that moment carrying wounded soldiers to Nashville and would not return in time to evacuate the command. Buckner's assessment finally carried the meeting.

  Floyd transferred command to Pillow, who passed it immediately to Buckner. Floyd, fearing indictment for his conduct as Secretary of War, left the next morning on the only steamer available, taking his two Virginia regiments with him. Pillow slipped away by small boat across the Cumberland in the night. Forrest, furious at what he called cowardice, announced "I did not come here to surrender my command" and led about seven hundred cavalrymen out through the shallow, icy waters of Lick Creek without encountering a single Union soldier.

  Buckner sent Grant a note requesting a truce and asking for terms. Grant's reply became one of the most quoted dispatches of the entire war: no terms except unconditional and immediate surrender could be accepted, and he proposed to move immediately upon the Confederate works. Buckner, who had once loaned Grant money to return home to Illinois after Grant resigned his army commission in 1854 under allegations of alcoholism, had hoped for generous terms from an old friend. He received none. In his reply accepting surrender, Buckner called the terms ungenerous and unchivalrous.

  Grant was courteous in the aftermath, offering to loan Buckner money to see him through captivity. Buckner declined. More than 12,000 Confederate soldiers were captured, along with 48 artillery pieces and much of the army's equipment. More than 7,000 prisoners were eventually transported to Camp Douglas in Chicago, Camp Morton in Indianapolis, and other camps across the North. Buckner himself was held at Fort Warren in Boston until he was exchanged in August 1862.

• 7. What the Victory Opened

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  Cannons fired and church bells rang across the North when news of the surrender arrived. The Chicago Tribune wrote that Chicago reeled mad with joy. The fall of Forts Henry and Donelson together represented the first significant Union victories of the war, and they opened two great rivers into the heartland of the South.

  Close to a third of Albert Sidney Johnston's entire force was now in Union custody. Johnston evacuated Nashville on the 23rd of February, making it the first Confederate state capital to fall to Union forces. Columbus was evacuated on the 2nd of March. Grant's forces controlled the surrounding rivers and railroads. Most of Tennessee and all of Kentucky came under Union control, though both remained subject to Confederate raids and incursions.

  Grant was promoted to major general of volunteers, second in seniority in the West only to Henry W. Halleck. After newspapers reported that Grant had won the battle with a cigar clamped between his teeth, admirers inundated him with cigars. Before Donelson he had been only a light smoker; finding he could not give the cigars away, he took to smoking them, a habit that likely contributed to his later death from throat cancer.

  Grant himself wrote in his memoirs that if all Union troops in the West had been unified under a single commander to exploit the victory at Fort Donelson, the fighting in the western theaters might have been closed quickly. Johnston was deprived of more than twelve thousand soldiers who might have proved decisive at the Battle of Shiloh, now less than two months away. Fort Donelson was the first of three Confederate armies Grant would capture during the war; the second was John C. Pemberton's at the Siege of Vicksburg, and the third was Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox.