Battle of Fort Henry

• 1. Introduction

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  On the morning of the 6th of February, 1862, Brig. Gen. Lloyd Tilghman stood inside a fort that was more than half underwater. The Tennessee River had risen so high that the powder magazine sat beneath the surface, and nine of his guns remained above water. He had already sent the bulk of his garrison marching overland to safety. What came next would decide the Union's grip on the entire Western Theater.

  The Battle of Fort Henry lasted 75 minutes. When it was over, Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant had achieved the first important Union victory in the West, though he had not yet arrived to see it. The man who surrendered the fort did so to a naval fleet, not an army, and the surrendering party had to sail out of the fort in a small boat because the gates were submerged. The question worth asking is how a Confederate position guarding two of the most critical rivers in the South came to fall so swiftly and so completely to a fleet of hastily constructed ironclads.

• 2. A Fort Built on Swampland

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  In May 1861, Tennessee's governor Isham G. Harris appointed state attorney Daniel S. Donelson as a brigadier general and charged him with building river fortifications across Middle Tennessee. Donelson found ideal sites along the rivers, but those sites sat inside Kentucky, which had declared neutrality and was off limits.

  Moving upriver into Tennessee, Donelson selected a site on the Cumberland River for one fort, named it Fort Donelson, and then moved 12 miles west to the Tennessee River for a second. He named this second position Fort Henry, after Tennessee Senator Gustavus Adolphus Henry Sr. Donelson placed Fort Henry on the east bank of the Tennessee so that a single garrison might travel between the two forts and defend both. He assumed the two would never face simultaneous attack.

  The problem was the ground itself. Fort Henry sat on low, swampy terrain, dominated by higher hills across the river. Donelson's own surveying team objected. Adna Anderson, a civil engineer, and Maj. William F. Foster of the 1st Tennessee Infantry both raised formal appeals, but Colonel Bushrod Johnson of the Tennessee Corps of Engineers approved the site anyway. The fort was a five-sided, open-bastioned earthen structure covering 10 acres, with walls 20 feet thick at the base rising 20 feet above the river at normal water levels. Heavy rains could flood more than half of it, including the armory. Construction began in mid-June 1861, using men from the 10th Tennessee Infantry and slaves. The first cannon was test-fired on July 12 of that year.

  Armed primarily with antique flintlock rifles from the War of 1812, the garrison also made use of a weapon then unique in the history of warfare: a naval minefield of anchored torpedoes rigged to explode on contact beneath the shipping channel. High water and leaking metal containers made it useless when the battle arrived.

• 3. The Union Opens Its Hand

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  By January 1862, political pressure from President Abraham Lincoln was pushing Union commanders in the West toward action before Washington's birthday on the 22nd of February. The Union military in the region was fractured into three separate departments that could not agree on strategy. Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck, commanding the Department of Missouri, and Brig. Gen. Don Carlos Buell, commanding the Department of the Ohio, were barely coordinating at all.

  Grant proposed moving against Fort Henry to draw Confederate attention away from Buell's intended advance toward Nashville. Halleck, eager to improve his standing relative to his rival Buell, and worried by rumors that Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard was about to arrive with 15 regiments, authorized the operation on the 30th of January, 1862. Grant left Cairo, Illinois on February 2, four days later.

  His force comprised 15,000-17,000 men in two divisions under Brig. Gens. John A. McClernand and Charles F. Smith, supported by the Western Gunboat Flotilla under Flag Officer Andrew Hull Foote. The flotilla included four ironclad gunboats, with the flagship USS Carondelet joined by USS St. Louis and USS Essex under Foote's direct command, and three timberclad vessels, USS Conestoga, USS Tyler, and USS Lexington, commanded by Lt. Seth Ledyard Phelps. Transport shortages meant the army needed two trips upriver just to deliver all of Grant's men. These troops, though not yet known by the name, were the nucleus of what would become the Union Army of the Tennessee.

• 4. Tilghman's Calculation

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  Brig. Gen. Lloyd Tilghman took command of both Forts Henry and Donelson in January 1862, inheriting a combined force of 4,900 men. At Fort Henry alone, roughly 3,000-3,400 men in two brigades answered to Colonels Adolphus Heiman and Joseph Drake. By the time Grant's divisions were landing on the 4th and the 5th of February, Tilghman had already grasped the situation clearly.

  Only nine guns remained above the waterline for use in any defense. Tilghman told his men he intended to hold off the Union fleet for one hour, enough time for the garrison to escape overland to Fort Donelson, 12 miles away. Fort Heiman across the river was abandoned on February 4. By February 5, all but a fragment of the garrison had marched out. The soldiers left behind were 54 men of Company B, 1st Tennessee Artillery, staying to man what guns they could. Confederate naval gun crews had suffered four casualties, one killed and three wounded, from gunboat fire during the afternoon of February 5.

  Tilghman himself spent the night of the 5th and 6th aboard the steamer Dunbar, anchored 1.5 miles upstream. Around midnight he sent a dispatch to General Johnston with a situational update, then returned to Fort Henry just before dawn. He arrived to face Foote's seven gunboats, which took up position at 12:30 p.m. and opened fire from 1,700 yards.

• 5. Seventy-Five Minutes

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  Foote deployed his four ironclad gunboats in a line abreast, with the three timberclads held further back for long-range covering fire. The high river had reduced the elevation advantage of Fort Henry's guns, allowing the ironclads to approach without presenting their weaker points to Confederate fire. Every hit the Confederates landed struck the ironclads where their armor was heaviest.

  The USS Essex was not so lucky. A 32-pound Confederate shot penetrated the ironclad and struck the middle boiler. Scalding steam swept through half the ship. Commander William D. Porter was among the 32 killed or wounded. The Essex was taken out of action for the rest of the campaign.

  After 75 minutes of bombardment, with only one cannon still working, the powder magazine submerged, and the fleet closing to within 400 yards for a final close-range assault, Tilghman ordered the Confederate flag lowered and a white sheet raised on the fort's flagpole. The Union gunboats ceased fire immediately. The surrendering party had to sail out through the fort's sally port in a small launch to reach the ship Cincinnati for the formal negotiation. Twelve officers and 82 men of the garrison surrendered. Other casualties from the fort's garrison were estimated at 15 killed and 20 wounded. The evacuating Confederate force had left all of its artillery and equipment behind.

  Grant and his troops reached Fort Henry at around 3 p.m. and found the garrison already gone. McClernand's division arrived 30 minutes after that. Grant wired Halleck a blunt dispatch: "Fort Henry is ours.... I shall take and destroy Fort Donelson on the 8th and return to Fort Henry." By February 8, Fort Henry was completely underwater.

• 6. Phelps Raids Upriver

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  Within hours of the surrender, Foote sent Lt. Seth Ledyard Phelps with the three timberclads, Tyler, Conestoga, and Lexington, upriver on a raid. The ironclads had taken damage in the bombardment and were too slow for pursuit duty, so the lighter wooden vessels went ahead alone.

  Phelps' raiders reached Muscle Shoals, just past Florence, Alabama, the navigable limit of the Tennessee River. Along the way they destroyed supplies and an important bridge of the Memphis and Ohio Railroad, 25 miles upriver. They also captured several Confederate vessels including Sallie Wood, Muscle, and Eastport, an ironclad still under construction. When the citizens of Florence appealed for their town and its railroad bridge to be spared, Phelps agreed, finding no military value in the target.

  One 19th-century account described the mission as a practical intelligence discovery as much as a military strike, noting that it revealed the real weakness of the Confederacy in that direction and the feasibility of marching an army into the heart of Confederate territory. The same account noted that Phelps recruited several pro-Union Southerners to assist him during the raid. The timberclads returned to Fort Henry on February 12. That same day, Grant's army set out overland the 12 miles to Fort Donelson.

• 7. What the River Opened

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  The fall of Fort Henry on February 6 did something strategically enormous: it converted the Tennessee River into a Union waterway, open to military traffic as far south as the Alabama border and beyond. For the days between February 6 and February 12, Union ironclad boats ranged the river destroying Confederate shipping and railroad bridges.

  Tilghman's own report used language that stayed on the record: Fort Henry was in a "wretched military position," and he wrote that "the history of military engineering records no parallel to this case." Halleck's telegram to Washington was considerably more triumphant: "Fort Henry is ours. The flag is reestablished on the soil of Tennessee. It will never be removed."

  After Fort Donelson fell to Grant on the 16th of February, both the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers came under Union control, outflanking Confederate forces at Columbus, Kentucky and forcing their withdrawal from that city and from western Kentucky. The nucleus of Grant's force at Fort Henry, still without a formal name during the battle, would go on as the Army of the Tennessee. Fort Henry itself was gone by February 8, fully submerged beneath the river that had already compromised its defense. Today, the remains of the fort lie permanently underwater beneath Kentucky Lake, formed when the Tennessee River was dammed in the 1930s. A small navigation beacon, far from the Kentucky shoreline, marks the northwest corner of where it stood.