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The
Confederate forts on the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers
were the southernmost points on Johnston’s line
of defense. Because the rivers flowed parallel to each
other only 10 miles apart, Forts Henry and Donelson
could be mutually supporting, although they also could
be attacked by the same force. A substantial emplacement
of batteries and earthworks, Fort Donelson guarded the
Cumberland River near Dover. Fort Henry, however, had
been hurriedly built on a low terrace prone to flooding.
It proved indefensible when Commodore Foote’s gunboats
appeared on February 6, 1862 and was abandoned after
a briefshelling. The quick fall of Fort Henry left the
entire Tennessee River open to Union control. In a pointed
demonstration of naval supremacy, Foote’s gunboats
steamed unopposed all the way to northern Alabama.
General
Grant marched his 27,000-strong army across the isthmus,
and Foote’s squadron steamed back down the Tennessee
and up the Cumberland to rendezvous with him for the
attack on Fort Donelson. There were some 17,000 Confederate
troops within the fort’s earthworks, under the
divided command of three generals. During the first
day’s action (February 14), Confederate water batteries
proved more than a match for the gunboats, while a probe
by Union infantry against the fort’s eastern flank
was repulsed. Despite the day’s inconclusive fighting,
two of the three Confederate generals panicked during
an evening council of war. Gideon Pillow and John B.
Floyd — both politician-generals — urged surrender
on General Simon B. Buckner and then fled into the night.
Grant ensured his fame when he responded to Buckner’s
offer to negotiate terms with his "unconditional
surrender" ultimatum.
This
stumbling defeat at Fort Donelson was even more disastrous
to the South than the loss of the lower Tennessee River.
The surrender at Dover Hotel quickly brought about the
fall of Clarksville and Nashville, the loss of their
factories and railroads, and the imprisonment of 12,000
troops (men the South could ill afford to lose). It
effectively meant the loss of middle Tennessee forthe
Confederacy, since General Johnston had to pull his
remaining forces back to Corinth, Mississippi.
Stung
by these sudden reverses, Johnston decided to strike
the invading Federals. He advanced against them as they
collected at an obscure place on the Tennessee River
called Pittsburg Landing. The Rebel divisions struck
at dawn on April 6, 1862, smashing into the blueclad
troops camped around a little country church called
Shiloh. They drove the Federals back toward the river
bluffs. By the time Grant, who had been quartered across
the river in Savannah, reached the battlefield, his
army appeared in danger of being driven into the river.
Soldier’s
map of Fort Donelson and Dover
The
Confederate juggernaut, however, stalled in front of
a sunken farm road that came to be known as the Hornet’s
Nest. Before they were pounded into submission by point-blank
artillery late in the day, the stubborn defenders of
the Hornet’s Nest bought enough time to allow Grant
to form a defensive perimeter around the river landing.
Troops
of General Don Carlos Buell’s army disembarked
during the night to reinforce Grant, and by the morning
of April 7 the Federal force had swelled to more than
39,000. General P. G. T. Beauregard, who took command
of Confederate forces when Johnston was mortally wounded
the previous afternoon, resumed the attack, only to
be driven back by a strengthened enemy. After relinquishing
the same ground they had gained the day before, the
exhausted Southerners were ordered by Beauregard to
return to Corinth.
Shiloh
National Military Park
The
bloodiest military engagement in American history to
date, the Battle of Shiloh was a wake-up call to both
sides that the war would be neither brief nor cheaply
won. The nearly 24,000 casualties were a grim harbinger
of large-scale Civil War battles to come. Shiloh blunted
theSouthern effort to retake those parts of Tennessee
lost in February. The Confederate pullback to Corinth
meant, at least temporarily, the abandonment of middle
Tennessee and its rivers to Federal control.
On
the same day as the Confederate army withdrew from Shiloh,
a large Rebel fort on the Mississippi River, Island
No. 10, surrendered with 7,000 troops and scores of
heavy guns. It fell to the same sort of combined army-navy
operation that had been so successful in earlier river
campaigns. Island No. 10 had been one of the South’s
best hopes for stopping the Federal river invasion above
Vicksburg. Its loss cast serious doubt on the Confederacy’s
ability to hold the Tennessee shores of the Father of
Waters.
Tennessee State Capitol
as Federal Fort
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