The Union Wins Its First Victory
The Civil War battle for Fort Donelson, fought 145 years ago today, on February 15, in 1862, was not the largest or most memorable engagement of that long conflict. But it was consequential for two reasons. It marked the first significant Union success after ten frustrating months of bungling by overly cautious and inept generals. And, more important, it launched the career of the man who was to ascend from years of failure to lead the Northern armies to ultimate victory.
In January, Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant had pressed a plan on his superior, Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck. Grant thought that his forces, stationed in Cairo, Illinois, could attack south along the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers into the Confederate heartland (the two rivers intersected with the Ohio just above Cairo). The Confederates had strongly fortified the Mississippi, but those two waterways were guarded by forts that Grant thought vulnerable. Halleck didn’t trust Grant, who had resigned his commission in 1854 with a reputation as a drunk. He refused the request.
Back in Cairo, Grant discussed his plan with Flag-Officer Andrew H. Foote, who commanded several ironclad gunboats and other war vessels on the river. Foote persuaded Halleck to agree to a combined land and water attack on the forts.
On February 5 a fleet of gunboats and transports carrying Grant’s 15,000 men steamed up the Tennessee toward Fort Henry on that river. The soldiers disembarked and began to slog through the winter mud while the gunboats opened up on the poorly designed fort. The Confederate commander, seeing the situation was hopeless, sent his garrison 12 miles overland to Fort Donelson on the Cumberland. He held out briefly with a company of gunners and surrendered before Grant’s force arrived.
On his own initiative, Grant decided to move on Fort Donelson. He had to wait a few days while Foote backtracked with his boats and brought them up the Cumberland. The easy victory at Fort Henry was not to be repeated. Confederate guns at Donelson raked the Union boats, disabling most of them. On the landward side, Grant’s men, along with 10,000 reinforcements, surrounded approximately 17,000 defenders. The temperature, which had been balmy, plunged to 12 degrees.
On February 14, Grant went downstream to confer with Foote, leaving orders for his three lieutenants to hold their divisions in place. According to the historian James M. McPherson, the move was part of “a pattern in Grant’s generalship: He always thought more about what he planned to do to the enemy than what his enemy might do to him. This offensive-mindedness eventually won the war, but it also brought near disaster to Grant’s forces more than once.”
Gen. John B. Floyd, the commander of Fort Donelson, saw that his only choices were to endure a hopeless siege or to try to break out. During a night of driving sleet and snow, he massed his troops on his left. At dawn on the fifteenth they crashed into the Union forces. By the time Grant hurried to the scene, his lines had been driven back more than a mile, and his men and their commanders were in a state of confusion. He did not panic. “The position on the right must be retaken,” he said flatly.
The Union soldiers rallied. Confederate Gen. Gideon J. Pillow, like Floyd a political appointee, felt his men were too exhausted to continue and ordered them back inside the fort. By nightfall, the battle was over, and 4,000 men lay dead and wounded on the icy field.
Floyd was one of the highest-ranking U.S. government officials to have joined the rebellion. Accused of corruption when he was secretary of war under President James Buchanan, he was desperate to avoid capture. He crossed the river with 1,500 Virginia troops and fled. Pillow also decided to escape, leaving a disgusted Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner to share the fate of his men.
Buckner, a West Pointer, had been friendly with Grant in earlier days and had lent him money. He expected leniency from his old comrade, but when at dawn on February 16 he suggested a truce to discuss the terms of capitulation, Grant replied, “No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately on your works.”
Buckner was stung by this “ungenerous and unchivalrous” ultimatum, but he had no choice but to comply.
Bells rang across the Northern states, cannon fired in celebration. Finally the Union had achieved a major victory. “Eight months earlier Grant had been an obscure ex-captain of dubious reputation,” McPherson points out in Battle Cry of Freedom; “now his name was celebrated by every newspaper in the land.”
Grant had knocked out a third of the Confederate forces in the West. Nashville fell two weeks later, the first Southern capital and industrial center to be taken. “The cause of the Union now marches on in every section of the country,” the New York Tribune exulted.
Not quite. Halleck, jealous of Grant’s victory, threatened to remove him from command. He wrote to superiors that Grant “richly deserves” censure for failing to file the proper reports. The chance to push forward aggressively in the West was stymied. But the reputation of “Unconditional Surrender” Grant had been made. Lincoln personally intervened to make sure he kept his command. Two years later, the President would install Grant as commander of all Union forces.
After the capture of Fort Donelson a Union soldier wrote, “My opinion is that this war will be closed in less than six months.” Northern ebullience proved short-lived. Confederates concentrated their remaining Western troops at Corinth, Mississippi. Halleck ordered Grant to assemble a substantial force to attack them. Grant was sure “Corinth will fall much more easily than Donelson did.” Again he failed to anticipate enemy intentions.
On the morning of April 6, thousands of screaming rebels descended on unwary Union troops near Shiloh church. The two-day slaughter that followed left 20,000 killed and wounded, nearly double the casualties of all the previous battles combined. Grant, who had hoped that a big victory might end the war, now “gave up all idea of saving the Union except by complete conquest.”