Battle of Fort Henry | |||||||
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Part of the American Civil War | |||||||
![]() Bombardment and capture of Fort Henry, Tenn, 1860s lithograph by Currier and Ives | |||||||
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Belligerents | |||||||
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Commanders and leaders | |||||||
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Units involved | |||||||
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Strength | |||||||
15,000 7 ships [1] | 3,000–3,400 [1] | ||||||
Casualties and losses | |||||||
40 [2] Contents | 79 [2] |
The Battle of Fort Henry was fought on February 6, 1862, in Stewart County, Tennessee, during the American Civil War. It was the first important victory for the Union and Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in the Western Theater.
On February 4 and 5, Grant landed two divisions just north of Fort Henry on the Tennessee River. (The troops serving under Grant were the nucleus of the Union's successful Army of the Tennessee, although that name was not yet in use. [3] ) Grant's plan was to advance upon the fort on February 6 while it was being simultaneously attacked by Union gunboats commanded by Flag Officer Andrew Hull Foote. A combination of accurate and effective naval gunfire, heavy rain, and the poor siting of the fort, nearly inundated by rising river waters, caused its commander, Brig. Gen. Lloyd Tilghman, to surrender to Foote before the Union Army arrived.
The surrender of Fort Henry opened the Tennessee River to Union traffic south of the Alabama border. In the days following the fort's surrender, from February 6 through February 12, Union raids used ironclad boats to destroy Confederate shipping and railroad bridges along the river. On February 12, Grant's army proceeded overland 12 miles (19 km) to engage with Confederate troops in the Battle of Fort Donelson.
In early 1861 the critical border state of Kentucky had declared neutrality in the American Civil War. This neutrality was first violated on September 3, when Confederate Brig. Gen. Gideon J. Pillow, acting on orders from Maj. Gen. Leonidas Polk, occupied Columbus, Kentucky, which overlooked strong defensive bluffs, to defend the Mississippi from Federal offensive action and was the terminus of the Memphis & Ohio railroad, which in turn leads southwards to the extremely important Charleston & Memphis railroad. The riverside town was situated on 180 feet (55 m) high bluffs that commanded the river at that point, where the Confederates installed 140 large guns, underwater mines and a heavy chain that stretched a mile across the Mississippi River to Belmont, while occupying the town with 17,000 Confederate troops, thus cutting off northern commerce to the south and beyond. [4]
Two days later, Union Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, displaying the personal initiative that would characterize his later career, seized Paducah, Kentucky, a major transportation hub of rail and port facilities at the mouth of the Tennessee River. Henceforth, neither adversary respected Kentucky's proclaimed neutrality, and the Confederate advantage was lost. The buffer zone that Kentucky provided between the North and the South was no longer available to assist in the defense of Tennessee. [5]
By early 1862, a single general, Albert Sidney Johnston, commanded all the Confederate forces from Arkansas to the Cumberland Gap, but his forces were spread too thinly over a wide defensive line. Johnston's left flank was Polk, in Columbus with 12,000 men; his right flank was Brig. Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner, in Bowling Green, Kentucky, with 4,000 men; the center consisted of two forts, Forts Henry and Donelson, under the command of Brig. Gen. Lloyd Tilghman, also with 4,000 men. Forts Henry and Donelson were the sole positions defending the important Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, respectively. If these rivers were opened to Union military traffic, two direct invasion paths would lead into western & eastern Tennessee, and the vital Memphis & SC Railroad and more. [6]
Key commanders at the Battle of Fort Henry |
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The Union military command in the West suffered from a lack of unified command, and were organized into three separate departments: the Department of Kansas, under Maj. Gen. David Hunter; the Department of Missouri, under Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck; and the Department of the Ohio, under Brig. Gen. Don Carlos Buell. By January 1862, the disunity was apparent because they could not agree on a strategy for operations in the Western Theater. Buell, under political pressure to invade and hold pro-Union eastern Tennessee, moved slowly in the direction of Nashville. In Halleck's department, Grant moved up the Tennessee River to divert attention from Buell's intended advance, which did not occur. Halleck and the other generals in the West were coming under political pressure from President Abraham Lincoln to participate in a general offensive by Washington's birthday (February 22). Despite his tradition of caution, Halleck eventually reacted positively to Grant's proposal to move against Fort Henry. Halleck hoped that this would improve his standing in relation to his rival, Buell. Halleck and Grant were also concerned about rumors that Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard would soon arrive with 15 Confederate regiments. On January 30, 1862, Halleck authorized Grant to take Fort Henry. [7]
Grant wasted no time, leaving Cairo, Illinois, at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, on February 2. His invasion force, which arrived on the Tennessee River on February 4 and 5, [8] consisted of 15,000–17,000 men in two divisions, commanded by Brig. Gens. John A. McClernand and Charles F. Smith, supported by the Western Gunboat Flotilla, commanded by United States Navy Flag Officer Andrew Hull Foote. The flotilla included four ironclad gunboats (flagship USS Cincinnati, USS Carondelet, USS St. Louis, and USS Essex) under Foote's direct command, and three timberclad gunboats (USS Conestoga, USS Tyler, and USS Lexington) under Lt. Seth Ledyard Phelps. Insufficient transport ships this early in the war to deliver all of the army troops in a single operation required two trips upriver to reach the fort. [1] General Johnston was pressured by the confederate government to defend the Cumberland & Tennessee and the important railroads in the region, to which end he converged all his forces further south, facing Buell's forces at the Cumberland Gap passes. His subordinate Beauregard incessantly protested at his defensive strategy, urging him to advance and meet the unionist offensive, or at least reinforce the fortifications on the rivers. Johnston refused, leaving a substantial force to guard Fort Donelson. Fort Henry was considered a liability due to its poor position & engineering which made it highly susceptible to being flooded during high tide and rain, and was garrisoned by a token force of 3,000-4,000 including the crews for the heavy guns, which was considered adequate for defending against enemy naval attack, in the meantime a new fort was being constructed on better ground upriver.[ citation needed ]
Fort Henry was a five-sided, open-bastioned earthen structure covering 10 acres (0.04 km2) on the eastern bank of the Tennessee River, near Kirkman's Old Landing. [9] The site was about one mile above Panther Creek and about six miles below the mouth of the Big Sandy River and Standing Rock Creek. [10]
In May 1861, Isham G. Harris, the governor of Tennessee, appointed the state's attorney, Daniel S. Donelson, as a brigadier general and directed him to build fortifications on the rivers of Middle Tennessee. Donelson found suitable sites, but they were within the borders of Kentucky, still a neutral state at that time. Moving upriver, just inside the Tennessee border, Donelson selected the site of the fort on the Cumberland River that would bear his name. Colonel Bushrod Johnson of the Tennessee Corps of Engineers approved of the site. [11]
As construction of Fort Donelson began, Donelson moved 12 miles (19 km) west, to the Tennessee River, and selected the site of Fort Henry, naming it after Tennessee Senator Gustavus Adolphus Henry Sr. With Fort Donelson on the west bank of the Cumberland, Donelson selected the east bank of the Tennessee for the second fort so one garrison could travel between them and defend both positions. (Donelson thought it unlikely that the two forts would be attacked simultaneously.) Unlike its counterpart on the Cumberland, Fort Henry was situated on low, swampy ground and dominated by hills across the river. This oversight developed into frequent flooding of the fort during rains or high tide, on some occasions more than half of the fort was underwater after rain, including most of its armory. To its advantage, it had an unobstructed field of fire 2 miles (3.2 km) downriver. Donelson's surveying team—Adna Anderson, a civil engineer, and Maj. William F. Foster from the 1st Tennessee Infantry—objected strongly to the site and appealed to Colonel Johnson, who inexplicably approved it. [12]
The fort was designed to stop traffic on the river, not to withstand large-scale infantry assaults that armies would use during the war. Construction began in mid-June, using men from the 10th Tennessee Infantry and slaves. The first cannon was test fired on July 12, 1861. After this flurry of activity, the remainder of 1861 saw little action because forts on the Mississippi River had a higher priority for receiving men and artillery. General Polk also neglected Forts Henry and Donelson in favor of defending Columbus, Kentucky. In late December, additional men from the 27th Alabama Infantry arrived along with 500 slaves to construct a small fortification across the river on Stewart's Hill, within artillery range of Fort Henry, and named it Fort Heiman. In January 1862, Brig. Gen. Lloyd Tilghman assumed command of both Forts Henry and Donelson, with a combined force of 4,900 men. At Fort Henry, approximately 3,000–3,400 men in two brigades were commanded by Colonels Adolphus Heiman and Joseph Drake. The men were armed primarily with antique flintlock rifles from the War of 1812. [13]
Seventeen guns were mounted in Fort Henry by the time of the battle, eleven covering the river and the other six positioned to defend against a land attack (18-pounder smoothbores). There were two heavy guns, a 10-inch (250 mm) Columbiad and a 24-pounder rifled cannon, with the remainder being 32-pounder smoothbores. There were also two 42-pounders, but no ammunition of that caliber was available. When the river was at normal levels, the fort's walls rose 20 feet (6.1 m) above it and were 20 feet (6.1 m) thick at the base, sloping upward to a width of nearly 10 feet (3.0 m) at the parapet. However, in February 1862, heavy rains caused the river to rise and most of the fort was underwater, including the powder magazine. [14]
The Confederates deployed one additional defensive measure, which was then unique in the history of warfare: several torpedoes (in modern terminology, a naval minefield) were anchored below the surface in the main shipping channel, rigged to explode when touched by a passing ship. (This measure turned out to be ineffective, due to high water levels and leaks in the torpedoes' metal containers.) [15]
On February 4 and 5, Grant landed his divisions in two different locations. McClernand's division was 3 miles (4.8 km) north of the fort, on the east bank of the Tennessee River, to prevent the garrison's escape. C.F. Smith's division would seize Fort Heiman on the Kentucky side of the river and turn its artillery on Fort Henry. When heavy rains the night of February 5 slowed the progress of Union troops toward the forts, the battle turned on naval actions, which concluded before the infantry saw action. [16]
Tilghman realized that it was only a matter of time before Fort Henry fell. Only nine guns remained above the water to mount a defense. While leaving artillery in the fort to hold off the Union gunboats, he ordered the majority of his force to march, under the command of Col. Adolphus Heiman, on the overland route to Fort Donelson, 12 miles (19 km) away. Fort Heiman was abandoned on February 4; gunfire from the gunboats on Fort Henry garrison caused 4 Confederate casualties [1 killed 3 wounded] on the afternoon of February 5. [17] All but a part of Company B,1st Tennessee Artillery CSA [54 men] left Fort Henry on February 5. [17] (Union cavalry pursued the retreating Confederates, but poor road conditions prevented any serious confrontation and they took few captives.) Tilghman, as was his custom, spent the night of February 5–6 on the steamer Dunbar, 1.5 miles (2.4 km) upstream from the fort. Around midnight he sent an update on the situation to Johnston, then returned to Fort Henry just before dawn. [18]
On the morning of February 6, Foote's seven Union gunboats arrived at Fort Henry and established their position around 12:30 p.m. They soon opened fire from a distance at 1,700 yards (around 1,554 meters), beginning an exchange of gunfire with Fort Henry that continued for over an hour. After Tilghman rejected an initial call to surrender, the fleet continued to bombard the fort. This was its first engagement using newly designed and hastily constructed ironclads. Foote deployed the four ironclad gunboats in a line abreast, followed by the three timberclads, under the command of Seth Ledyard Phelps, which were held back for long-range, but less effective fire against the fort. The high water level of the river and the low elevation of Fort Henry's guns allowed Foote's fleet to escape serious destruction. The Confederate fire was able to hit the ironclads only where their armor was strongest. During the bombardment, all four of the Union ironclads were repeatedly hit by Confederate fire. The USS Essex was seriously damaged when a 32-pound shot from Fort Henry penetrated the ironclad, hitting the middle boiler and sending scalding steam through half the ship. Thirty-two crewmen were killed or wounded, including commander William D. Porter. The ship was out of action for the remainder of the campaign. [19]
After the bombardment had lasted 75 minutes, Tilghman surrendered to Foote's fleet, which had closed to within 400 yards (370 m) for a close-range bombardment. Before the battle, Tilghman told his men that he would offer an hour of resistance to allow his men additional time to escape. With only one cannon still working, down to the last few rounds due to the powder magazine being underwater, and the rest of the guns destroyed or knocked out, Tilghman ordered the Confederate flag at Fort Henry lowered and a white sheet raised on the fort's flagpole. Upon seeing the white flag, the Union gunboats immediately ceased fire. The flooded state of the fort was as such that the surrendering party sailed out of the sally port of the fort in a small launch and picked up Tilghman for the surrender negotiation on Cincinnati. Twelve officers and 82 men of the garrison surrendered; other casualties from the fort's garrison were estimated to be 15 men killed and 20 wounded. [20] The evacuating Confederate force left all of its artillery and equipment behind. Tilghman was imprisoned for many months, and exchanged in August 15. [21]
Tilghman wrote bitterly in his report that Fort Henry was in a "wretched military position. ... The history of military engineering records no parallel to this case." Grant sent a brief dispatch to Halleck: "Fort Henry is ours. ... I shall take and destroy Fort Donelson on the 8th and return to Fort Henry." Halleck wired Washington, D.C.: "Fort Henry is ours. The flag is reestablished on the soil of Tennessee. It will never be removed." [22]
Grant and his troops arrived at Fort Henry at around 3 p.m. on February 6 to see that the garrison had already surrendered. McClernand's division arrived at the fort about 30 minutes later. In the meantime, Smith's division had reached the deserted Fort Heiman. If Grant had been cautious and delayed his departure by two days, the battle would have never occurred. By February 8, Fort Henry was completely underwater. On February 7, the Union gunboats Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Essex returned to Cairo with whistles blowing and flying Fort Henry's captured Confederate flags upside down. The Chicago Tribune proclaimed the battle as "one of the most complete and signal victories in the annals of the world's warfare." [23]
Fort Henry's fall quickly opened the Tennessee River to Union gunboats and shipping south of the Alabama border. Immediately after the surrender, Foote sent Lieutenant Phelps with the three timberclads, Tyler, Conestoga, and Lexington, on a mission upriver to destroy installations and supplies of military value. (The flotilla's ironclads had sustained damage in the bombardment of Fort Henry and were slower and less maneuverable for the mission at hand, which included pursuit of Confederate ships.) The raid reached as far as Muscle Shoals, just past Florence, Alabama, the river's navigable limit. The Union timberclads and their raiding parties destroyed supplies and an important bridge of the Memphis and Ohio Railroad, 25 miles (40 km) upriver. They also captured a variety of southern ships, including Sallie Wood, Muscle, and Eastport, an ironclad under construction. The citizens of Florence asked Phelps to spare their town and its railroad bridge. Phelps agreed, seeing no military importance to the bridge. [24] One 19th century source described Phelps’ raid as “a perfect success. It discovered the real weakness of the Confederacy in that direction, the feasibility of marching an army into the heart of the Confederacy, and, better than all, it developed the most gratifying evidences of genuine Union feeling in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama.” [25] According to the same account, Phelps recruited several pro-Union Southerners to assist him during the raid. [25] The Union gunboats returned safely to Fort Henry on February 12.[ citation needed ]
After the fall of Fort Donelson to Grant's army on February 16, the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, two major water routes in the Confederate west, became Union waterways for movement of troops and material. As Grant suspected, the Union capture of the two forts and the rivers flanked the Confederate forces at Columbus, and soon caused them to withdraw from that city and from western Kentucky. [26]
Although closely associated with Fort Donelson, the Fort Henry site is not managed by the U.S. National Park Service as part of the Fort Donelson National Battlefield. It is currently part of the Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area. When the Tennessee River was dammed in the 1930s, creating Kentucky Lake, the remains of Fort Henry were permanently submerged. A small navigation beacon, far from the Kentucky shoreline, marks the location of the northwest corner of the former fort. Fort Heiman was on privately owned land until October 2006, when the Calloway County, Kentucky, executive office transferred 150 acres (0.61 km2) associated with that fort to the National Park Service for management as part of the Fort Donelson National Battlefield. Some of the entrenchments are still visible. [27]
Albert Sidney Johnston was an American military officer who served as a general in three different armies: the Texian Army, the United States Army, and the Confederate States Army. He saw extensive combat during his 34-year military career, fighting actions in the Black Hawk War, the Texas-Indian Wars, the Mexican–American War, the Utah War, and the American Civil War.
Fort Donelson was a fortress built early in 1862 by the Confederacy during the American Civil War to control the Cumberland River, which led to the heart of Tennessee, and thereby the Confederacy. The fort was named after Confederate general Daniel S. Donelson.
The Battle of Fort Donelson was fought from February 11–16, 1862, in the Western Theater of the American Civil War. The Union capture of the Confederate fort near the Tennessee–Kentucky border opened the Cumberland River, an important avenue for the invasion of the South. The Union's success also elevated Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant from an obscure and largely unproven leader to the rank of major general, and earned him the nickname of "Unconditional Surrender" Grant.
Lloyd Tilghman was a Confederate general in the American Civil War.
The Vicksburg campaign was a series of maneuvers and battles in the Western Theater of the American Civil War directed against Vicksburg, Mississippi, a fortress city that dominated the last Confederate-controlled section of the Mississippi River. The Union Army of the Tennessee under Major General Ulysses S. Grant gained control of the river by capturing this stronghold and defeating Lieutenant General John C. Pemberton's forces stationed there.
The Army of the Tennessee was a Union army in the Western Theater of the American Civil War, named for the Tennessee River. A 2005 study of the army states that it "was present at most of the great battles that became turning points of the war—Fort Donelson, Vicksburg, and Atlanta" and "won the decisive battles in the decisive theater of the war."
The Battle of Island Number Ten was an engagement at the New Madrid or Kentucky Bend on the Mississippi River – forming the border between Missouri and Tennessee – during the American Civil War, lasting from February 28 to April 8, 1862. Island Number Ten, a small island at the (Tennessee) base of a tight double turn in the river, was held by the Confederates from the early days of the war. It was an excellent site to impede Union efforts to invade the South by the river, as ships had to approach the island bows on and then slow to make the turns. For the defenders, however, it had an innate weakness in that it depended on a single road for supplies and reinforcements. If an enemy force managed to cut that road, the garrison would be isolated and eventually be forced to surrender.
Fort Donelson National Battlefield preserves Fort Donelson and Fort Heiman, two sites of the American Civil War Forts Henry and Donelson Campaign, in which Union Army Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant and Flag Officer Andrew Hull Foote captured three Confederate forts and opened two rivers, the Tennessee River and the Cumberland River, to control by the Union Navy. The commanders received national recognition for their victories in February 1862, as they were the first major Union successes of the war. The capture of Fort Donelson and its garrison by the Union led to the capture of Tennessee's capital and industrial center, Nashville, which remained in Union hands from February 25, 1862, until the end of the war, and gave the Union effective control over much of Tennessee. This struck a major blow to the Confederacy early in the war.
Andrew Hull Foote was an American naval officer who was noted for his service in the American Civil War and also for his contributions to several naval reforms in the years prior to the war. When the war came, he was appointed to command of the Western Gunboat Flotilla, predecessor of the Mississippi River Squadron. In that position, he led the gunboats in the Battle of Fort Henry. For his services with the Western Gunboat Flotilla, Foote was among the first naval officers to be promoted to the then-new rank of rear admiral.
Charles Ferguson Smith was an American military officer who served in United States Army during the Mexican–American War and the Utah War; and as a Union Army major general in the American Civil War. He graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1825 and served as an instructor at the academy beginning in 1829 and as Commandant of Cadets from 1838 to 1843. During the American Civil War, he served under Ulysses S. Grant who was a student of his at the military academy. Smith was instrumental in Grant's victory at the Battle of Fort Donelson but died in 1862 due to infection of a non-combat leg injury and subsequent dysentery.
Bushrod Rust Johnson was a Confederate general in the American Civil War and an officer in the United States Army. As a university professor he had been active in the state militias of Kentucky and Tennessee and on the outbreak of hostilities he sided with the South, despite having been born in the North in a family of abolitionist Quakers. As a divisional commander he managed to evade capture at the Battle of Fort Donelson, but was wounded at the Battle of Shiloh. He served under Robert E. Lee throughout the 10-month Siege of Petersburg, and surrendered with him at Appomattox.
John Alexander McClernand was an American lawyer, politician, and a Union Army general in the American Civil War. He was a prominent Democratic politician in Illinois and a member of the United States House of Representatives before the war. McClernand was firmly dedicated to the principles of Jacksonian democracy and supported the Compromise of 1850.
The Battle of Belmont was fought on November 7, 1861, in Mississippi County, Missouri. It was the first combat test in the American Civil War for Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, the future Union Army general in chief and eventual U.S. president, who was fighting Major General Leonidas Polk. Grant's troops in this battle were the "nucleus" of what would become the Union Army of the Tennessee.
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The western theater of the American Civil War encompassed major military operations in the states of Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina, Kentucky, South Carolina and Tennessee, as well as Louisiana east of the Mississippi River. Operations on the coasts of these states, except for Mobile Bay, are considered part of the Lower Seaboard Theater. Most other operations east of the Appalachian Mountains are part of the eastern theater. Operations west of the Mississippi River took place in the trans-Mississippi theater.
The Mississippi River campaigns, within the Trans-Mississippi Theater of the American Civil War, were a series of military actions by the Union Army during which Union troops, helped by Union Navy gunboats and river ironclads, took control of the Cumberland River, the Tennessee River, and the Mississippi River, a main north-south avenue of transport.
Seth Ledyard Phelps was an American naval officer, and in later life, a politician and diplomat. Phelps received his first commission in United States Navy as a midshipman aboard the famous USS Independence. He served patrolling the coast of West Africa guarding against slavers. During the Mexican–American War he served on gunboats, giving support to Winfield Scott's army, and later served in the Mediterranean and Caribbean squadrons.
The following Union Army units and commanders fought in the Battle of Fort Donelson of the American Civil War. Order of battle compiled from the casualty returns, and the reports. The Confederate order of battle is listed separately.
On the onset of the American Civil War in April 1861, Ulysses S. Grant was working as a clerk in his father's leather goods store in Galena, Illinois. When the war began, his military experience was needed, and congressman Elihu B. Washburne became his patron in political affairs and promotions in Illinois and nationwide.