In February 1862, after defeats at Bull Run and at Wilson's Creek in Missouri, the Union army was desperate for victory on the eve of its first offensive of the Civil War. The strategy was to penetrate the Southern heartland with support from a new "Brown Water"? navy. In a two-week campaign plagued by rising floodwaters and brutal winter weather, two armies collided in rural Tennessee to fight over two forts that controlled the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers. Those intense days set the course of the war in the Western Theater for eighteen months and determined the fates of Ulysses S. Grant, Andrew H. Foote and Albert Sidney Johnston. Historian James R. Knight paints a picture of this crucial but often neglected and misunderstood turning point.
Although previously undervalued for their strategic impact because they represented only a small percentage of total forces, the Union and Confederate navies were crucial to the outcome of the Civil War. In War on the Waters, James M. McPherson has crafted an enlightening, at times harrowing, and ultimately thrilling account of the war's naval campaigns and their military leaders. McPherson recounts how the Union navy's blockade of the Confederate coast, leaky as a sieve in the war's early months, became increasingly effective as it choked off vital imports and exports. Meanwhile, the Confederate navy, dwarfed by its giant adversary, demonstrated daring and military innovation. Commerce raiders sank Union ships and drove the American merchant marine from the high seas. Southern ironclads sent several Union warships to the bottom, naval mines sank many more, and the Confederates deployed the world's first submarine to sink an enemy vessel. But in the end, it was the Union navy that won some of the war's most important strategic victories--as an essential partner to the army on the ground at Fort Donelson, Vicksburg, Port Hudson, Mobile Bay, and Fort Fisher, and all by itself at Port Royal, Fort Henry, New Orleans, and Memphis.
Though the battles of Forts Henry and Donelson are often neglected in Civil War historiography, their importance cannot be overstated. It was there that Ulysses S. Grant became a national hero, that a Southern field army ceased to exist, and most importantly, where the Confederacy's vital western defense line was broken and shattered. The South was hard pressed to ever recover.
"Fort Donelson's Legacy portrays the tapestry of war and society in the upper southern heartland of Tennessee and Kentucky after the key Union victories at Forts Henry and Donelson in February 1862. Those victories, notes Benjamin Franklin Cooling, could have delivered the decisive blow to the Confederacy in the West and ended the war in that theater. Instead, what followed was terrible devastation and bloodshed that embroiled soldier and civilian alike. Cooling compellingly describes a struggle that was marked not only by the movement of armies and the strategies of generals but also by the rise of guerrilla bands and civil resistance. It was, in part, a war fought for geography - for rivers and railroads and for strategic cities such as Nashville, Louisville, and Chattanooga. But it was also a war for the hearts and minds of the populace ... In exploring the complex terrain of 'total war' that steadily engulfed Tennessee and Kentucky, Cooling draws on a huge array of sources, including official military records and countless diaries and memoirs. He makes considerable use of the words of participants to capture the attitudes and concerns of those on both sides."--Dust jacket.