Download or read book The Confederate Command During The Fort Henry Fort Donelson Campaign February 1862 written by Major Kendall D. Gott and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2015-11-06 with total page 69 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study investigates the decisive factors that affected the Fort Henry-Fort Donelson campaign in February 1862. The thesis is relevant not only to the study of history, but as a series of lessons for all commanders. In the final analysis, the ultimate failure of the Confederates during this campaign can be attributed directly to the actions of General Albert Sidney Johnston. He failed to develop an adequate strategy to meet the expected invasion from the North or to insure that each subordinate command in his department was prepared for the onslaught. Johnston also failed to establish a command structure to support his Department. Most damaging of all, Johnston neglected the defenses of the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, which served as invasion routes through the center of his department Ironically, one of the worst generals of the Confederacy correctly saw Fort Donelson as the key to stopping Grant and protecting Nashville. Had he been better supported by his superiors and by the officers serving at the fort with him, the Confederates may have won a victory at Fort Donelson and secured the Western Department for several months.
Download or read book Where the South Lost the War written by Kendall D. Gott and published by Stackpole Books. This book was released on 2011-07-20 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the collapse of the Confederate defenses at Forts Henry and Donelson, the entire Tennessee Valley was open to Union invasion and control.
Download or read book Fort Henry and Fort Donelson Campaigns February 1862 written by United States. Army Service Schools (Fort Leavenworth, Kan.) and published by . This book was released on 1923 with total page 1534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Confederate Command During the Fort Henry Fort Donelson Campaign February 1862 written by and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study investigates the decisive factors that affected the Confederate command during the Fort Henry-Fort Donelson campaign in February 1862. The thesis is relevant not only to the study of history, but as a series of lessons for senior leaders today. In the final analysis, the ultimate failure of the Confederates during the campaign can be attributed directly to Albert Sidney Johnston. As the department commander he failed to develop an adequate strategy to meet the invasion of Grant's army or to insure that each subordinate command was prepared. Most damaging of all, Johnston neglected the defenses of the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, which were the key invasion routes into his department. Johnston also erred badly in his selection of a commander for the beleaguered garrison of Fort Donelson. John B. Floyd's ineptitude and dishonorable acts sealed the fort's fate and assured victory for the North.
Download or read book The Confederate Command During the Fort Henry Donelson Campaign February 1862 written by U S Army Command and General Staff Coll and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2015-04-17 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study investigates the decisive factors that affected the Confederate command during the Fort Henry-Fort Donelson campaign in February 1862. The thesis is relevant not only to the study of history, but as a series of lessons for senior leaders today. In the final analysis, the ultimate failure of the Confederates during the campaign can be attributed directly to Albert Sidney Johnston. As the department commander he failed to develop an adequate strategy to meet the invasion of Grant's army or to insure that each subordinate command was prepared. Most damaging of all, Johnston neglected the defenses of the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, which were the key invasion routes into his department. Johnston also errred badly in his selection of a commander for the beleaguered garrison of Fort Donelson. John B. Floyd's ineptitude and dishonorable acts sealed the fort's fate and assured victory for the North.
Download or read book The Confederate Command During the Fort Henry Fort Donelson Campaign February 1862 written by and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study investigates the decisive factors that affected the Confederate command during the Fort Henry-Fort Donelson campaign in February 1862. The thesis is relevant not only to the study of history, but as a series of lessons for senior leaders today. In the final analysis, the ultimate failure of the Confederates during the campaign can be attributed directly to Albert Sidney Johnston. As the department commander he failed to develop an adequate strategy to meet the invasion of Grant's army or to insure that each subordinate command was prepared. Most damaging of all, Johnston neglected the defenses of the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, which were the key invasion routes into his department. Johnston also erred badly in his selection of a commander for the beleaguered garrison of Fort Donelson. John B. Floyd's ineptitude and dishonorable acts sealed the fort's fate and assured victory for the North.
Download or read book The Battle of Fort Donelson No Terms but Unconditional Surrender written by James R. Knight and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2011-03-04 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Grant Invades Tennessee written by Timothy B. Smith and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2021-10-29 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When General Ulysses S. Grant targeted Forts Henry and Donelson, he penetrated the Confederacy at one of its most vulnerable points, setting in motion events that would elevate his own status, demoralize the Confederate leadership and citizenry, and, significantly, tear the western Confederacy asunder. More to the point, the two battles of early 1862 opened the Tennessee River campaign that would prove critical to the ultimate Union victory in the Mississippi Valley. In Grant Invades Tennessee, award-winning Civil War historian Timothy B. Smith gives readers a battlefield view of the fight for Forts Henry and Donelson, as well as a critical wide-angle perspective on their broader meaning in the conduct and outcome of the war. The first comprehensive tactical treatment of these decisive battles, this book completes the trilogy of the Tennessee River campaign that Smith began in Shiloh and Corinth 1862, marking a milestone in Civil War history. Whether detailing command-level decisions or using eye-witness anecdotes to describe events on the ground, walking readers through maps or pulling back for an assessment of strategy, this finely written work is equally sure on matters of combat and context. Beginning with Grant's decision to bypass the Confederates' better-defended sites on the Mississippi, Smith takes readers step-by-step through the battles: the employment of a flotilla of riverine war ships along with infantry and land-based artillery in subduing Fort Henry; the lesser effectiveness of this strategy against Donelson's much stronger defense, weaponry, and fighting forces; the surprise counteroffensive by the Confederates and the role of their commanders' incompetence and cowardice in foiling its success. Though casualties at the two forts fell far short of bloodier Civil War battles to come, the importance of these Union victories transcend battlefield statistics. Grant Invades Tennessee allows us, for the first time, to clearly see how and why.
Download or read book Personal Memoirs of U S Grant written by Ulysses Simpson Grant and published by New York, C. L. Webster & Company. This book was released on 1885 with total page 606 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Faced with failing health and financial ruin, the Civil War's greatest general and former president wrote his personal memoirs to secure his family's future - and won himself a unique place in American letters. Devoted almost entirely to his life as a soldier, Grant's Memoirs traces the trajectory of his extraordinary career - from West Point cadet to general-in-chief of all Union armies. For their directness and clarity, his writings on war are without rival in American literature, and his autobiography deserves a place among the very best in the genre.
Download or read book Forts Henry and Donelson The Key to the Confederate Heartland written by Benjamin Franklin Cooling and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Fort Henry Fort Donelson Campaign The History and Legacy of the Union Victories That Made Ulysses S Grant a Major General written by Charles River Editors and published by Independently Published. This book was released on 2019-01-16 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Includes pictures *Includes soldiers' accounts *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading While the Lincoln Administration and most Northerners were preoccupied with trying to capture Richmond in the summer of 1861, it would be the little known Ulysses S. Grant who delivered the Union's first major victories, over a thousand miles away from Washington. Grant's new commission led to his command of the District of Southeast Missouri, headquartered at Cairo, after he was appointed by "The Pathfinder," John C. Fremont, a national celebrity who had run for President in 1856. Fremont was one of many political generals that Lincoln was saddled with, and his political prominence ensured he was given a prominent command as commander of the Department of the West early in the war before running so afoul of the Lincoln Administration that he was court-martialed. In January of 1862, Grant persuaded General Henry "Old Brains" Halleck to allow his men to launch a campaign on the Tennessee River. As soon as Halleck acquiesced, Grant moved against Fort Henry, in close coordination with the naval command of Flag Officer Andrew Hull Foote. The combination of infantry and naval bombardment helped force the capitulation of Fort Henry on February 6, 1862, and the surrender of Fort Henry was followed immediately by an attack on Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River, which earned Grant his famous nickname "Unconditional Surrender." Grant's forces enveloped the Confederate garrison at Fort Donelson, which included Confederate generals Simon Buckner, John Floyd, and Gideon Pillow. In one of the most bungled operations of the war, the Confederate generals tried and failed to open an escape route by attacking Grant's forces on February 15. Although the initial assault was successful, General Pillow inexplicably chose to have his men pull back into their trenches, ostensibly so they could take more supplies before their escape. Instead, they simply lost all the ground they had taken, and the garrison was cut off yet again. During the early morning hours of February 16, the garrison's generals held one of the Civil War's most famous councils of war. Over the protestations of cavalry officer Nathan Bedford Forrest, who insisted the garrison could escape, the three generals agreed to surrender their army, but none of them wanted to be the fall guy. General Floyd was worried that the Union might try him for treason if he was taken captive, so he turned command of the garrison over to General Pillow and escaped with two of his regiments. Pillow had the same concern and turned command over to General Buckner before escaping alone by boat. With no attempt to conceal his anger at the cowardice displayed by his commanding officers, Forrest announced, "I did not come here to surrender my command!" He then proceeded to round up his own men and rallied hundreds of men before leading them on a daring and dramatic escape under the cover of darkness through the icy waters of Lick Creek to escape the siege and avoid capture. Despite all of these successful escapes, General Buckner decided to surrender to Grant, and when asked for terms of surrender, Grant replied, "No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender." In addition to giving him a famous sobriquet, Grant's campaign was the first major success for the Union, which had already lost the disastrous First Battle of Bull Run in July 1861 and was reorganizing the Army of the Potomac in anticipation of the Peninsula Campaign (which would fail in the summer of 1862). It also exposed the weakness of the outmanned Confederates, who were stretched too thin across the theater. The Fort Henry-Fort Donelson Campaign: The History and Legacy of the Union Victories that Made Ulysses S. Grant a Major General analyzes the campaign that put Ulysses S. Grant's name on the map and paved the way for the rest of his Civil War career.
Download or read book War on the Waters written by James M. McPherson and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-09-17 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Fort Donelson s Legacy written by Benjamin Franklin Cooling (III) and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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.
Download or read book The Forts Henry Heiman and Fort Donelson Campaigns written by Roy P. Stonesifer and published by . This book was released on 1965 with total page 852 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In February 1862, with the American Civil War already ten months in progress, Union land and naval forces shattered the Confederacy's main defense line in the Western theater of operations. They accomplished this by capturing Forts Henry and Donelson in northwestern Tennessee. This thesis attempts to prove that the Confederate disasters at the river forts were caused chiefly by the failures of Southern command and engineering"--Preface.
Download or read book Island No 10 written by Larry J. Daniel and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 1996-04-30 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book is useful to historians of the Civil War who wish to draw on it for an authoritative account of this campaign, and Civil War buffs will want it in their libraries". -- James M. McPherson Princeton University
Download or read book Struggle for the Heartland written by Stephen D. Engle and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2005-03-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Struggle for the Heartland tells the story surrounding the military campaign that began in early 1862 with the advance to Fort Henry and culminated in late May with the capture of Corinth, Mississippi. The first significant Northern penetration into the Confederate west, this campaign saw the military coming-of-age of Ulysses S. Grant and offered a hint as to where the Federals might win the war. For the South, it dashed any hopes of avoiding a protracted conflict. Stephen D. Engle colors in the details that bring great clarity and new life to the scene of these battles as well as to the social and political context in which they occurred.
Download or read book The Grand Design written by Donald Stoker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-20 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the abundance of books on the Civil War, not one has focused exclusively on what was in fact the determining factor in the outcome of the conflict: differences in Union and Southern strategy. In The Grand Design, Donald Stoker provides for the first time a comprehensive and often surprising account of strategy as it evolved between Fort Sumter and Appomattox. Reminding us that strategy is different from tactics (battlefield deployments) and operations (campaigns conducted in pursuit of a strategy), Stoker examines how Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis identified their political goals and worked with their generals to craft the military means to achieve them--or how they often failed to do so. Stoker shows that Davis, despite a West Point education and experience as Secretary of War, ultimately failed as a strategist by losing control of the political side of the war. Lincoln, in contrast, evolved a clear strategic vision, but he failed for years to make his generals implement it. And while Robert E. Lee was unerring in his ability to determine the Union's strategic heart--its center of gravity--he proved mistaken in his assessment of how to destroy it. Historians have often argued that the North's advantages in population and industry ensured certain victory. In The Grand Design, Stoker reasserts the centrality of the overarching plan on each side, arguing convincingly that it was strategy that determined the result of America's great national conflict.
