The fighting 241Those remnants at Fort Henry quickly
succumbed to US navy shelling.
The new Confederate commander of the
Western Department, General Albert Sidney
Johnston, had no delusions about the
overextended nature of the Confederate
defenses. Located at Bowling Green,
Kentucky, with about 25,000 troops,
Johnston worried that the Federals would
pierce his weak cordon and then outflank or
trap a large portion of his manpower among
Grant's command, a smaller one to the east
under Brigadier-General Don Carlos Buell,
and the Union river gunboats. After meeting
with senior officers, Johnston decided to fall
back to a Memphis-Nashville line, but also
sent reinforcements to Fort Donelson to
delay Grant's advance. Even worse, the two
ranking commanders at Donelson were
military incompetents yet well-connected
politicians, John B. Floyd and Gideon Pillow.
Grant, meanwhile, immediately shifted
his focus to the Confederates at Fort
Donelson. Unlike so many Union officers,
Grant grasped the value of initiative in
warfare. He directed two divisions to slog
their way through mud to the outskirts of
the Confederate positions. The succeeding
day, a third division arrived by transport
along the Cumberland River, and with the
aid of Federal gunboats, Grant invested the
Rebel forces.
At Fort Donelson, the Confederates
suffered from dreadful leadership. They
launched a surprise attack that pried open an
escape route, but Pillow grew squeamish over
the losses and convinced Floyd to cancel the
breakout. Seizing the opportunity, the
aggressive Grant launched a counterattack of
his own which not only sealed the
breakthrough but occupied some vital
positions in the old Confederate line as well.
Unable to withstand another Federal assault,
the Confederate commanders realized that
their situation had become hopeless. Floyd
fled, followed by Pillow. Also refusing to
surrender was a disgusted colonel named
Nathan Bedford Forrest, who would prove to
be a Union scourge for the next three years.
Forrest took 700 horsemen with him.
That left Brigadier-General Simon Bolivar
Buckner, an old friend of Grant's, to request
terms for capitulation. Grant's terse reply,
wholly in character with his approach to
warfare, captured the imagination of the
Northern public: 'No terms except an
unconditional and immediate surrender can
be accepted. I propose to move upon your
works immediately.' Buckner angrily
relented, and Grant had gained the first
important Union victory of the war, taking
nearly 13,000 Rebels prisoner.
With the fall of Forts Henry and
Donelson, the door opened for a rapid
advance on Nashville. Grant and Buell both
made haste, and by late February the city
had fallen into Union hands. Grant's
columns then pushed on to the Tennessee
River, where they awaited reinforcements for
a large-scale advance on Corinth, Mississippi,
the site of a major rail intersection.
After abandoning Nashville, Johnston fell
back to Corinth. There, he gathered some
40,000 Rebel troops and hatched a scheme to
crush Grant's command before it united with
Buell. Grant's soldiers, positioned largely on
the south side of the Tennessee River, had
failed to fortify. An effective Confederate
attack might be able to pin the Yankees
against the riverbank and crush them. With
his army prepared to assail the Union lines the
next day, Johnston vowed they would water
their horses in the Tennessee River tomorrow.
In the early morning of 6 April,
Johnston's troops struck Brigadier-General
William Tecumseh Sherman's division,
catching them largely without fortifications.
Sherman and most of the Federals fought
valiantly that day, but the Rebel onslaught
was too much. Even though thousands of
Federals cowered under the riverbank, Union
troops had resisted enough for the Yankees
to regroup and prepare a defensive position,
aided by ample artillery. There, they received
help from portions of Buell's army, which
began arriving in the late afternoon. Among
the staggering number of casualties, close to
20,000 that April day, was Albert Sidney
Johnston, who bled to death from an
untreated leg wound.