‘Unconditional Surrender’

At a small hotel along the banks of the Cumberland River outside the northwestern Tennessee town of Dover, three Confederate generals gathered in a council of war. Their task on that early morning of Feb. 16, 1862, was a grave one: to decide the fate of Fort Donelson, the Cumberland River redoubt which they and more than 13,000 Confederate soldiers had been defending for four cold and bloody days.

Courage was in short supply that day. Despite leading a nearly successful escape by his forces hours earlier, the Confederate commander — the incompetent but politically connected Gen. John B. Floyd — handed over his command to fellow Gen. Gideon Pillow, and then fled south. Pillow also panicked at the sudden reversal of fortune and passed the leadership to Simon Bolivar Buckner, who hoped to secure reasonable terms from the opposing Union leader, Ulysses S. Grant.

A negotiated surrender wasn’t out of the realm of possibilities; Buckner and Grant had been close friends before the war, with Buckner helping Grant during a particularly difficult struggle with alcoholism in the 1850s. But that counted for little this time. Instead, Buckner received an ultimatum from Grant that was sure to stun and humiliate the Confederate Army if he accepted: “No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.”

With his two superior officers abandoning the field, Buckner felt he had no choice but to accept. A furious and still mostly unknown Confederate cavalry leader, Nathan Bedford Forrest, grumbled later: “I did not come here to surrender my command.” Forrest escaped, eventually becoming one of the most feared commanders on either side of the war. But on that morning it was the Union general who shocked the world with his ruthless and uncompromising terms.

Later that day Buckner and Grant met at the Dover Hotel to plan the details of what was, to that point, the greatest military surrender in American history: More than 12,000 Confederate soldiers were to stack their guns on the banks of the Cumberland and board boats headed for Northern prisons. And with that, the battle of Fort Donelson was over, and the upriver (though directionally south) cities of Clarksville and Nashville, Tenn., lay open for invasion and capture. It was, by any estimation, one of the great turning points of the American Civil War.

The battle of Fort Donelson is a story of geography as much as it is one of military blunder and cowardice. After the Confederate Army invaded Kentucky in early September 1861, a long but thin line, stretching across southern Kentucky from the Mississippi River to Cumberland Gap, protected Tennessee from certain Federal invasion. While many leaders on both sides imagined that Union forces would invade through Cumberland Gap into East Tennessee – where Unionist civilians eagerly awaited deliverance from Confederate control – Union Gen. Henry Halleck and Confederate Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston understood that geography made an invasion of West and Middle Tennessee more likely. East Tennessee and its rugged mountains could end up as a death trap for an invading force.

But if the invasion would be in the west, where would it come, exactly? Johnston figured that Union troops would head towards Bowling Green, Ky., where the Louisville and Nashville Railroad passed on its way to the Tennessee capital. But Halleck and Grant decided that a more fruitful invasion path would follow the twin rivers – the Tennessee River through West Tennessee and into North Alabama and the Cumberland, which led straight to Nashville. Fort Donelson was the key to unlocking both rivers.

The Fort Donelson campaign was actually a complicated amphibious military engagement involving three garrisons hovering over two major rivers. Much of the fighting occurred across a narrow spit of land along the border between Kentucky and Tennessee, where the parallel rivers of the Cumberland and Tennessee run just five miles apart. The area was thick with Confederate defenses: along the Tennessee River to the west was Fort Heiman on the Kentucky side and Fort Henry within Tennessee.

On Feb. 6, the joint efforts of Union Navy Flag Officer Andrew Foote’s timberclad gunboats and infantry forces under Grant and Gen. Charles F. Smith captured Fort Heiman and persuaded Confederate Brig. Gen. Lloyd Tilghman to surrender Fort Henry, which, thanks to heavy rains and a low elevation, was nearly underwater. The Tennessee River now lay open to invasion as far as Alabama.

But the bigger prize was the Cumberland and its reaches deep through the Tennessee heartland, guarded by the much more formidable Fort Donelson. Large smoothbore and rifled cannons lined its thick ramparts, which sat on a bluff overlooking a bend in the river.

Grant decided to attack the fort by land, but the five-mile trek from Fort Henry to Fort Donelson proved far more hazardous than he had imagined. His men faced harassing cavalry attacks under Forrest along the march. But just as difficult was the weather, which turned from wet and mild to frigid and icy as three inches of snow took the normally winter-hardened Yankee troops by surprise. To add to the difficulties, the naval assault on Fort Donelson was easily repulsed.

Grant’s infantry forces eventually reached the land side of Fort Donelson, threatening to trap the Confederate garrison. For a brief moment on the morning of Feb. 15, the Confederate forces broke out of their position, with an escape route southeast toward Nashville available between Grant’s right and the Cumberland River. Inexplicably — perhaps due to mistaken intelligence regarding the Union position — General Floyd reversed course in the middle of the escape and retreated back into the surrounded trenches. Later that night Floyd would meet with Pillow and Buckner to plan the fort’s surrender.

The result was predictable and catastrophic for the Confederacy in the Western Theater. When news of Fort Donelson’s defeat reached Clarksville and Nashville, many citizens panicked and escaped. Clarksville’s Fort Defiance raised the white surrender flag just three days after Donelson’s fall, paving the way for easy capture of Nashville a week later. After Nashville fell, Grant continued his tenacious push along the Tennessee River into West Tennessee, with his goal the railroad crossing at Corinth, Miss.

Even further to the west, Federal gunboats pushed down the Mississippi River and captured Memphis in June. Despite occasional harassment and counterattack from Forrest, Middle and West Tennessee would remain in Union hands for the rest of the war. And an invasion route into the Deep South was opened for good.

Historians often argue over the turning points of the Civil War. Larger and more famous battles at Gettysburg, Antietam and Chattanooga rightly earn their reputations as significant inflection points in the great strategic conflict. But no other battle so early in the war had such long-lasting consequences as Fort Donelson. By cementing Grant’s fearless reputation in the Western Theater, opening up the first Confederate state capital for capture, demonstrating the effectiveness of the Union Navy along the South’s vast river network, and removing a massive Confederate army from the field — 12,000 troops not available two months later at the critical battle of Shiloh — the Battle of Fort Donelson would prove the most strategically decisive military engagement in the first half of the Civil War.

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Sources: William Freehling, “The South v. The South”; B. Frankling Cooling, “Forts Henry and Donelson: The Key to the Confederate Heartland”; Kenneth Gott, “Where the South Lost the War: An Analysis of the Fort Henry-Fort Donelson Campaign”; Kim Trevathan, “Coldhearted River: A Canoe Odyssey Down the Cumberland”; Teresa Prober, Preservation historian at the Dover Hotel.

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Aaron Astor is an assistant professor of history at Maryville College in Maryville, Tenn. He is the author of the forthcoming book “Rebels on the Border: Civil War, Emancipation and the Reconstruction of Kentucky and Missouri.”