The Battle of Fort Donelson, 1862: Unconditional Surrender Grant

In February 1862 the Union had little to celebrate. Then, from the frozen hills above the Cumberland River, came news of a Confederate army surrendered whole, and of a little-known general named Ulysses S. Grant who had offered it no terms at all.⁶

A battle of the American Civil War, part of the greatest battles of the Civil War · Related: Belmont, Vicksburg · Before: The First Battle of Bull Run · Next: The Battle of Shiloh

Who won the Battle of Fort Donelson and why?

The Union won. Grant surrounded the fort by land while Foote's gunboats came up the river, and when the Confederates broke out on 15 February their generals called the troops back instead of marching through the gap. Grant counterattacked at once and closed the road, and the garrison surrendered unconditionally the next morning.⁷

Background: the river gateway to the South

In early 1862 the Confederate line in the West stretched across Kentucky and Tennessee, and two forts guarded the places where the rivers cut through it: Fort Henry on the Tennessee and Fort Donelson on the Cumberland, the river to Nashville, the capital of Tennessee. Tennessee Confederates had built Donelson in the summer of 1861, above all as a battery commanding the river.⁸

On 6 February Union gunboats forced Fort Henry to surrender. Grant had boasted that he would take Fort Donelson on the 8th, but rain turned the roads to mud and the gunboats were slow to come round by river, so he did not march until the 12th. He crossed about twelve miles of country and found the road open.⁹ › Ulysses S. Grant

On the Confederate side, the department commander Albert Sidney Johnston was convinced that no earthen fort could stand against the Union gunboats, yet he left the garrison in place and sent four generals with reinforcements and, in the verdict of the historian B. Franklin Cooling, only vague instructions.¹⁰

Armies and commanders

Grant led the Union army as a brigadier general. John McClernand's division held the right, Charles F. Smith's the left, and from 14 February a new division under Lew Wallace filled the center. On the river, Flag Officer Andrew H. Foote brought four ironclads, St. Louis, Pittsburg, Louisville and Carondelet, with the wooden gunboats Tyler and Conestoga.¹¹

The Confederates had four generals: John B. Floyd, the senior, a former US Secretary of War under President Buchanan; Gideon Pillow; Simon Bolivar Buckner; and Bushrod Johnson. Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest commanded the cavalry.¹²

The fort itself was an earthwork on a bluff above the river, with a line of rifle pits for the infantry around its landward side. Its river batteries held eleven heavy guns by the Park Service's count, while Floyd reported thirteen guns of different calibers mounted in the fort.¹³

The numbers depend on the source. The American Battlefield Trust counts 24,531 Union and 16,171 Confederate troops engaged, and Cooling gives the Confederates some 15,000 men against 17,000 to 21,000 Union. Buckner, in his official report, put the Confederate army at never more than 12,000. Grant himself, writing in 1885, thought he had faced about 21,000 men, with 27,000 of his own by the last day.¹⁴

The commanders' decisions

Grant's aim from the start, Lew Wallace later wrote, was not the fort but the army inside it, and he counted on Foote's gunboats, after their quick success at Fort Henry, to close the river behind it. In his memoirs Grant explains that from the 12th to the 14th he had only about 15,000 men and no gunboats, so he could do little more than hold his ground until the fleet and fresh troops arrived.¹⁵

Inside the lines the Confederate commanders came to the same conclusion whenever they met: the fort could not be held. After the gunboat battle of the 14th, Floyd reported, he called his division and brigade commanders together after dark, and they adopted a plan to strike the Union right at dawn and open the road south toward Nashville, with Pillow attacking on the left and Buckner striking from the center along the Wynn's Ferry road. Pillow, in his own report, described the aim rather as cutting up the investing force before its fresh troops were in position.¹⁶

Grant did not expect a fight on land. Before dawn on the 15th the wounded Foote asked to see him on the flagship, and Grant rode to the landing, some four or five miles from his right, after ordering his division commanders to hold their positions and bring on no engagement. He was on board the St. Louis when the Confederates struck.¹⁷

The battle in phases

12 and 13 February: the investment. Grant's divisions took up positions on the ridges facing the Confederate rifle pits on the landward side of the fort. On the 13th the Union troops probed the lines, and the fighting was already costly. Then the weather turned: rain and snow gave way to bitter cold, and the soldiers of both armies lay out in the open on the frozen ground.¹⁸

14 February: the gunboats. That morning transports landed fresh Union troops below the fort under the cover of newly arrived gunboats. Grant now had Lew Wallace's new division and about 2,500 more men of Smith's division brought over from Fort Henry. In the afternoon Foote brought his ironclads up the Cumberland to repeat the success at Fort Henry. They closed to within a few hundred yards of the fort's water batteries, firing as they came. After about an hour and a half the heavy guns on the bluff had badly damaged three of the boats and driven the flotilla off, and Foote himself was wounded. The Confederates cheered along their lines.¹⁹

15 February: the breakout. With Grant's army growing every day, the Confederate generals decided to cut their way out. Early in the morning they massed against the Union right, and McClernand's division was driven back step by step, opening the road south toward Nashville.²⁰

McClernand's men gave way largely because they ran out of cartridges, Grant later wrote, while boxes of ammunition lay close at hand. Lew Wallace, in the center, sent one of his brigades to McClernand's aid, and it helped stop the Confederate advance short of the rest of the Union line.²¹

Turning point: the order to go back

Just as the way seemed clear, Gideon Pillow ordered the attacking troops back into their trenches. The American Battlefield Trust calls the order inexplicable; the Park Service puts it down to confusion and indecision among the Confederate commanders, who could not agree whether to escape or to hold the fort.²²

Grant saw the chance. Reaching the field, he told an officer of his staff that some of his men were badly demoralized, “but the enemy must be more so, for he has attempted to force his way out, but has fallen back: the one who attacks first now will be victorious.” He reasoned that the enemy had stripped his own right to make the attack, and while McClernand and Lew Wallace went back for the lost ground, he ordered Smith to storm the Confederate works on the left. Smith's division broke through the outer rifle pits before dark and spent the night inside the enemy lines. The way of escape was shut again.²³

Aftermath: the night the generals fled

That night the generals met in council at a hotel in Dover and agreed that the fort could not be held. Floyd, who feared what would happen to him as a prisoner because of his record as Secretary of War, handed command to Pillow, who passed it on to Buckner. Floyd and Pillow got away up the river toward Nashville with part of the garrison: about 2,000 men by the Park Service's count, about 3,000 by Grant's and Cooling's.²⁴

Forrest would not surrender. He gathered his cavalry and slipped away through the snow, fording the icy backwater of a flooded creek south of Dover. Grant put the men who left with him at about a thousand, Cooling at 1,500 horsemen and some infantry.²⁵

On the morning of 16 February Buckner, who had known Grant at West Point and in Mexico, asked for an armistice and for commissioners to settle terms. Grant replied: “No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.” Buckner answered that his situation compelled him to accept what he called ungenerous and unchivalrous terms, and the fort surrendered.²⁶

Counting the losses

No one knew exactly how many men surrendered. Buckner told Grant it would be no fewer than 12,000 and no more than 15,000, yet in his official report he wrote that the army had shrunk to fewer than 9,000 once Floyd's brigade had gone. The American Battlefield Trust counts more than 13,000 men left in the fort, and Grant reported 12,000 to 15,000 prisoners, with some 20,000 small arms, 48 pieces of artillery and 17 heavy guns.²⁷

Union losses are better recorded, though the counts differ. Battles and Leaders gives the army 510 killed, 2,152 wounded and 224 captured or missing, 2,886 in all, with another 54 killed and wounded in the gunboats; the American Battlefield Trust gives 2,691: 507 killed, 1,976 wounded and 208 missing or captured. Confederate killed and wounded were never stated exactly; Pillow put them at about two thousand.²⁸

The consequences reached far beyond the hills of Dover. The Confederates had to give up southern Kentucky and much of Middle and West Tennessee. Nashville was soon abandoned amid riots and panic and became a great Union supply depot, and the news shocked Johnston. Floyd and Pillow were officially censured for abandoning their men; Buckner went to a Northern prison until he was exchanged.²⁹

Legacy and memory

The North had won its first great victory of the war and found a hero. Grant was promoted to major general, and his initials were said to stand for Unconditional Surrender. Cooling writes that the road to Appomattox and to the White House began for him at Fort Donelson; within weeks his army was on its way to Shiloh.³⁰

Success also brought jealousy. Grant's superior, Henry Halleck, complained to Washington that Grant had gone to Nashville without leave and sent no reports, and Grant was relieved of his field command, in his own words virtually under arrest. Halleck soon backed down and cleared him, and Grant learned only years later that Halleck's own reports had caused the trouble.³¹

Visiting Fort Donelson today

The battlefield near Dover, Tennessee, is preserved by the National Park Service as Fort Donelson National Battlefield. Visitors can walk the earthen fort and the Confederate earthworks, look down the Cumberland from the water batteries, see the Dover Hotel where Buckner surrendered, and visit the Fort Donelson National Cemetery.³² › The Greatest Battles of the American Civil War