Timothy B. Smith - Grant invades Tennessee : the 1862 battles for Forts Henry and Donelson

MODERN WAR STUDIES

Theodore A. Wilson
General Editor

Raymond Callahan
Jacob W. Kipp
Allan R. Millett
Carol Reardon
Dennis Showalter
David R. Stone
James H. Willbanks
Series Editors

GRANT INVADES
TENNESSEE

_______________

The 1862 Battles for Forts Henry and Donelson

T IMOTHY B. S MITH

University Press of Kansas

To God Be the Glory

It was quite the scene, as the two old generals sat and enjoyed each others company. Veterans had reminisced together many times since the Civil War, but this meeting had more multiple layers of meaning than normal as a dying Ulysses S. Grant visited with one of his oldest friends, Simon Bolivar Buckner. The visit was newsworthy if for no other reason than Grant was a former president of the United States, and the most popular American alive at the time. Buckner was no slouch himself, of course, being a former Confederate general and governor of Kentucky, but Grant was clearly the elder statesman of the two and Buckner came to pay what he knew would be his final respects to the living legend.

Beyond Grants presidential credentials, the meeting was also significant in other ways. The two were generals before they were politicians, and on opposite sides of the great Civil War that had torn the nation asunder some two and a half decades before. Their meeting together and discussion (Grant writing on scraps of paper because his throat cancer had ended his ability to talk) of the reconciliation even then taking place were certainly noteworthy. Grant noted, I have witnessed since my last sickness just what I wished to see ever since the war: harmony and good feeling between the sections. I have always contended that if there had been nobody left but the soldiers we should have had peace in a year. The meeting also illustrated the need for old soldiers to write memoirs, preserve battlefields, and give their recollections about what had happened; this generation, with Grant its standard-bearer, was beginning to pass away. Grant was dying, but Buckner was getting old as well. At one point, Grant wrote of Buckner, you look very natural except that your hair has whitened and you have grown stouter.

The 1885 meeting was fraught with other fascinating contexts as well. The scene harked back to earlier relationships these two had shared. Their days together at West Point had been enjoyable and full of youth, and their service together in Mexico fighting for the United States government was by then a fond memory as well. Grant and Buckner reminisced about those times, Grant even writing a short note to Buckners new wife: I knew your husband long before you did. We were at West Point together and served together in the Mexican War.

Significantly, Grant only mentioned a few parts of their association. Not so glorious, for each of them, were other meetings that one or the other obviously remembered less fondly. In fact, their recorded association in the 1850s was when Grant was out of money and a charitable Buckner bailed him out. Apparently neither mentioned their next meeting either, which was certainly their most famous and significant. The two had met again at Dover, Tennessee, in February 1862. By this time, Grant was an up-and-coming Union general while Buckner was the chivalrous expatriated Kentuckian defending one of the key points in the Confederacy. While the Union victory at Fort Donelson won laurels for Grant, Buckner was not totally humiliated. While he faced numerous months in Federal captivity, some of it in solitary confinement, he emerged from the ordeal beloved by his soldiers, whose fate he had chosen to share. Yet no evidence remains that in 1885 the two talked over the Fort Donelson events. The charitable Grant never brought it up, no doubt fearing it would cause Buckner embarrassment. It had to be in the back of their minds, though, as the two sat and visited for one last time. It was, to be sure, a curious meeting of two friends, made more curious and perplexing by the odd happenings of a civil war decades earlier.

The Forts Henry and Donelson campaign certainly affected the Grant and Buckner relationship, but its significance spread even farther. In a real sense, the battle portended a lethal result for Grant because it was there that he switched from a pipe to cigars. Admiring Americans began to send him boxes of the latter when he was shown in the papers calmly smoking one. Even larger ramifications resulted from the February 1862 events, however; much of the reunification and even reconciliation even then discussed by these two elder statesmen had come from those events decades earlier. Thus for many reasons, the Forts Henry and Donelson campaign is rich in significance and consequence.

For all its importance, few major studies of the February 1862 campaign have surfaced through the century and a half since. While there are certainly many books detailing the operations on the twin rivers in 1862, only two stand out as major academic studies. A path-breaking publication by Benjamin Franklin Cooling brought the campaign to the forefront in 1987: Forts Henry and Donelson: The Key to the Confederate Heartland . Sixteen years later, in 2003, Kendall D. Gott published Where the South Lost the War: An Analysis of the Fort Henry-Fort Donelson Campaign, February 1862 . Both are serious academic studies worthy of attention.

Yet while both books are very well done, they approach the fighting from completely different angles and neither fully covers the story. Cooling is interested mostly in context, and as a result takes the broadest possible approach in his examination. Everything is seemingly fair game, and as a result he spends nearly the entire first half of the book on background economics, politics, and society. Likewise, much of the latter part of the book (as well as two additional volumes) is contextual material on what happened in the area after the fighting, including commemorative efforts. While there is certainly validity in this approach, it leaves little room for the coverage of tactical military detail.