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  • Grant Invades Tennessee: The 1862 Battles for Forts Henry and Donelson by Timothy B. Smith
  • Eric Michael Burke
Timothy B. Smith. Grant Invades Tennessee: The 1862 Battles for Forts Henry and Donelson. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2016. 526 pp. ISBN: 9780700623126 (cloth), $34.95.

Today, one might forgive visitors to Tennessee and Kentucky's Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area if they are unable, on the mere basis of an eponymous trail network and a few historical markers, to recognize the full significance of the submerged fort at the bottom of Kentucky Lake. Timothy Smith's Grant Invades Tennessee reminds us that, when the Depression-era Tennessee Valley Authority officials opted to sink the remnants of Fort Henry under the waters of the Tennessee River, they had less excuse. Although the second and more famous of Grant's twin victories during the winter of 1861–62, the capture of Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River, has always figured much larger in collective memory (its remnants are still well-preserved above water), Smith argues that the relatively greater amount of attention Donelson has received is somewhat incommensurate with its actual strategic importance compared to its oft-snubbed western companion. In short, perhaps we sunk the wrong fort.

In this third volume of Smith's trilogy detailing Grant's Mississippi Valley campaign, which culminated in the battles of Shiloh and Corinth, the author provides a vivid tactical reconstruction of the opening blows to the western Confederacy that enabled all that followed in the western theater of the war. Smith makes clear that the Union capture of Forts Henry and Donelson not only opened the gate for the entrance of Federal forces into the Tennessee and Cumberland River valleys but in fact "allowed the Union forces access by naval as [End Page 89] well as land forces all the way into the interior of the South" (150). While the two victories, coming during an otherwise depressing first winter of the northern war effort, have long been recognized as the beginning of Grant's ascendency in the public eye, the strategic import of prying open a navigable water route—the Tennessee—that cut deep into the bowels of the young Confederacy, along with ensuring ready access to that route by securing its flank—the Cumberland to the east—is hard to overstate. Although the northern public quickly latched onto the more dramatic of the two successes—the bloody battle at Fort Donelson and the capture of thousands of Rebel prisoners—it was the fall of Fort Henry that, according to Smith, "shook the Confederacy to its core from Richmond to New Orleans" (xiv). In the words of a Tennessee Confederate's bride just prior to its capture, "If the Federals ever take Fort Henry we are ruined" (153). Indeed, with no major Rebel stronghold along the Tennessee River south of Fort Henry, its capture opened the waterway to potential Federal invasion as far south as Florence, Alabama. Moreover, as Smith shows, it was the fall of Henry, not Donelson, that spurred Confederate officials to reluctantly abandon the previous year's deeply flawed "cordon" defensive strategy and rush far-flung reinforcements to northern Mississippi in order to forestall such a potential disaster. The resulting Rebel concentration set the stage for both the battle of Shiloh and the subsequent Union offensive against Corinth.

Though historians Benjamin Cooling and Kendall Gott have provided studies of the broader social and political context in which the campaign for the two forts unfolded and offered evaluations of high command decisions, Smith's work is a response to his sense of a lingering "desperate need" for a "truly comprehensive tactical treatment" of the two battles (xiii). While most major campaigns of the war already enjoy a sizable complement of tactical scholarship, "causing socially oriented historians to complain about the lack of context," Smith asserts, the Henry-Donelson campaign has long suffered from the opposite problem (xiii). Thus, Smith's narrative differs from those of Cooling and Gott chiefly in its focus on tactical-level operations, illuminated by the employment of a prodigious array of sources, including, most saliently, the words of enlisted men who took part. Smith...

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