Fort Donelson
With its whistle blaring, the Confederate gunboat Grampus steamed into Madrid Bend, where Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas come together on the Mississippi River. Read more
Fort Donelson
The winter of 1863 was a time of general inactivity for the exhausted armies in middle Tennessee. Read more
Fort Donelson
A signal rocket set off by Confederate pickets streaked skyward in the damp early morning of February 4, 1862. Read more
Fort Donelson
After an almost uninterrupted, four-month-long string of Union successes beginning in early 1862, followed by the advance of a 100,000-man enemy army to the eastern outskirts of its capital at Richmond, Virginia, the Confederacy suddenly found itself in a life-or-death struggle for its very survival. Read more
Fort Donelson
The June 19, 1861, editorial in the Charleston Mercury newspaper warned: “War is bloody reality, not butterfly sporting. Read more
Fort Donelson
It was raining heavily, a deluge of almost Biblical proportions that hammered down on the exhausted men of the Union’s Army of the Tennessee. Read more
Fort Donelson
Born in Ohio in 1822, Ulysses S. Grant graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1843. Read more
Fort Donelson
No one expected this—not the fiercest “fire-eater” in South Carolina or the flintiest abolitionist in New England. Read more
Fort Donelson
Of all the unlikely heroes of the Civil War, none was more unlikely than Bushrod Johnson, Ohio-born Quaker turned Confederate general. Read more
Fort Donelson
Prior to the American Civil War, Nathan Bedford Forrest amassed a fortune in real estate, agriculture, and the slave trade. Read more
Fort Donelson
Confederate Maj. Gen. Gideon Pillow. After gaining ground trying to cut an escape path for the Confederates during the February 1862 siege of Fort Donelson by Union forces led Brig. Read more
Fort Donelson
On April 15, 1861, three days after the bombardment of Fort Sumter, President Abraham Lincoln issued a call for 75,000 volunteer troops. Read more
Fort Donelson
One evening around Christmas of 1861 Union Maj. Gen. Henry “Old Brains” Halleck, commanding the Department of Missouri, dined with his chief of staff, Brig. Read more
Fort Donelson
For much of its history, artillery has been a weapon of mass destruction and attrition, a force designed to cause casualties, destroy fortifications, and wear an enemy down with its noise, explosions, and shrapnel. Read more
Fort Donelson
When the Civil War started in 1861, there were only two officers in the Union Army who had commanded a force in battle larger than a brigade. Read more
Fort Donelson
The soldiers of the two armies at Fort Donelson awoke on the morning of February 15, 1862, to another frigid morning. Read more
Fort Donelson
To say the Confederates had the perfect chance at the Battle of Shiloh to evict Maj. Gen. Read more
Fort Donelson
In 1862, Confederate forces in Virginia were enjoying a number of campaign successes, but the decisive advantage in naval power enjoyed by the Union enabled it to advance down the Mississippi, capture river forts, and conduct many coastal attacks. Read more
