Forts Henry and Donelson: The Key to the Confederate Heartland

The Forts Henry and Donelson - or Twin Rivers - Campaign of 1862 was one of the decisive campaigns in the American Civil War. The fall of the two forts, on the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers in the West, handed the Confederacy its first major defeat, bolstered Northern enthusiasm for war, and opened an invasion route to Nashville and the deeper South.

While the South ignored the western rivers, the North grasped their strategic and symbolic importance in American life. Union gunboats plied these rivers in an unusual show of cooperation between Union army and navy. The author explorers the roots of this cooperation as well as the inevitable political struggles among leaders and levels of command on both sides of the conflict.

The campaign's outcome catapulted to prominence an unknown brigadier general, Ulysses S. Grant, and sent into decline the career of the South's Albert Sidney Johnston. At the same time, these battles, fought largely by Northern and Southern volunteers, gave many American youths their tragic first taste of combat. This book, the definitive account of the Forts Henry and Donelson story, recreates in vivid, rich detail, the many facets of this crucial campaign and its momentous consequences.