Battle of Fort Henry - Background

Background

In early 1861 the critical border state of Kentucky had declared neutrality in the American Civil War. This neutrality was first violated on September 3, when Confederate Brig. Gen. Gideon J. Pillow, acting on orders from Maj. Gen. Leonidas Polk, occupied Columbus. Two days later Union Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, displaying the personal initiative that would characterize his later career, seized Paducah, a major transportation hub of rail and port facilities at the mouth of the Tennessee. Henceforth, neither adversary respected the proclaimed neutrality of the state and the Confederate advantage was lost; the buffer zone that Kentucky provided was no longer available to assist in the defense of Tennessee.

By early 1862, on the Confederate side, a single general, Albert Sidney Johnston, commanded all forces from Arkansas to the Cumberland Gap. But his forces were spread too thinly over a wide defensive line: his left flank was Polk in Columbus with 12,000 men; his right flank was Brig. Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner in Bowling Green, Kentucky, with 4,000; the center consisted of two forts under the command of Brig. Gen. Lloyd Tilghman, also with 4,000. Fort Henry and Fort Donelson were the sole positions to defend the important Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, respectively. If these rivers were opened to Union military traffic, two direct invasion paths would lead into Tennessee and beyond.

The Union military command in the West suffered from a lack of unified command, organized into three separate departments: the Department of Kansas, under Maj. Gen. David Hunter; the Department of Missouri, under Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck; and the Department of the Ohio, under Brig. Gen. Don Carlos Buell. By January 1862, this disunity of command was apparent because they could not agree on a strategy for operations in the Western theater. Buell, under political pressure to invade and hold pro-Union eastern Tennessee, moved slowly in the direction of Nashville. In Halleck's department, Grant demonstrated up the Tennessee River to divert attention from Buell's intended advance, which did not occur. Halleck and the other generals in the West were coming under political pressure from President Abraham Lincoln to participate in a general offensive by Washington's Birthday. Despite his traditional caution, Halleck eventually reacted positively to Grant's proposal that he move against Fort Henry. He hoped that this would improve his standing in relation to his rival, Buell. But he and Grant were also concerned about rumors that Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard would soon arrive in the theater with large numbers of reinforcements, so celerity was warranted. On January 30, 1862, Halleck authorized Grant to take Fort Henry.

Grant wasted no time, leaving Cairo, Illinois, at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, on February 2. His invasion force consisted of 15–17,000 men in two divisions, commanded by Brig. Gens. John A. McClernand and Charles F. Smith, and the Western Flotilla, commanded by United States Navy Flag Officer Andrew Hull Foote. Foote had four ironclad gunboats (flagship USS Cincinnati, USS Carondelet, USS St. Louis, and USS Essex) under his direct command, and three wooden ("timberclad") gunboats (USS Conestoga, USS Tyler, and USS Lexington) under Lt. Seth Ledyard Phelps. There were insufficient transport ships this early in the war to deliver all of the army troops in a single operation, so two trips upriver were required to reach the fort.