BiblioVault - Books about Steplyk, Jonathan M.

The Forts Henry and Donelson Campaign

February 6–16, 1862

Edited by Steven E. Woodworth and Charles D. Grear

Southern Illinois University Press, 2026

New perspectives on the battles that opened the Confederacy to invasion

In early 1862, the Civil War had been raging for almost ten months, and the Confederacy had enjoyed virtually uninterrupted success. From seizing federal property to early battlefield victories, Southern forces had effectively expelled Union authority from nearly all of the Confederacy’s eleven states. The Union suffered repeated setbacks, while modest victories in western Virginia and Kentucky had little strategic impact. By the end of February, however, much had changed.

On February 6, Union gunboats under the joint command of Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant and Flag Officer Andrew H. Foote captured Fort Henry on the Tennessee River, opening a crucial waterway into the Confederacy. Just days later, Grant moved against Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River. After several days of fighting, the fort surrendered on the 16th, along with more than 13,000 Confederate troops—the largest surrender in US history to that point. These twin victories shattered Confederate control of Kentucky and western Tennessee, allowing Federal soldiers and sailors to use the rivers to threaten the Confederacy’s interior. This first major strategic breakthrough of the war signaled a dramatic shift in momentum and elevated Grant’s national profile.

In this essay collection, leading and emerging scholars provide in-depth analyses of previously overlooked aspects of the Forts Henry and Donelson campaign. Contributors examine how ecological forces influenced the campaign, the effectiveness of the joint command between the Union army and navy, and Union brigadier general Charles F. Smith’s assault that doomed Fort Donelson. They also explore the battle’s impact on the military career of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the effects of surprise during the Confederate breakout attempt from Fort Donelson, Confederate colonel Gabriel Wharton’s memoir, and how the loss of the forts showed Texans that the fight to preserve the enslaved South would cost them more than they had imagined.

In the aftermath of the Forts Henry and Donelson campaign, most of the Civil War still lay ahead. The Confederacy would have many opportunities to regain its momentum and exhaust the Union will to prevail. However, with a few key exceptions, for the rest of the war, the Confederacy fought to defend itself rather than to take new territory. It was in this massive shift of momentum during ten days in 1862 that the war’s military outcome was foreshadowed.

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The Tennessee Campaign of 1864

Edited by Steven E. Woodworth and Charles D. Grear

Southern Illinois University Press, 2016

Few American Civil War operations matched the controversy, intensity, and bloodshed of Confederate general John Bell Hood’s ill-fated 1864 campaign against Union forces in Tennessee. In the first-ever anthology on the subject, The Tennessee Campaign of 1864, edited by Steven E. Woodworth and Charles D. Grear, fourteen prominent historians and emerging scholars examine the three-month operation, covering the battles of Allatoona, Spring Hill, and Franklin, as well as the decimation of Hood’s army at Nashville.

Contributors explore the campaign’s battlefield action, including how Major General Andrew J. Smith’s three aggressive divisions of the Army of Tennessee became the most successful Federal unit at Nashville, how vastly outnumbered Union troops held the Allatoona Pass, why Hood failed at Spring Hill and how the event has been perceived, and why so many of the Army of Tennessee’s officer corps died at the Battle of Franklin, where the Confederacy suffered a disastrous blow. An exciting inclusion is the diary of Confederate major general Patrick R. Cleburne, which covers the first phase of the campaign. Essays on the strained relationship between Ulysses S. Grant and George H. Thomas and on Thomas’s approach to warfare reveal much about the personalities involved, and chapters about civilians in the campaign’s path and those miles away show how the war affected people not involved in the fighting. An innovative case study of the fighting at Franklin investigates the emotional and psychological impact of killing on the battlefield, and other implications of the campaign include how the courageous actions of the U.S. Colored Troops at Nashville made a lasting impact on the African American community and how preservation efforts met with differing results at Franklin and Nashville.

Canvassing both military and social history, this well-researched volume offers new, illuminating perspectives while furthering long-running debates on more familiar topics. These in-depth essays provide an expert appraisal of one of the most brutal and notorious campaigns in Civil War history.

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Vicksburg Besieged

Edited by Steven E. Woodworth and Charles D. Grear

Southern Illinois University Press, 2020

A detailed analysis of the end of the Vicksburg Campaign and the forty-day siege

Vicksburg, Mississippi, held strong through a bitter, hard-fought, months-long Civil War campaign, but General Ulysses S. Grant’s forty-day siege ended the stalemate and, on July 4, 1863, destroyed Confederate control of the Mississippi River. In the first anthology to examine the Vicksburg Campaign’s final phase, nine prominent historians and emerging scholars provide in-depth analysis of previously unexamined aspects of the historic siege.

Ranging in scope from military to social history, the contributors’ invitingly written essays examine the role of Grant’s staff, the critical contributions of African American troops to the Union Army of the Tennessee, both sides’ use of sharpshooters and soldiers’ opinions about them, unusual nighttime activities between the Union siege lines and Confederate defensive positions, the use of West Point siege theory and the ingenuity of Midwestern soldiers in mining tunnels under the city’s defenses, the horrific experiences of civilians trapped in Vicksburg, the Louisiana soldier's defense of Jackson amid the strains of piano music, and the effect of the campaign on Confederate soldiers from the Trans-Mississippi region.

The contributors explore how the Confederate Army of Mississippi and residents of Vicksburg faced food and supply shortages as well as constant danger from Union cannons and sharpshooters. Rebel troops under the leadership of General John C. Pemberton sought to stave off the Union soldiers, and though their morale plummeted, the besieged soldiers held their ground until starvation set in. Their surrender meant that Grant’s forces succeeded in splitting in half the Confederate States of America.

Editors Steven E. Woodworth and Charles D. Grear, along with their contributors—Andrew S. Bledsoe, John J. Gaines, Martin J. Hershock, Richard H. Holloway, Justin S. Solonick, Scott L. Stabler, and Jonathan M. Steplyk—give a rare glimpse into the often overlooked operations at the end of the most important campaign of the Civil War.

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