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9 - The Western Theater, 1862–1863

from Part I - Major Battles and Campaigns

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2019

Aaron Sheehan-Dean
Affiliation:
Louisiana State University
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Summary

Ulysses S. Grant’s successful campaign against Forts Henry and Donelson in February 1862 left the western Confederacy reeling. The capture of the Tennessee and Cumberland river forts placed nearly a third of available Confederate troop strength in the theater into Federal custody. Flanked by Grant and facing Don Carlos Buell’s approaching Army of the Ohio as well, Confederate department commander Albert Sidney Johnston led a ragged, dismal, rain and sleet soaked retreat out of southern Kentucky. Plagued by desertions and stragglers, his army stumbled across Tennessee until it reached northern Mississippi. Nashville, one of the Confederacy’s most industrialized cities, fell without a fight in Johnston’s wake before the month ended, and soon with it most of Middle Tennessee’s rich farmlands. Simultaneously, John Pope’s Army of the Mississippi and Andrew Foote’s fleet of Union gunboats pursued Confederates fleeing their Mississippi River “Gibraltar” at Columbus, Kentucky. They drove down the flooded river valley until encountering the Confederate bastion at Island No. 10 opposite New Madrid, Missouri. Farther west across the river, Federal troops under Samuel Curtis already were in the act of shoving Sterling Price’s secessionist Missourians out of southwestern Missouri into Arkansas during a brutal winter campaign. Reuniting the separated Confederate forces including Price’s that had won a victory at Wilson’s Creek the previous summer, new Confederate commander Earl Van Dorn launched an ill-fated attack at Pea Ridge, Arkansas, that left his defeated army staggering southward in the cold. Not surprisingly, given the collapse of the Confederacy’s western line of defenses and its apparent implosion, many Federal soldiers gleefully anticipated a prompt end to the war after an additional season of mopping up.

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Chapter
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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References

Key Works

Ash, Stephen V. Middle Tennessee Society Transformed, 1860–1870: War and Peace in the Upper South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988).Google Scholar
Connelly, Thomas Lawrence. Army of the Heartland: The Army of Tennessee, 1861–1862 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967).Google Scholar
Cooling, Benjamin Franklin. Fort Donelson’s Legacy: War and Society in Kentucky and Tennessee, 1862–1863 (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1997).Google Scholar
Cooling, Benjamin Franklin. Forts Henry and Donelson: The Key to the Confederate Heartland (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1987).Google Scholar
Daniel, Larry J. Days of Glory: The Army of the Cumberland, 1861–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004).Google Scholar
Daniel, Larry J. and Bock, Lynn N.. Island No. 10: Struggle for the Mississippi Valley (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1996).Google Scholar
Hess, Earl J. Banners to the Breeze: The Kentucky Campaign, Corinth, and Stones River (Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, 2000).Google Scholar
Noe, Kenneth. Perryville: This Grand Havoc of Battle (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2009).Google Scholar
Roland, Charles P. Albert Sidney Johnston, Soldier of Three Republics (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1964).Google Scholar
Shea, William L. and Hess, Earl J., Pea Ridge: Civil War Campaign in the West (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992).Google Scholar
Woodworth, Steven E. Nothing but Victory: The Army of the Tennessee, 1861–1865 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005).Google Scholar

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