In February 1862 the Confederate Fort Henry on the Tennessee River became the site of the Union’s first major victory of the Civil War, and much of it was underwater when it fell. The episode traces how Kentucky’s neutrality collapsed in September 1861 when Confederates occupied Columbus and Ulysses S. Grant answered two days later by seizing Paducah, leaving Albert Sidney Johnston to defend a hollow 300-mile line. Engineers had found better ground in Kentucky but were forced south into Tennessee, onto low, marshy ground commanded by hills, so the fort could sit 12 miles from Fort Donelson. Heavy rains then flooded the powder magazines and left only nine of the fort’s 17 cannons above water.
With Grant’s 15,000 men stalled in mud, Brigadier General Lloyd Tilghman sent most of his roughly 3,000 troops overland to Fort Donelson and stayed behind with fewer than 100 artillerymen to hold off Flag Officer Andrew Foote’s seven gunboats, including four new city-class ironclads in their first combat. Because the flooded guns sat so low, they fired straight into the ironclads’ sloped armor. After 75 minutes, with one gun left working, Tilghman surrendered, and a Union boat rowed through the sally port to collect him. Lieutenant Seth Ledyard Phelps then led three timberclads up the river as far as Muscle Shoals in northern Alabama.
- The fort’s naval mines, then called torpedoes, failed when river water got past their faulty seals and soaked the charges.
- A 32-pound shot pierced the USS Essex and hit its middle boiler, killing or badly scalding 32 crewmen, including the commander.
- Many of the defenders carried antique flintlocks left over from the War of 1812.
- Phelps’s raiders captured the unfinished Confederate ironclad Eastport and were fed and helped by pro-Union civilians.
- The site of Fort Henry was submerged for good when the Tennessee River was dammed in the 1930s to create Kentucky Lake.
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