Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

The Mississippi River and its Tributaries, 1861–1863 159
Maryland and Missouri, the other slave-holding border states that did not secede,
was the number of slaveholders among the white population. Although
Kentucky’s 919,484 white residents accounted for only 37.2 percent of the
total white population in the three states, its 38,645 slaveholders outnumbered
those of Maryland and Missouri combined. The sheer number of Kentuckians
who owned human property was an important factor in formulating the Lincoln
administration’s policies, first about emancipation and later about recruiting
black soldiers in the state. 7
In all the slave states west of the Appalachian Mountains, navigable rivers
formed an important feature of the land. During the antebellum period, they
afforded the cheapest, fastest means of transportation for people and goods.
Eighteenth-century settlers had founded Nashville on the Cumberland River.
Farther south and east, Chattanooga and Knoxville stood on the upper reaches of
the Tennessee. Natchez and Vicksburg, both cotton-shipping ports, were the commercial
hubs of Mississippi. Little Rock stood on the south bank of the Arkansas
River near the center of the state. Throughout the war, these rivers would provide
invasion routes for Union armies headed deep into the Confederacy. 8
By the first week of September 1861, a squadron of three federal gunboats
controlled the Mississippi River from Cairo, Illinois, southward nearly to the
Tennessee state line. Until that week, both sides in the war had observed the
“neutrality” that Kentucky’s state government wished to maintain. Then, within
days, a Confederate force occupied the town of Columbus on bluffs above
the Mississippi and Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant seized Paducah, where the
Tennessee River empties into the Ohio. Five months later, on 6 February 1862,
a U.S. Navy flotilla forced the surrender of Fort Henry, which guarded the upper
reaches of the Tennessee. Two days after that, Union gunboats touched at
Florence, Alabama, 257 miles upstream from Paducah—a foray that took them
deep into the Confederacy. 9
Grant moved next against Fort Donelson, less than ten miles east of
Fort Henry on the Cumberland River. The garrison there surrendered on 16
February, and Confederate troops evacuated Nashville a week later. A federal
army led by Brig. Gen. Don C. Buell crossed the Cumberland and occupied
Tennessee’s capital on 25 February, leaving the Confederate General Albert S.
Johnston, commanding west of the Appalachians, with a choice of either contesting
the occupation of middle Tennessee or defending the Mississippi River.
Johnston decided on the western option. As a result, a Union force led by Brig.
Gen. Ormsby M. Mitchel was able to march overland from Murfreesborough,
Tennessee, to Huntsville, Alabama, which it occupied on 11 April. Later that
7 Sam B. Hilliard, Atlas of Antebellum Southern Agriculture (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1984), pp. 50, 52, 54, 62, 66–67, 71, 76–77; U.S. Census Bureau, Agriculture of
the United States in 1860 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1864), pp. 229, 231, 234;
Population of the United States in 1860, pp. 171, 211, 277.
8 Richard M. McMurry, The Fourth Battle of Winchester: Toward a New Civil War Paradigm
(Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2002), pp. 68, 70.
9 OR, ser. 1, 4: 180–81, 196–97; 7: 153–56. Official Records of the Union and Confederate
Navies in the War of the Rebellion, 30 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1894–
1922), ser. 1, 22: 299–309 (hereafter cited as ORN); J. Haden Alldredge, “A History of Navigation
on the Tennessee River System,” 75th Cong., 1st sess., H. Doc. 254 (serial 10,119), pp. 7, 84–88.