The Battle of Fort Donelson: No Terms but Unconditional Surrender (Civil War Series)

In February 1862, after defeats at Bull Run and at Wilson's Creek in Missouri, the Union army was desperate for victory on the eve of its first offensive of the Civil War. The strategy was to penetrate the Southern heartland with support from a new Brown Water� navy. In a two-week campaign plagued by rising floodwaters and brutal winter weather, two armies collided in rural Tennessee to fight over two forts that controlled the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers. Those intense days set the course of the war in the Western Theater for eighteen months and determined the fates of Ulysses S. Grant, Andrew H. Foote and Albert Sidney Johnston. Historian James R. Knight paints a picture of this crucial but often neglected and misunderstood turning point.

James R. Knight is a graduate of Harding University, 1967. He spent five years as a pilot in the United States Air Force, flying the C-130E, and thirty-one years as a pilot for Federal Express, flying the Dassault DA-20 Falcon, the Boeing 727 and the McDonnell Douglass DC-10. In the early '90s, he began researching a historical incident in his hometown and published his first work, an article in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly in 1997. In 2003, Eakin Press published his biography of two Texas outlaws titled Bonnie and Clyde: A 21st Century Update. In 2007, he published the story and correspondence of a Confederate cavalryman from Tennessee titled Letters to Anna. This is his second work in The History Press's Sesquicentennial Series, having written The Battle of Franklin in 2009. Knight retired from Federal Express in 2004 and lives in Franklin, Tennessee, where he works part time as a historical interpreter for the Battle of Franklin Trust. When not encouraging visitor at the Carter House to relive some moments of the Battle of Franklin, he sings on the worship team at church, collects historical documents and artifacts and occasionally drives around in his restored 1934 Ford V-8. He and his wife, Judy, and have three children and six grandchildren.