Battle of Fort Donelson

In February 1862 the Confederacy held the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers with two earthwork forts. Take them and the road into the western Confederacy opened. Grant took the first, Fort Henry, in a morning. Fort Donelson took four days and nearly went the other way.

On February 15, in bitter cold, the Confederate garrison attacked out of its own works and punched a hole clean through the Union right. The road to Nashville was open. Then their commanders lost their nerve and ordered the men back inside the fort. Grant, returning to the field, read it exactly right: a garrison carrying haversacks was trying to escape, not to win. He ordered an immediate counterattack and sealed them in.

The next morning General Buckner asked for terms. Grant's reply became the most famous sentence of his early career: no terms except unconditional and immediate surrender. Around 13,000 men marched out as prisoners — the largest capture on the continent to that point. The North, starved of good news, had found a general, and the initials U. S. Grant suddenly stood for something else.