Forts Henry and Donelson: The Key to the Confederate Heartland

Forts Henry and Donelson portrays the tapestry of war and society in the upper southern heartland of Tennessee and Kentucky after key Union victories in February 1862. Those victories, notes Benjamin Franklin Cooling, could have delivered the decisive blow to the Confederacy in the West and ended the war in that theater. Instead, what followed was terrible devastation and bloodshed that embroiled soldier and civilian alike.

Cooling compellingly describes a struggle that was marked not only b...