Men of Fire
Grant, Forrest, and the Campaign That Decided the Civil War
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Deep in the winter of 1862, on the border between Kentucky and Tennessee, two extraordinary military leaders faced each other in an epic clash that would transform them both and change the course of American history forever. Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant had no significant military successes to his credit. He was barely clinging to his position within the Union Army-he had been officially charged with chronic drunkenness only days earlier, and his own troops despised him. His opponent was as untested as he was: an obscure lieutenant colonel named Nathan Bedford Forrest. Forrest was a slaveholder, Grant a closet abolitionist-but the two men held one thing in common: an unrelenting desire for victory at any cost. After ten days of horrific battle, Grant emerged victorious. He had earned himself the nickname "Unconditional Surrender" for his fierce prosecution of the campaign, and immediately became a hero of the Union Army. Forrest retreated, but he soon re-emerged as a fearsome war machine and guerrilla fighter. His reputation as a brilliant and innovative general survives to this day. But Grant had already changed the course of the Civil War. By opening the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers to the Union Army, he had split Dixie in two. The confederacy would never recover. A riveting account of the making of two great military leaders, and two battles that transformed America forever, Men of Fire is destined to become a classic work of military history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The bloody February 1862 Union victory at Fort Donelson on Tennessee's Cumberland River is remembered as the Union's first big success and as the battle in which Ulysses S. Grant held firm for Confederate unconditional surrender. Former journalist Hurst (Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography) attempts to make the case that Grant's western theater victory at Donelson indelibly shaped his military career, as well as that of Confederate Lt. Col. Nathan Bedford Forrest, and that the battle turned the tide of the Civil War unalterably in the North's favor. Writing forcefully and engagingly, Hurst does a thorough job of reconstructing the military aspects of the battle and never shies away from illuminating the war's horror. His focus is on Grant, the Confederate generals who faced him (John Floyd, Gideon Pillow, Simon Buckner and Bushrod Johnson) and the ever-aggressive Forrest, best known for his battlefield viciousness and his postwar role in creating the Ku Klux Klan. It's a stretch, though, to postulate that the 1862 victory at Donelson propelled the Union to victory more than three years later. Certainly, as Hurst says, western theater action often is overlooked in assessing the Civil War. But one can't ignore the impact on the war's outcome of the massive battles of Antietam, Gettysburg, Wilderness and Cold Harbor that came after Donelson.