James L. McDonough

The Army of Tennessee, known by various names in the course of its existence, was the Confederacy's principal army on the western front. From the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River, this force fought most of the major battles that…

The battle of Chickamauga (September 19-20, 1863) developed from the struggle to control the strategic railroad town of Chattanooga, the gateway to the Deep South, the seizure of which President Abraham Lincoln viewed as comparable to the capture of Richmond.…

In February 1862 a Union army-navy offensive succeeded in capturing Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, located respectively on the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, near the Tennessee-Kentucky border, and the fall of the two forts initiated a series of Union triumphs…

By the last days of December 1862, the Civil War was more than halfway through its second year, and certainly its course had turned against the Confederacy. The fall of Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, the loss of New Orleans,…