Fort Donelson National Battlefield

In February 1862 Union gunboats and Ulysses S. Grant's army took Fort Henry on the Tennessee River and turned to Fort Donelson, about 12 miles east on the Cumberland. The Confederates tried to break out on February 15 and failed. Generals Floyd and Pillow fled, and Simon Bolivar Buckner asked Grant for terms. Grant replied that "no terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender" could be accepted. Buckner surrendered at the Dover Hotel on February 16, and more than 13,000 Confederate soldiers became prisoners. Both rivers were open, and Nashville fell within two weeks.

Enslaved laborers helped build the forts. Tennessee slaveholders were asked in 1861 to send workers to the river defenses, and Alabama sent more to Forts Henry and Heiman. After the surrender, enslaved people kept coming to the Union lines, and by the winter of 1863 nearly 300 formerly enslaved people lived near the garrison, in what the Park Service calls the Free State. Aid societies reported that they built a school and churches and kept gardens. Their position was precarious: commanders sometimes returned people to owners who could prove ownership. Colonel Abner Harding, an abolitionist, gave weapons to formerly enslaved men to help defend the fort in the 1863 Battle of Dover.

The earthworks and river batteries are open to walk, and the national cemetery lies nearby. The Dover Hotel, built between 1851 and 1853, is the only surviving structure where a major Civil War surrender took place; a local association saved it from demolition in 1927.