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Under the Anaconda Plan, Union forces in the West were to seize
control of the Mississippi River while Union forces in the East
tried to capture the new Confederate capital in Richmond. In the
western theater, the Confederates had built two forts, Fort Donelson
along the Cumberland River and Fort Henry on the Tennessee River,
which controlled the Kentucky and western Tennessee region and
blocked the Union's path to the Mississippi.
The Union officer responsible for capturing these forts was
Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885), a West Point graduate who had resigned
from the army because of a drinking problem and who was working
in his father's tanning shop when the war began. In February 1862,
gunboats under Grant's command took Fort Henry and ten days later,
Grant's men took Fort Donelson, forcing 13,000 Confederates to
surrender.
Grant and some 42,000 men then proceeded south along the Tennessee
River. A Confederate force of 40,000 men, under the command of
Beauregard and Johnston tried to surprise Grant before other Union
forces could join him at the Battle of Shiloh. In two days of
heavy fighting during which there were 13,000 Union casualties
and over 10,000 Confederate casualties, Grant successfully pushed
back the southern forces. By early June, Union forces controlled
the Mississippi River as far south as Memphis, Tennessee.
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