Hello,

I am the president of the Friends of the Ft. Donelson Campaign, which of course covers Ft. Henry.

Those intrepid gunners at Henry did a fine job - and their marksmanship was not bad at all! One of their first rounds penetrated the casemate of the USS Essex knocking her out of the action early on as the shot struck one of her boilers rupturing it. This shot may have been fired by Henry's rifled 24 pound cannon. The USS Essex was hit 15 times.

Other hits were also damaging the other three ironclads - the USS Cincinnati, for example, had two of her guns disabled and she took 31 hits overall. Her armored casemate was also penetrated. The USS St. Louis was hit 7 times and the USS Carondolet was hit six times.

What began the downhill trend for the gunners at Henry was two-fold:

1) There were only some 80 men left to man the guns, and they were tiring fast after over an hour of heavy firing. The Union ironclads, only using their bow guns, could roate fresh crews from the otehr guns on the vessels.

2) CS guns started blowing up or getting hit themselves. The first gun to blow up was the 24 pounder rifle. The 10 inch Columbiad was accidently spiked by the braking of its priming wire in the vent. One of the 42 pounders, firing 32 pounder ammo since there were no proper rounds for it, then blew up. One of the 32 pounders was then struck by a shell from the USS Carondolet.

With their own defensive fire dropping dramatically due to lost guns and dead, wounded or exhausted crews, Tilghman, who was basically holding out so his main garrison force could get away safely, then decided that he had done all he could and surrendered.

Laslty- Gannt's 9th Tennessee Cavalry Battlion performed horribly in this campaign. They utterly faiedl in their job of rear guard for the escaping Henry garriosn and stampeded through the column of CS troops with Union cavalry nipping at their heels. Then, when Forrest ordered them to join in the Confederate attack of Feb. 15th at Donelson, they refused. They also refused to go out of the fort when Forrest took the rest of the cavalry with him to escape.

They would do a much better job later in the war, but February, 1862 was a terrible time for this unit.

Greg Biggs