Men of Fire

Sometime After noon in the Snowy Ravine Outside Fort Donelson, Nathan Bedford Forrest's horse had finally succumbed to its seven bullet wounds. The Confederate lieutenant colonel, a novice soldier but no stranger to spilled blood, spotted another mount whose saddle had been emptied of its rider. Since early morning on this sub-zero day, Forrest and his men had pushed the enemy back more than a mile. Now, he could see that Union troops to his front were retreating. Riding toward Forrest from the battle's other side was another unheralded officer, the Union's Brigadier General Ulysses Grant. Earlier this morning, he had made a blunder sure to make his already precarious position more so. Traveling north to confer with his chief of gunboats, Grant had left his troops at Fort Donelson with no subordinate in charge. Before he could return, he learned that the Confederates had burst from their lines in front of Donelson. The juggernaut had pulverized the Union army's right wing and now was rolling up its center. All was chaos.... 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 incommon: 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.Hurst, Jack is the author of 'Men of Fire ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780465031849 and ISBN 0465031846.