A POET MIGHT DESCRIBE them as arrows running though the heart of the Confederacy, but to the military and political leaders of the North and South back in 1861, the Cumberland, Tennessee, and Mississippi rivers represented something much more prosaic, yet vital: the probable difference between victory and defeat in the American Civil War. Besides serving as a major peacetime avenue of trade for the western states, these rivers dissected and divided much of the richest area of the South. With its tremendously greater industrial resources, the North could easily utilize these rivers as avenues of invasion into the heartland of the South, striking at the population centers of Tennessee, at the railroad lines connecting the Confederacy, and at the industrial centers that were beginning to bud, notably Chattanooga, Nashville, and Atlanta. The Confederacy, lacking the industrial facilities to build a powerful river fleet, would be forced to utilize river fortifications as a defense against a Northern push down the lines of these rivers.
One of the prizes in the war in this heartland region was the all important border states, Kentucky and Missouri. Not only for their geographical locations, but also as a fertile field for recruiting and obtaining munitions, these states were of the utmost importance to both sides.
The geographical features of this heartland region, where the war was slowly developing, were significant. The two great rivers, the Tennessee and Cumberland, intersected the region, and would be of great use as a means of moving troops and supplies with minimum cost. The Tennessee was navigable from its mouth, through Western Kentucky and Tennessee, and into the northern part of Alabama as far as Mussel Shoals, while the Cumberland could be navigated far up beyond Nashville. In the eastern region were the Cumberland Mountains which could be crossed at certain passes, the most important of which was Cumberland Gap, if the Union forces could develop a strong enough army with a secure logistics base to immediately advance and drive out the comparatively small Confederate force in the area. The Tennessee and Georgia Railway ran up the valley of these mountains into Virginia, making it one of the main lines of communications between the Southern armies operating in that region and the Gulf States. At the city of Chattanooga, in East Tennessee, Unionist territory, this railway connected with the Georgia Central Railroad, which led into the heart of Georgia, and with the Memphis and Charleston, which passed into northern Alabama and Mississippi and Memphis, Tennessee. From Louisville, Kentucky, the Louisville and Nashville line ran southward through Bowling Green a hundred miles and to Nashville, seventy miles farther.