General Grant was a West Point graduate ranking low in his class at graduation. He served for a time in the regular army with such capacity as to reach the rank of captain. Then he resigned, as many other officers did--Stonewall Jackson and William T. Sherman among the number--because the police duty which seemed to constitute the only function of the regular army offered no career to him. Captain Grant became first a farmer and later a clerk in his brother's business house at Galena, Illinois, upon a meager salary of $800 a year, which was eked out by the earnings of his slaves in Missouri. When the war broke out he offered his services to his country, asking for a restoration to the regular army. His application was not deemed worthy even of a reply. But presently a regiment of Illinois volunteers, more appreciative than the Washington authorities, made him its colonel, and after a little while he was promoted to be a brigadier-general of volunteers, but still without even so much as a second lieutenant's commission in the regular army. In this volunteer capacity he was sent first to Missouri and later to Cairo in Illinois to command a wide district. He fought the battle of Belmont and after a partial victory he lost it. A few months earlier, learning that the Confederates, who were masters of Columbus, twenty miles down the Mississippi, were planning to seize upon Paducah, fifty miles up the Ohio, Grant had undertaken without orders an expedition against that town. He promptly captured it and thus defeated the Confederate program. After the battle of Belmont he planned and proposed a campaign which he hoped might reverse the existing situation at the West and give to the Union arms their first important and strategically significant victory. Two great and practically navigable rivers, the Cumberland and the Tennessee, rise in the very heart of what was then the Southern Confederacy. Upon substantially parallel though vastly varying lines, they flow westward and northward till they debouch into the Ohio River within a few miles of each other. At a point near the boundary between Kentucky and Tennessee where these two rivers flow within eleven miles of each other, the Confederates had erected two fortresses to command them--Fort Henry and Fort Donelson. These fortresses gave to the South control of the two rivers. It was Grant's idea that by the reduction of these works he might reverse this condition of affairs, and make of the two rivers facile avenues of Federal access to the heart of the Confederacy, where now they served the Confederates as roadways of approach to positions of the utmost strategic importance to the side that should master and hold them.