Editing Unconditional surrender (section)

===American Civil War===
The most famous early use of the phrase in the [[American Civil War]] occurred during the 1862 [[Battle of Fort Donelson]]. [[Brigadier general (United States)|Brigadier General]] [[Ulysses S. Grant]] of the [[Union Army]] received a request for terms from [[Confederate Army|Confederate]] Brigadier General [[Simon Bolivar Buckner Sr.]], the fort's commanding officer. Grant's reply was that "no terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works." When news of Grant's victory, one of the Union's first in the war, was received in [[Washington, DC]], newspapers remarked (and [[President of the United States|President]] [[Abraham Lincoln]] endorsed) that Grant's first two initials, "U.S.," stood for "Unconditional Surrender," which would later become his nickname.

However, subsequent surrenders to Grant were not unconditional. When [[Robert E. Lee]] surrendered his [[Army of Northern Virginia]] at [[Appomattox Court House National Historical Park|Appomattox Court House]] in 1865, Grant agreed to allow the men under Lee's command to go home under parole and to keep sidearms and private horses. Generous terms were also offered to [[John C. Pemberton]] at [[Battle of Vicksburg|Vicksburg]] and, by Grant's subordinate, [[William Tecumseh Sherman]], to [[Joseph E. Johnston]] in [[North Carolina]].<ref>Silkenat, David. ''Raising the White Flag: How Surrender Defined the American Civil War''. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. {{ISBN|978-1-4696-4972-6}}.</ref>

Grant was not the first officer in the Civil War to use the phrase.  The first instance came some days earlier, when Confederate Brigadier General [[Lloyd Tilghman]] asked for terms of surrender during the [[Battle of Fort Henry]]. Flag Officer [[Andrew H. Foote]] replied, "no sir, your surrender will be unconditional." Even at Fort Donelson, earlier in the day, a Confederate messenger approached Brigadier General [[Charles Ferguson Smith]], Grant's subordinate, for terms of surrender, and Smith stated, "I'll have no terms with Rebels with guns in their hands, my terms are unconditional and immediate surrender." The messenger was passed along to Grant, but there is no evidence that either Foote or Smith influenced Grant's choice of words.

In 1863, [[Ambrose Burnside]] forced an unconditional [[Battle of the Cumberland Gap (1863)|surrender of the Cumberland Gap]] and 2,300 Confederate soldiers,<ref>[http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/moa/pageviewer?frames=1&coll=moa&view=50&root=%2Fmoa%2Fwaro%2Fwaro0052%2F&tif=00509.TIF&cite=http%3A%2F%2Fcdl.library.cornell.edu%2Fcgi-bin%2Fmoa%2Fmoa-cgi%3Fnotisid%3DANU4519-0052 Burnside's Official Report]</ref> and in 1864, Union General [[Gordon Granger]] forced an unconditional surrender of [[Fort Morgan (Alabama)|Fort Morgan]].