John Bell Hood: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of a Confederate General

by Hood, Stephen

  The next major book on the Tennessee Campaign, Autumn of Glory, was published several years later by Horn’s fellow Tennessean Thomas Connelly, who informed readers that Hood blamed the fall of Atlanta on his subordinates and that he “seriously questioned the army’s valor.” On the morning of November 30 (the day of Franklin, and the day after Spring Hill), Connelly wrote:

  Probably he [Hood] intended the assault, in his own tormented way, as an exercise of discipline for the army. He later admitted that he utilized frontal assaults for such a purpose, and reveled in the shedding of blood as a booster of morale. For him, the Franklin attack would be a last great effort to mold the army into his image of the Virginia army as he had known it.3

  Like Horn before him, Connelly source was six pages from Hood’s memoirs. The only problem is that there is nothing within those pages that remotely supports Connelly’s libelous statements. Hood never accused his soldiers of cowardice or discussed using assaults—frontal or otherwise—to discipline troops. Indeed, Hood could not have admitted to using “frontal assaults” for any purpose for the simple reason that, prior to the afternoon of November 30, 1864, at Franklin, he had never as an army commander ordered a frontal assault (as had Gens. Grant, Burnside, Lee, Bragg, and others). Further, Hood did not write anything that even hinted that he “reveled in the shedding of blood as a booster of morale.” It is both perplexing and disturbing that Connelly could read these pages from Hood’s own account and make such claims. (For the reader’s convenience, the pages from Hood’s account are reproduced in Appendix 1.)

  Elsewhere in Autumn of Glory, Connelly condemned Hood by claiming that he repeatedly “rebuked his own troops for their cowardice,” and that the army “knew of Hood’s scorn.” Not surprisingly given his track record regarding his treatment of Hood, Connelly could not provide a single quote from any “rebuked” soldier, or anyone who recorded Hood’s alleged “scorn.” If the Army of Tennessee’s commanding general had rebuked his own men openly and claimed that they and the army were cowardly (Connelly claimed the men “knew” of Hood’s scorn), why hasn’t a single diary, journal, letter, or memoir surfaced to substantiate the accusation?

  Even if Hood thought the men lacked valor (in fact he unambiguously wrote and stated exactly the opposite), it would have been impossible for his troops to have known it at the time according to the sources Connelly relied upon: Hood’s official report of the Tennessee Campaign was written in February of 1865, while his memoir Advance and Retreat was published posthumously in 1880. Even if one of Hood’s men misinterpreted what he wrote, it could only have occurred after Hood’s resignation, and months or in the case of his memoirs, years after the November 30, 1864, march from Spring Hill to Franklin. It is difficult to reach any conclusion other than that Connelly fabricated Hood’s supposed scorn for his soldiers, thereby perpetuating and exaggerating Stanley Horn’s earlier unfounded implication that Hood considered his soldiers to be cowards.4

  Unfortunately, as is so often the case when dealing with Hood, these claims by Horn, Connelly, and others have been picked up and repeated ad nauseam by subsequent writers. For example, in 1990, historian Steven Woodworth wrote about Hood’s failure at Spring Hill in his acclaimed book Jefferson Davis and His Generals: The Failure of Confederate Command in the West. “The failure was unbearable,” explained Woodworth, “so Hood convinced himself that he had not failed. His generals—Cheatham, Cleburne and the others—had let him down. They were incompetent and probably cowardly, too. The soldiers, cowardly and afraid to charge an entrenched enemy, had also failed him.”5

  This type of writing claimed detailed and specific insights into Hood’s thoughts, his opinion of his soldiers and of specific Confederate commanders, and of his future intentions. Such profound assertions can only come directly from eyewitnesses or reliable written evidence. Dr. Woodworth’s source for his clairvoyance, however, was nothing more than Connelly’s Autumn of Glory. Ironically, when asked in a December 2006 interview if Hood was the recipient of unfair treatment in Civil War literature, Woodworth replied, “I think Hood has received something less than a fair shake from historians, especially from those like [Wiley] Sword.”6

  Sword, a leading John Bell Hood critic, has claimed on more than one occasion that Hood accused his soldiers of cowardice. He did so in his 1992 book The Confederacy’s Last Hurrah: Spring Hill, Franklin, and Nashville, and again in Courage Under Fire: Profiles in Bravery from the Battlefields of the Civil War in 2006. In the latter book, Sword alleged that Hood “sacrificed” men during the defense of Atlanta and that he alleged a “want of courage” in his soldiers when deciding to teach them “a remedial lesson” at the battle of Franklin. In his earlier book, Sword commented extensively on Hood’s purported lack of respect for the soldiers of the Army of Tennessee and his intent to “purge their ranks” of their fear of fighting except behind breastworks. In each instance, Sword’s source was a single paragraph from Hood’s memoirs, in which the general wrote nothing that remotely resembled Sword’s interpretation and presentation.7

  Some Civil War historians feel free to make almost any assertion or assumption and then justify it with an arbitrary source taken out of context, often in reference to something Hood wrote pertaining to another situation entirely. John Lundberg’s book The Finishing Stroke is further evidence that legends and previous authors’ opinions are too often misconstrued as fact. Lundberg presented his own version of events of the morning of November 30, 1864, when he stated that Hood “had the audacity to accuse the men of the army of cowardice.” For this incredible assertion he offered no primary source, choosing instead to cite Craig Symonds’s Stonewall of the West. In the passage cited by Lundberg, Symonds referred to a pair of Hood’s subordinates who wrote after the campaign that he was critical of the army’s “lack of energy” and its “failure to seize the turnpike.” Lundberg somehow took these benign observations by Symonds and twisted them into the affirmative claim that Hood had audaciously called his soldiers cowards. The only one demonstrating audacity was Lundberg, who on the same page claimed the following about the march from Spring Hill to Franklin: “As Hood’s charges of cowardice permeated the ranks of the Army of Tennessee, the veterans were offended by the accusations.” His support is a reference to an unpublished manuscript by Danny Sessums entitled “Force to be Reckoned With: Granbury’s Texas Brigade, C.S.A.” If Sessums has discovered a heretofore unknown primary source claiming that Hood called his men cowards and that they knew about it, he would be the first to have done so. The vast majority of the roughly 20,000 Southern officers and men present at Spring Hill survived the Civil War. Not a single one is known to have said or written that Hood called them cowards or questioned their valor at any time during the Tennessee Campaign.8

  Continuing this theme, Lundberg wrote, “[General Hiram] Granbury, like his men, was also bothered by the insult to their honor, and he was no doubt still angry about his exchange with the army commander the next day.” There is evidence that a verbal exchange occurred among Hood, Gen. Granbury, and Granbury’s immediate superior, Gen. Patrick Cleburne on the previous day during the march from Columbia to Spring Hill, but the subject of the discussion among these commanders was the slow pace of the army’s march—not the valor of the soldiers. Granbury’s brigade was the vanguard on the march to Spring Hill, and he and Cleburne were complaining to Hood that the rest of the army was not keeping pace.9

  Regrettably, other authors have mimicked Connelly, Sword, and Lundberg. In his book It Happened in the Civil War, Michael W. Bradley described Hood’s demeanor on the morning after Schofield’s escape at Spring Hill this way: “When General Hood found out what had happened, he blamed everyone but himself, even calling his soldiers and their commanders cowards.” If Bradley had more thoroughly researched this subject, or had researched it at all, no incidents of Hood calling anyone a coward would have been included in a book of things that “happened” in the Civil War.10

  So what, exactly, did Hood
write that several authors have cited as justification for declaring that he called his soldiers cowards? These historians either cited another author or relied upon the single paragraph on page 290 of Hood’s Advance and Retreat describing the failure at Spring Hill. That paragraph reads as follows:

  The best move of my career as a soldier, I was thus destined to behold come to naught. The discovery that the Army, after a forward march of one hundred and eighty miles, was still, seemingly, unwilling to accept battle unless under the protection of breastworks, caused me to experience grave concern. In my inmost heart I questioned whether or not I would ever succeed in eradicating this evil. It seemed to me I had exhausted every means in the power of one man to remove this stumbling block to the Army of Tennessee. And I will here inquire, in vindication of its fair name, if any intelligent man of that Army supposes one moment that these same troops, one year previous, would, even without orders to attack, have allowed the enemy to pass them at Rocky-faced Ridge, as he did at Spring Hill.11

  Nowhere do the words “fear,” “bravery,” “cowardice,” or “courage” appear in this or any other paragraph relating to this event. All Hood explained was his frustration at the army’s apparent unwillingness to accept battle unless from behind breastworks, which he believed was a “stumbling block” instilled by the tactics of the previous commander. Any other reading, especially as portrayed as fact by so many “historians,” is grossly inaccurate and completely unwarranted. A full reading of the subject chapter of Hood’s memoirs clearly demonstrates that he believed the Army of Tennessee was comprised of gallant and accomplished officers, soldiers with great potential whose aggressiveness and ardor had been weakened by the persistent retreating tactics of Joseph Johnston.12

  Hood served in the Virginia army during the early years of the war, mostly under Robert E. Lee. Almost all of his combat experience included carrying the fight to the enemy, and most of those offensive actions resulted in tactical victories. Eltham’s Landing, Gaines’s Mill, and Second Manassas in 1862 were significant victories large and small, and all three were won by offensive action. Although the September 17, 1862, battle of Sharpsburg (Antietam) ended in a tactical draw, Hood’s aggressive counterattack that morning near the Dunker Church and into the Miller cornfield held off advancing Federals that significantly outnumbered his own command. Although Gen. George McClellan’s Army of the Potomac initiated the tactical offensive at Sharpsburg, McClellan did so only after Lee carried the war into Maryland with a bold strategic offensive. In 1863, Lee took the war north yet again, this time through Maryland and into Pennsylvania. Ordered to attack the Federal left flank at Gettysburg on July 2, Hood fell wounded while leading his division early in the assault. Later that year after his recovery, Hood was sent to the Western Theater to command a division at Chickamauga in September. There, the Army of Tennessee assumed the tactical offensive and won its first and only major victory of the entire war. Hood had copious firsthand experience that well-planned offensives often led to success (his Virginia battles and at Chickamauga in north Georgia), and had witnessed for himself the stunning offensive capability of the Army of Tennessee. Hood was thusly inspired to believe that the Confederacy’s primary Western army, if properly inspired and led, could match the successes of its Virginia counterpart. He had high (but reasonable) expectations for the Army of Tennessee, he knew its soldiers and officers were gallant and courageous, and he attributed any lack of success to the persistent negative influences of some of its leaders (Braxton Bragg, for example, and later and primarily Joseph E. Johnston). As Hood explained after the war in a speech to a reunion of Confederate veterans, “Our soldiers were superior to those of the North … in time of battle one Confederate soldier was equal with two or three of the foe. Our Generals likewise as a body were superior.”13

  The single paragraph in Hood’s memoir Horn, Connelly, Sword, and others cited as justification for asserting that Hood doubted the valor of his troops is part of a long commentary on the failure at Spring Hill. In the closing pages of that chapter, Hood opined that the army had been negatively influenced by the tactics employed by Johnston—an observation other commanders and enlisted men of the Army of Tennessee also expressed. A careful consideration of Hood’s words demonstrate without doubt that he was acknowledging the soldiers’ élan and aggressive spirit prior to Johnston’s assumption of command and the long series of repeated retreats that followed. By simple definition, there is a significant difference between an unnatural lack of aggressiveness on the part of an army and the raw cowardice of its soldiers. An individual soldier or a body of troops can be cautious or defensive in nature and not be cowardly. Hood never mentioned a lack of valor on the part of his soldiers as individuals or the army as a whole. He simply opined that under Johnston, the same men who had invaded Kentucky, fought so hard at Murfreesboro, and scored a stunning victory at Chickamauga had lost their former aggressiveness. The paragraph cited by his detractors merely stated that after the debacle at Spring Hill, he decided to take up the pursuit and make a final effort to catch Schofield’s army before it reached Nashville.

  Reasonable and unbiased readers of Hood’s memoirs realize his observation of the army’s lack of initiative and aggressiveness was primarily directed at Johnston and William Hardee. The command structure not only makes and implements all decisions, but also strongly influences its overall nature. The balance of Hood’s other 300 pages of Advance and Retreat does not offer even the hint of a suspicion of cowardice on the part of the rank-and-file soldiers of the Army of Tennessee. Nor did Hood in any contemporary reports, correspondence, postwar letters, or interviews ever state that his soldiers lacked individual bravery. To the contrary, Hood went to great lengths to praise the gallantry of the individual soldiers of his army.

  Hood was not alone in his concern that his predecessor had instilled a lack of aggressiveness in some quarters of the Army of Tennessee. At Spring Hill, cavalry commander Gen. James Chalmers approached Gen. John C. Brown to ask why his division had not attacked the Federals defending the road. When Brown replied that he was awaiting orders from his corps commander Cheatham, Chalmers responded, “General, when I was circumstanced as you are at Shiloh, I attacked without orders.” Captain H. M. Neely of Gen. John C. Carter’s brigade was also perplexed at Brown’s inaction and had implored the hesitant general to attack. “If he would take the responsibility of beginning the attack,” Neely recalled telling Brown, “it would be a quick and easy matter to capture and destroy Schofield’s corps in its present condition.” Brown could not be persuaded to take the initiative, however, and the Federals made good their escape.14

  Hood’s comment on the tentativeness developed by the Army of Tennessee under Johnston is worth consideration. After assuming command of the army, Hood launched four separate attacks in an attempt to repel Sherman and save Atlanta. Those battles, discussed earlier in this book, are known today as Peachtree Creek, Atlanta, Ezra Church, and Jonesboro. Although the first three did not defeat Sherman, they did succeed in delaying the Federal flanking movements intended to encircle the city and cut the Confederate supply lines. In a blistering two-page factually incomplete diatribe, Stanley Horn condemned Hood’s heartlessness for allegedly questioning the courage of the soldiers at the battle of Ezra Church: “Hood, assuming an attitude that will forever remain a smirch on his record, attempts to explain away his lack of success here, as well as on subsequent occasions, by unwarranted reflections on the courage of his men.” This is patently untrue. In the portion of Hood’s memoirs cited by Horn to support this accusation, Hood elaborated extensively on the great potential of the army and his attempts to re-awaken it through successful offensive operations against Sherman. Hood also expressed dissatisfaction with his corps commander William Hardee and commented on the overall negative effect of Hardee’s nonaggressive tendencies on the army as a whole. Continuing in his memoirs, Hood stated that in various battle scenarios certain corps and divisions would advance and perform well, but b
attles were lost when others would not advance in concert. In his discussion of Ezra Church, for example, Hood relied upon the official report of his corps commander Stephen D. Lee, who wrote: “I am convinced that if all the troops had displayed equal spirit, we would have been successful, as the enemy’s works were slight, and besides, they had scarcely gotten into position when we made the attack.” Hood had remained in Atlanta’s defenses with Hardee’s corps and the Georgia militia, while Lee’s and A. P. Stewart’s corps moved west of the city to thwart the Federal flanking movement in that sector. Did Horn think Hood should have objected to or discounted Lee’s firsthand assessment when Hood wasn’t on site during the battle? Regarding Ezra Church, Hood simply repeated—almost verbatim—what Lee had submitted in his official report. Horn could have informed his readers that Hood was not a witness to the fighting and had relied on Lee’s assessment of the Confederate effort at Ezra Church. Unfortunately, and for reasons known only to Horn, he failed to do so.15

  In discussing the controversy between Hardee and Hood regarding the loss of Atlanta, Eric Jacobson wrote in For Cause and For Country, “But Hood went further than simply blaming one of his subordinates. He again accused the troops of performing poorly, if only indirectly, by going so far as to say the attack at Jonesboro on August 31 was ‘feeble’ because the Confederates suffered only about 1,400 casualties.” Jacobson seemed to object to Hood’s use of the word “feeble” when it was in fact the exact word used by corps leader Stephen D. Lee in his official report to Hood after Jonesboro. Thomas Connelly went a step further, stating that “almost to the point of being psychotic,” Hood associated “valor with casualty figures” when the army commander cited the low Southern casualties at Jonesboro. Curiously, Connelly described Hood as being “almost … psychotic” for citing the low Confederate casualties at Jonesboro, but S. D. Lee—who made the identical report to Hood—somehow evaded Connelly’s ire. Was Lee also “almost to the point of being psychotic?”16