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

by Hood, Stephen

  In a speech before Confederate veterans in Charleston, South Carolina, on December 12, 1875, Hood encouraged the aging heroes to join him in memorializing the valor of the Confederate soldier: “Let us teach the children of the brave men who fought and fell in defense of their homes; what their fathers did … for the sake of truth, manhood, and the future, and that the sons may arise worthy of their sires.”33

  There is no doubt that Hood loved his men, their valor, and their exceptional gallantry—and that the historical record is replete with instances of this admiration. No contemporary evidence exists to the contrary.

  1 Hay, Hood’s Tennessee Campaign, 95.

  2 Horn, The Army of Tennessee, 394.

  3 Connelly, Autumn of Glory, 503.

  4 Ibid., 430-431.

  5 Woodworth, Jefferson Davis and His Generals, 299.

  6 Woodworth interview, Civil War Gazette.

  7 Sword, The Confederacy’s Last Hurrah, 177-180; Sword, Courage Under Fire, 197.

  8 Lundberg, The Finishing Stroke, 85. Lundberg cited a copy of Danny Sessums, “A Force to be Reckoned With: Granbury’s Texas Brigade, C.S.A.,” in his personal possession.

  9 Ibid., The Finishing Stroke, 85; Frank H. Smith, “History of the 24th Tennessee,” Columbia, TN, March 1904. Smith conveyed the story as told to him by a veteran named Gregory in a section titled, “Hood, Cleburne and Granberry Quarrel”: “They halted for dinner at a late hour just south of Blantons Chapel, when there was some more misunderstanding between Hood, Cleburne, and Granberry. Gregory overheard it all but did not pay much attention to it; his present impression is that there were some words between them, as to Cleburne or Granberry being put in the extreme advance and some chafing and dissatisfaction because some of the troops were so slow in coming up.”

  10 Michael R. Bradley, It Happened In the Civil War (Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot Press, 2002), 91.

  11 Hood, Advance and Retreat, 290-291.

  12 Ibid.

  13 Hood’s Oration.

  14 Young, “Hood’s Failure at Spring Hill,” Confederate Veteran, vol. 16 (January 1908), 34, 35.

  15 Horn, The Army of Tennessee, 361; Hood, Advance and Retreat, 339.

  16 Jacobson, For Cause and For Country, 31; Connelly, Autumn of Glory, 431.

  17 Hood, Advance and Retreat, 340; F. M. Cockrell letter, September 13, 1864, Letters Sent and Received by the Confederate Secretary of War/Letters Sent and Received Confederate Adjutant and Inspector General, National Archives, 1727-H-1864.

  18 OR 45, pt. 1, 709.

  19 Ibid., 709; Douglas S. Freeman, Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study in Command 3 vols. (New York, Touchstone, 1998), vol. 3, 796; Dowdey and Manarin, The Wartime Papers of Robert E. Lee, 938.

  20 OR 38, pt. 3, 633; Johnston, Narrative, 344; William T. Sherman, Home Letters of General Sherman, M. A. DeWolfe Howe, ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909), 299.

  21 OR 38, pt. 3, 702, 774, 835.

  22 Bonds, War Like the Thunderbolt, 265; Albert Castel, Tom Taylor’s Civil War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 178.

  23 OR 38, pt. 3, 764; ibid., 39, pt. 1, 810.

  24 Ibid., 45, pt. 1, 755.

  25 Ibid., 38, pt. 1, 68; Benson Bobrick, Master of War: The Life of George H. Thomas (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009), 236.

  26 OR 25, pt. 2, 810.

  27 Ibid., 4, pt. 2, 110.

  28 Stephen Bailes, Natural Histories: Stories from the Tennessee Valley (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007), 201.

  29 Harrison Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

  30 Freeman, Lee’s Lieutenants, vol. 3, 798; Daniel, Confederate Scrap Book, 5.

  31 Hood, Advance and Retreat, 140, 296, 297, 317-337. Hood did the same after Nashville. In describing the difficult retreat after his defeat there, Hood wrote: “When the fortunes of war were against us, the same faithful soldiers remained true to their flag, and with rare exceptions followed it in retreat as they had borne it in advance.”

  32 Ibid., 296.

  33 Hood’s Oration.

  Chapter 14

  “Historians are gossips who tease the dead.”

  —Voltaire

  A Callous Attitude: Did John Bell Hood “Bleed His Boys”?

  Many and rather nonchalantly sacrificed his troops in battle. Nothing could be further from the truth.

  Typical literary portrayals of Hood and his arch rival Joseph Johnston provide a classic example of scholars influenced by a character’s historical personage. Historians generally depict Johnston as a commander whose primary concern was the welfare of his men. Hood, in contrast, is portrayed as being careless with the lives of his soldiers. This meme has Hood wasting lives in a hopeless campaign in an attempt to win a war that was already lost, while Johnston—who years later described Hood’s decision to attack at Franklin as “useless butchery”—evades censure for his tactical offensive against Sherman at Bentonville in March 1865. Johnston’s late-war action cost more than 3,000 Confederate casualties, including approximately 800 killed—which is more than the killed and wounded Hood lost in the battle of Nashville. If any Confederate historians and other authors believe John Bell Hood had a callous attitude toward casualties, and routinely commander can be criticized for wasting lives in a meaningless attack, it is Joe Johnston.

  Consider what Johnston wrote about resuming command of the Army of Tennessee during the war’s final months:

  I therefore accepted the command … with a full consciousness on my part, however, that we could have no other object in continuing the war, than to obtain fair terms of peace; for the Southern cause must have appeared hopeless then, to all dispassionate and intelligent Southern men. I therefore resumed the duties of my military grade with no hope beyond that of contributing to obtain peace on such conditions as, under the circumstances, ought to satisfy the Southern people and their Government.1

  In a postwar letter to Hood, Johnston’s cavalry commander Gen. Matthew C. Butler revealed that Johnston confided to him that he believed the war was a lost cause as early as the spring of 1863. Butler, who served as an escort at Johnston’s final surrender meeting with Sherman in North Carolina, wrote, “On our return to camp he [Johnston] told me that he had no confidence in the success of our cause for two years.” Butler added, “I then became satisfied that Mr. Davis was correct in his judgment when he relieved him on the previous occasion and made a mistake in restoring him afterwards, for the reason that I could have no faith in an officer in command of an army, in the success of which or the cause he had no confidence.”2

  Hood is almost universally condemned for incurring 11,800 casualties during the Tennessee Campaign in an attempt to liberate Tennessee and destroy a Federal army in November 1864. However, Johnston, who commanded the Army of Tennessee in the spring and summer of 1864 has largely avoided such criticism even though he incurred thousands of casualties that summer, and went on to attack and lose another 3,000 men at Bentonville as late as March 1865—even though in his own words penned after the war, he believed the Confederate cause was already lost some two years earlier. Such is the state of modern Civil War scholarship in the Western Theater.

  Hood was influenced and impressed by his aggressive mentors Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Jefferson Davis acknowledged that Hood was of the Lee and Jackson school, and placed Hood in command to assume the offensive at a point in the war when nothing else could turn the tide in the favor of the Confederacy. “Three years of service in Virginia, and one year in the West,” Hood recalled after the war, “taught me that a general can acquire sufficient caution by receiving hard blows; but none can acquire boldness; it is a gift from heaven.” Hood’s military boldness is often described as recklessness, and although there is admittedly a thin line between the two, boldness was more commonly linked to a display of courage in the 19th century. In their influential book Attack and Die: Civil War Military Tactics and the Southern Heritage, historians Grady McWhiney and
Perry Jamieson argued that aggressiveness was the norm among Confederate officers, and that “Southerners [were] imprisoned in a culture that rejected careful calculation and patience, often refused to learn from their own mistakes.” Hood was not atypical. He reflected the regional culture during the antebellum and Civil War period when Southerners felt besieged and occupied by the North, and were willing to sacrifice their lives to defend their homes and way of life.3

  Although his brigades and divisions suffered horrific casualties at Gaines’s Mill, Second Manassas, Sharpsburg, Gettysburg, and Chickamauga, Hood was a subordinate to Robert E. Lee and Braxton Bragg during those battles and dutifully followed the orders of his superiors. Nonetheless, authors asserted that Hood was indifferent to casualties and rarely mentioned that he was a subordinate when his renowned troops were frequently assigned to perform difficult tasks on the battlefields. For example, Thomas Connelly painted Hood as bloodthirsty, declaring that he “pined to repeat” his victories while in Lee’s army, which “had been achieved with the shedding of much blood.”4

  Because he frequently incurred staggeringly high losses when called upon by his superiors, Hood is routinely portrayed as responsible for the high casualties. In the documentary film “The Battle of Franklin,” the writers introduced Hood by stating that he came west to the Army of Tennessee with an ominous reputation. In a dramatically grim tone, the narrator claimed that Hood, as a commander in Virginia, “bled his boys.”5

  In his study of Spring Hill and Franklin, Eric Jacobson introduced Hood as an aggressive commander and offered William T. Sherman’s appraisal of Hood upon his appointment to command the Army of Tennessee in July of 1864: “[He] is a new man and fighter and must be watched … as he is reckless with the lives of his men.” Sherman’s assessment is ironic because the Federal commander himself often used harsh and cavalier expressions regarding his own casualties. As previously noted, of his losses at the battle of Kennesaw Mountain, Sherman wrote, “I begin to regard the death and mangling of a couple of thousand men as a small affair, a kind of morning dash, and it may be well that we become so hardened… . The assault I made was no mistake. I had to do it.” Sherman downplayed his casualties at Kennesaw in a letter to Gen. George Thomas immediately following the attack: “At times assaults are necessary and inevitable… . Had we broken his line today it would have been most decisive, as it is our loss is small compared with some of those [in the] East.” What would modern scholars write about Hood if he had called his losses in Georgia and Tennessee “a small affair, a kind of morning dash,” “necessary and inevitable,” and “small compared with” Lee’s battles in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland?6

  In 19th century society, warfare was viewed much differently than it is today. Soldiers were expected to willingly expose themselves to death or injury on the battlefield as a demonstration of courage, honor, and devotion. Colonel W. D. Gale of A. P. Stewart’s corps staff has avoided accusations of callousness toward the soldiers even though he described the men of Zachariah Deas’s Alabama brigade at Nashville as “utterly lethargic and without interest in battle. I never witnessed such a want of enthusiasm.” Referring to Confederate casualties in the defeat at the Nashville in December 1864, Lost Cause founder E. A. Pollard criticized the effort of Hood’s soldiers: “Our loss in killed and wounded was disgracefully small.” As noted earlier, corps commander Stephen D. Lee likewise complained about the performance of his own corps at the battle of Jonesboro by citing low casualties: “The attack was a feeble one, and a failure, with a loss to my corps of about 1,300 men in killed and wounded.” In 19th century warfare, bloodletting was considered a barometer of effort and dedication.7

  Like most military commanders, Hood maintained strong affection for his men. Although it is rarely revealed in the literature covering his tenure as commander of the Army of Tennessee, Hood demonstrated his affection time and again throughout the war. At Gaines’s Mill on June 27, 1862, Robert E. Lee ordered yet another assault against Fitz John Porter’s heavily entrenched Federal defenders. Hood’s brigade spearheaded this effort. Fulfilling a promise to his old regiment, Hood personally led the 4th Texas Infantry in a frontal charge across a mile of largely open ground, across swampy Boatswain’s Creek, and uphill against fortified infantry and artillery positions. Unlike earlier failed attacks, Hood’s men broke through; other units followed, and Porter’s position unraveled. Hood and his Texas brigade are credited with earning Lee his first tactical victory of the war which, in turn, helped save the imperiled Confederate capital of Richmond. The cost, however, was high. Hood’s 4th Texas suffered 50 percent casualties. Every officer in the regiment above the rank of captain was killed or wounded except for Hood, who somehow miraculously escaped without injury. Major James W. Ratchford of Gen. D. H. Hill’s staff recalled Hood immediately after the battle openly grieving for his men while wondering aloud why fate had spared him while so many of his soldiers—“every one of them as good as I am”—were dead or suffering. Chaplain Nicholas Davis remembered that Hood was appalled the next day when only a fraction of the men answered the morning’s roll call. Their commander rode away weeping. According to Davis, “there was not a soldier in that line but what thought more of him now than ever before.”8

  At Sharpsburg on September 17, 1862, Hood was in temporary command of a small division comprising his Texas brigade under Col. William Wofford and Chase Whiting’s brigade of Georgians under Col. Evander Law. When the massive Federal assault against Lee’s left flank threatened to break the line early that morning, Hood was ordered to move quickly to the front from his reserve position and counterattack. His vigorous well-directed effort against superior numbers threw back the enemy and temporarily stabilized the line. His leadership impressed Stonewall Jackson, who urged that Hood be promoted to major general. The cost of success, however, was staggering: 532 of 850 men in the Texas brigade were killed, wounded, or captured, as were 427 from Law’s command out of about 1,000. The 1st Texas Infantry suffered 82 percent casualties. When General Lee inquired about his men that evening, Hood answered, “They are lying on the field where you sent them. My division has been almost wiped out.” Hood is reported to have “wept as he told Lee of the hundreds of his Texans and Georgians who had fallen that day in the cornfield.”9

  After the battle of Franklin, William Stanton of Granbury’s brigade recalled that Hood cried upon learning of the death of Patrick Cleburne. South Carolina artillerist Bryan Bowers described Hood’s arrival at the front to inspect the battlefield the morning after the battle: “His sturdy visage assumed a melancholy appearance, and for a considerable time he sat on his horse and wept like a child.” Despite a record replete with evidence of his compassion and love for his men, modern historians rarely expounded upon the subject in context.10

  On May 2, 1864, near Dalton, Georgia, Joseph Johnston presided over what is believed to be the largest mass execution of the Civil War when 14 North Carolina soldiers of the Army of Tennessee were put to death after being convicted of desertion. Johnston’s predecessor Braxton Bragg was notorious for executing his soldiers. Few students of the war, however, are aware that there is no known record of any member of the Army of Tennessee being executed after Hood took command of the army in mid-July 1864. In fact, on November 6, 1864, near Florence, Alabama, seven of Hood’s soldiers were court-martialed and convicted of desertion, but Hood personally pardoned the men and ordered them returned to duty without punishment. Two soldiers from the 54th Virginia Infantry, three from the 63rd Virginia Infantry, and two from the 58th North Carolina Infantry had been convicted in a court-martial presided over by Col. J. B. Bibb of the 23rd Alabama Infantry. Hood summarily dismissed the charged and ordered the men released from custody and returned to duty without conditions.11

  Hood further demonstrated his concern for his troops after the defeat at Nashville during the retreat to Tupelo, Mississippi, when he attempted to grant 100-day furloughs to members of the Army of Tennessee. Fearing the men would not r
eturn to the army, however, Richmond authorities essentially admonished Hood for making such a proposal. “Repress by all means the proposition to furlough the Trans-Mississippi troops,” replied Secretary of War James Seddon. “The suggestion merely is dangerous; compliance would probably be fatal; extinguish, if possible, the idea.” Hood’s immediate superior, P. G. T. Beauregard, promptly sent Hood a stern reply: “Secretary of War disapproves application relative to your Trans-Mississippi troops. He considers that to grant it would be dangerous, and might be fatal. I agree with him. Discountenance it in full.” Persisting on behalf of his troops, Hood replied to Beauregard a few days later: “I am very anxious to see you here in reference to the Trans-Mississippi troops, and also as to some system of furlough for other troops.”12

  Some of the sharpest criticisms of Hood dripped from the pen of Capt. Samuel Foster of Granbury’s brigade. It is difficult to find a book, essay, or article about the Army of Tennessee, the Tennessee Campaign, or the battle of Franklin that does not include Foster’s bitter condemnations of Hood, as recorded in the captain’s diary on December 1, 1864, the day after Franklin. “Gen. Hood has betrayed us,” scribbled Foster, because the battle at Franklin “was not the kind of fighting he promised” before the campaign. Franklin, he added, was not a “fight with equal numbers and choice of the ground” that Hood had guaranteed. No other soldier or officer of the Army of Tennessee is known to have recorded that such a pledge was either made or broken by Hood. To the contrary, regimental surgeon Dr. Urban Owen wrote weeks before the battle to his wife on November 5 from Tuscumbia, Alabama, “Our Generals all say we will have to fight a severe fight after we cross the river before we can enter and hold Middle Tenn.” Apparently the army didn’t mind an upcoming severe battle, because in the same letter Owen added that “our army is buoyant,” and on November 19 he confided, “Our whole army is eager to move onward.” Nevertheless, Foster’s assertion—unsupported and uncorroborated in the recollections of any other member of the Army of Tennessee—was evidence enough for modern author Webb Garrison Jr., who cited only Foster when writing, “Hood promised his men that they would face little risk of defeat,” and would not attack “a numerically superior foe and he would fight on ground of his choosing.”13