Shrouds of Glory

by Winston Groom

  Hood had other business to attend to as well, foremost being to deal with whoever was responsible for foiling his cherished plans to capture Schofield back at Spring Hill. Hood finally settled on Cheatham as the culprit—apparently for not following his midnight order to have someone close up the Franklin Pike. On December 7 Hood wired Seddon to “withdraw” his previous recommendation for Cheatham’s promotion to corps commander, “for reasons which I will write more fully.” He followed this up next day with a request that Richmond send “a good major-general at once” to command Cheatham’s corps. But in an extraordinary turnaround that same day, he reversed himself and wired Seddon again: “Major-General Cheatham made a failure on the 30th of November which will be a lesson to him. I think it best he should remain in his position for the present. I withdraw my telegrams of yesterday and today on this subject.”

  What had caused this strange change of mind? The answer turned out to be as intriguing as the question, and many years later the exiled Tennessee Governor Isham Harris, who had been traveling with Hood’s army, provided the explanation. On the night of the misfortune at Spring Hill, Harris and Hood were sharing a room in the Absalom Thompson mansion when they were awakened by the private soldier who told Hood of seeing vast columns of Union troops and trains marching northward along the Franklin Pike. Without getting out of bed, Hood, according to Harris, told his adjutant, Major Pen Mason, to send an order to Cheatham “to move down the road immediately and attack the enemy.” Having done that, Hood and Harris both went back to sleep, secure in the notion that the pike would be sealed off by Cheatham and next morning they would only have to accept the surrender of Schofield and his flanked and cut-off army.

  Of course, it did not turn out like that; Cheatham did not manage to seal off the Pike and Schofield escaped the trap, paving the way for the tragedy at Franklin, and Hood was out for blood. But Harris provided an answer for Cheatham’s odd failure. According to the governor, the day after the Spring Hill disaster, as the Army of Tennessee was marching toward Franklin, Hood, Major Pen Mason, and Harris were riding together, and Hood was fulminating over Cheatham’s disobedience of orders. When Hood rode off to attend to something, Mason, according to Harris, confessed to him, “General Cheatham was not to blame about the matter last night. I did not send him the order.” Mason, it seems, exhausted by twenty-four hours without rest, had fallen asleep before finishing the order for Cheatham to attack the pike, and thus Cheatham never got it.

  Harris claimed that he told Mason that in fairness to Cheatham, he must report this matter to Hood, and that Mason did in fact tell the commanding general, who, according to Harris, admitted to him later that he had “done an injustice” to Cheatham and “did not censure or charge him” with failure to make the attack. Later, according to both Harris and Cheatham, Hood even wrote Cheatham a note saying he “held him blameless.”

  But all this, of course, only deepened the riddle of the Spring Hill failure when Cheatham later claimed that he did receive Mason’s neversent order and did in fact move a division to the pike, only to find it empty. Whatever the truth, Hood’s army, only about twenty-five thousand strong, with Cheatham still in command of his corps, now stood before Nashville, where George Thomas and some seventy-seven thousand federal troops awaited him.

  If any place was home to the Army of Tennessee, it was Nashville, which every soldier could now plainly see from the Confederate positions along the hills south of the city. The enormous white granite portals of the new state capitol building, the Stars and Stripes waving over it, gleamed in the winter sun. The federals had captured Nashville three years earlier, turning it into not only the largest supply center for the Union army but also perhaps the most heavily fortified city on the American continent.

  Before the war, Nashville had flourished as the Tennessee heartland’s premier city, occupied by about thirty-five thousand souls. Tucked into a bend in the Cumberland River, Nashvilleans considered their home a cosmopolitan “Athens of the South”—and, for its day, perhaps it was. There were several colleges, a medical school, five daily newspapers, a seven-hundred-foot-long suspension bridge, theaters, and an opera. Gas lights lit the streets at night, the city sidewalks were paved with brick, and telegraph lines and steamboat services linked it with the other important cities of the South. By the outbreak of the war, Nashville boasted foundries, machine shops, mills, and dry goods stores. Down by the river, the docks teemed with steamboats loaded with cotton, vegetables, grains, and tobacco from the fertile farms in outlying areas. But now, after four years of conflict, Nashville seethed.

  Most of the original citizens considered themselves subjugated to a “reign of terror” by the Union occupation. Newspapers thought to print disloyal items were shut down and their editors thrown into jail, as were many prominent ministers. Residents were required to take a loyalty oath and post cash bonds to insure their allegiance to the federal government. Many were either arrested or expelled from the city and their property confiscated. Mail was censored, elections were rigged, passes were required to move around the city, and any talk thought favorable to the Confederacy brought swift punishment. All of this was presided over by a corrupt military secret police commanded by one William Truesdail.

  Moveover, by this stage of the war, Nashville was bulging with over one hundred thousand people—soldiers, refugees from the fighting in the countryside, homeless Negroes, peddlers, speculators, carpetbaggers, and an enormous flock of prostitutes. The prostitutes became such a problem that somebody decided to round them up and ship them north. Several hundred females—including a few respectable Nashville ladies swept up by mistake—were herded aboard a steamer, which tried unsuccessfully to offload this offensive cargo in several cities, including Louisville and Cincinnati, but in the end was forced to return it to Nashville, where it was again set loose on the community. Other vices infested the city, too; drinking became such a problem that the military instituted prohibition, but so much bootleg whisky was available, the policy had no effect. Drunken soldiers preyed upon the Nashville citizenry, stealing, insulting, and performing all kinds of depredations and illegal acts. One newspaper complained that the city “swarms with a host of burglars, brass-knuck and slingshot ruffians, pickpockets and highwaymen who have flocked hither from all parts of the country.”

  By the same token, federal authorities—namely, the ubiquitous Truesdail and his secret police—viewed all Nashville residents as a menace and described the city as “swarming with traitors, smugglers and spies . . . whose sole aim is to plot secret treason and furnish information to the rebel leaders.” In this they were at least partly correct. Nashville contained a web of Confederate spies and saboteurs, including a Doctor Hudson and his wife, who smuggled saws and chisels in cakes to the Confederate prisoners in Nashville camps. In fact, some of Nashville’s most prominent Confederate spies were women, who, according to a staff member of Stewart’s corps, “would go into Nashville, get what information was needed, and place it in a designated tree, stump or log to be conveyed to [them by their] secret scouts.” This officer, Bromfield Ridley, believed that two women, Kate Patterson and Robbie Woodruff, were responsible for delivery to the Confederate command of a complete diagram of the federal fortifications around Nashville, apparently stolen from the table of the Union general Grenville Dodge.

  Of course, not all citizens of Nashville were Confederate sympathizers. At the beginning of the war there were a considerable number of loyal Unionists living in the city, but most of those were soon hounded out of town and their property confiscated, or forced to swear allegiance to the Confederacy by a series of persecutions by Confederate authorities. Confederate laws allowed the setting of high cash bonds against suspected Unionists and in other cases citizens who expressed Union sympathy were formally banished northward, out of the Confederate states. However, all that changed in February 1862, when the federal army marched into town. With Nashville occupied by Union troops, President Lincoln appointed Andrew Johnso
n as governor of Tennessee to replace the banished Confederate governor Isham Harris. Johnson was a former tailor who had managed to become a U.S. senator and spoke vehemently against secession. He soon became immensely unpopular with the people of the state and in particular with the people of Nashville. Johnson evicted the state officials and legislators who had supported secession—and that was virtually all of them—and installed a Union-loyal government, which began enacting such laws as to suppress Confederate sympathy or assistance.

  These measures were even more stringent than the Confederate attempts to purge Unionist support; newspaper editors were arrested and replaced by imported Northerners who wrote what they were told. Nashville’s jails began to bulge with “old gray haired men” who made the mistake of criticizing the federal government or uttering pro-Confederate statements. A loyalty oath to the Union was required, with the penalty for failing to take it ranging from jail to banishment to confiscation of property, which converted most of the city’s population into jailbirds, paupers, or, most commonly, liars. Confiscation of property probably had the most profound effect and led to the most egregious abuses. One edict demanded that if secessionists harassed a Unionist, authorities would arrest five suspected Confederate sympathizers and confiscate their property. The confiscated property—mostly houses and land—was often sold off to Northern carpetbaggers or Union sympathizers in the area for a fraction of its value. The newly formed sevenhundred-member Nashville branch of the Union League, a social arm of the Republican party, adopted a declaration advocating that foreigners immigrating into northern ports be encouraged to come to Tennessee and take up residence, presumably on the lands of displaced secessionists.

  So the people of the city lived in turbulent and uneasy times, the grand balls of earlier days replaced by smaller parties in private homes with much whispering and vindictive talk. The sons of most Nashville families were away fighting with the Confederate army, while the hated Union sympathizers were holding all the political offices and enjoying carte blanche under blue-clad military occupation. After nearly three years of this, as John Bell Hood’s army marched relentlessly toward Nashville in December of 1864, Southern sympathizers felt their hearts leap with joy at the prospect of deliverance, while the Unionists began to have grave second thoughts as to what would happen to them if Hood succeeded in retaking the city.

  Hood’s besieging army, still shocked and shattered by the experience at Franklin, was making the most of it outside Nashville. Dr. Quintard recorded that he performed marriages between Confederate officers and Nashville belles and ate “sumptuous” dinners, particularly at the Overton residence, which had become Hood’s headquarters on the Nashville-Franklin Pike. There were more parties, dances, music, and serenading for officers, but somehow it was without the luster they had enjoyed a few weeks before at Columbia. Too much had happened since then, reflected poignantly in the absence of missing friends.

  On paper, Hood’s army still seemed formidable—three corps, nine divisions, twenty-seven brigades of infantry. In better times this might have signified an army of seventy-five or eighty thousand men. But now in the cold hills around Nashville in the closing month of 1864, regiments that once held eight hundred men had less than one hundred. Divisions were scarcely the size of brigades. Fifty-two of Hood’s fieldgrade officers had been left on the bloody ground at Franklin, and regiments were commanded by captains instead of colonels, who were now commanding brigades; enlisted men often commanded companies. The condition of the army was also reflected in the gaunt, hunger-glistening eyes of the ragged soldiers. Shoes had a predictable life span, and after the 250-mile march from Atlanta, that span had long ago run out. Clothing was torn or rotten, and many men had no overcoats or blankets. To make matters worse, the balmy weather had given way to a freezing blizzard, the coldest on record, with much snow, sleet, and ice, and the men shivered on the frozen ground and cursed the weather and the army, and in many cases they cursed General Hood. Frequent cases of severe eye problems were reported, due to the men getting so close to their campfires trying to keep warm that they suffered smoke irritation.

  Hood tried to alleviate these conditions by firing off a barrage of telegrams to Beauregard and other authorities in Mississippi and Alabama, urgently demanding shipments of shoes, clothing, and, most of all, more men. But the replacements were not to be had. Some few trickled up the line, and a few men who had been on detail were sent back to the army, but it was barely a drop in the bucket. Hood ordered that the countryside all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico be dragooned for “units belonging to this Army.”

  The lone hope Hood held out was that heavy reinforcements would arrive from General Kirby Smith in Shreveport, on the Texas border. Hood seems to have held on to this expectation to the bitter end, but when Beauregard—acting on Hood’s request—wired Secretary of War Seddon for permission to have the brigades of Kirby Smith brought across the Mississippi, he received a reply that even the adjutant general’s office in Richmond branded as “strange.” Beauregard, Seddon said, was free to order the Texans to Hood’s relief, but he noted that Kirby Smith had “failed heretofore to respond to like emergencies, and no plans should be based on his compliance.” This unusual revelation by no less than the secretary of war speaks for itself as to the condition of the Confederacy at this stage of the game. In his pleading letter to Kirby Smith, Beauregard stated, “The fate of the country may depend upon the result of Hood’s campaign in Tennessee.” He asked that two of Smith’s divisions be sent to the Army of Tennessee immediately. When Smith finally got around to replying, the answer was No—the river was too high; he had no way to get his men across; and even if he did, Union gunboats and land forces would prevent a crossing. At one point the frustrated Beauregard even suggested that Smith might try to send his army across the Mississippi in canoes.

  And so Hood waited in vain and prayed and planned for Thomas’s undoing. To accomplish that, he positioned his army in a convex semicircle facing Nashville from the south. Initially, he designed his lines to stretch around the city with both ends anchored on the Cumberland River, but, with the paucity of troops, that proved impossible, so the semicircle was shortened by several miles. Cheatham’s corps was posted on the far right down to a natural barrier called Brown’s Creek; Lee was in the center and Stewart on the left with his own left thrown back in a series of five little forts to refuse a flanking movement. To Stewart’s left, stretching down to the river, was Chalmers’s cavalry. All this was about two miles south of the federal fortifications around the city. In fact, the battle area at Nashville was eerily reminiscent of that at Franklin (except that it was on a much larger scale), the city tucked into the bend of a river with a series of roads and pikes converging on it from the south in a sort of triangle. It was Hood’s hope at this point that Thomas would come out and attack him, as he had so disastrously attacked Schofield at Franklin. And Hood’s men, whether by orders, or on their own, began to build the breastworks their commander so despised.

  The right flank of this line would normally have been held all the way to the Cumberland by Forrest’s cavalry, except that Forrest was not present. He and Bate’s division of Cheatham’s corps had been dispatched by Hood to Murfreesboro, scene of the bloody battle two years earlier, to capture a detachment of federal troops there and tear up railroad tracks that ran from Nashville to Chattanooga. Unfortunately, Hood was misinformed about what kind of forces Forrest could expect to find at Murfreesboro, and in fact Forrest was unpleasantly surprised to discover that the place was formidably defended by more than eight thousand bluecoats under General Lovell H. Rousseau, a forty-six-yearold Kentuckian who had his own ideas about being captured by anybody.

  The Confederate commander wasn’t the only one to have administrative problems. Over in the Union lines there was the question of what to do about George Day Wagner, who had disobeyed orders at Franklin by leaving two of his brigades too long exposed in front of the breastworks and nearly costing the federals
the battle. Following its withdrawal from Franklin, Schofield’s army had plodded up the Nashville Pike, arriving in the city a little before noon. Not long after that, an anxious Wagner appeared in the quarters of General Cox. Already Wagner had heard of “severe criticism” against him by his brigade commanders, Lane, Conrad, and Opdycke, which he realized “was likely to lead to an official inquiry, if not a court martial.” To soften the penalty he feared was about to drop on him, Wagner tried to persuade Cox that he had not ordered the two brigades to fight the whole Confederate army, but had instead told them to fall back if things got too hot, and unfortunately somebody waited too long—and so on. This, of course, was a lie, but Cox did not know it at the time and told Wagner that he would give him a favorable report. Colonel Conrad, however, who had commanded one of the sacrificial brigades Wagner left in the lurch, took the extraordinary step of dashing off his own official after-action report the moment he got to Nashville—not even stopping to rest from the twenty-mile march—and this bitter document became, as Cox said, “the equivalent to preferring charges against the division commander.” Thomas then held an inquiry. Whether Wagner’s alleged drunkenness became part of it is not known, but within two days Wagner was relieved of his command and, at his own chagrined request, was allowed to resign from the army.