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

by Hood, Stephen

  Two modern writers, Dr. Brian Craig Miller, author of John Bell Hood and the Fight for Civil War Memory, and Thomas Brown, the author of a thesis on the general entitled John Bell Hood: Extracting Truth from History, argue persuasively that Hood was targeted by the Lost Cause myth makers to be the virtual James Longstreet of the Western Theater. This, in turn, made Hood the all-purpose scapegoat for the destruction of the Confederacy’s primary Western army. Miller and Brown assert that the besmirching of Hood began when former Southern General Dabney Maury’s influential Southern Historical Society moved from its initial headquarters in New Orleans (Hood’s postwar home) to Richmond, Virginia. The last two commanders of the Army of Tennessee, both of whom led the army to defeats in 1864 and 1865, were Joseph Johnston and John Bell Hood. The former, however, was a native Virginian, so the Lost Causers (led primarily by Virginians) turned their vitriol against the latter.4

  While this theory has merit, my research also revealed that many of the early anti-Hood authors were Tennesseans. Of course this could be merely coincidence, but it is worth noting that the earliest Hood critics in Civil War literature were Stanley Horn, followed in succession by Thomas Connelly and James McDonough—all of whom are/were Tennessee natives or who were at some point residents of Middle Tennessee, the site of the Army of Tennessee’s defeats in its final major campaign.

  In 1929, before these Tennessee authors set pen to paper, Thomas Hay (of New York) wrote the following on John Bell Hood:

  The strong force of Hood’s character yielded an influence that no oratory could command and he passed his days, after the war, refined by sorrow, purified by aspiration, strengthened through self-reliance, and made gentle by an earnest faith in things unseen. He was genial, generous, and indulgent toward others and severe to himself. His aims were prompted by noble desires and in politics his ideals for democratic action were high. With all his limitations, which he recognized, as well as his powers, he commands our admiration and respect.5

  For reasons difficult to understand, Hay’s Hood the Confederate hero (a man who in 1929 was deserving of our admiration and respect) had by 1992 transformed into Wiley Sword’s “fool with a license to kill his own men,” and to economist, actor, and author Ben Stein’s “horrifyingly misguided soul [who was] the most destructive American of all time” in 2006. Writing only a few years after the release of Sword’s book historian Steven Woodworth said of the almost hysterically negative portrayals of Braxton Bragg and Hood, “Some recent accounts of these two hapless generals lead the reader to wonder not why they held command of an army but rather why they were not in an insane asylum.”6

  This study details many examples of factual errors, inaccurate and misleading paraphrasing of primary sources, and the apparent concealment of historical facts. I am reluctant to believe that multiple errors of fact by an author relating to the same subject (Hood) are intentional; yet, it is equally difficult to credit these mistakes as an accident when factual errors accompany persistent misleading paraphrasing of letters, reports, journals, and other contemporary sources that completely mischaracterize the words of Hood and his supporters in and out of the army.

  Some authors influence the perception of their readers by engaging in what I like to call sourcing sleight-of-hand, which includes some or all of the following:

  1. Making factual statements without providing a source;

  2. Making a factual statement and providing a source that has no relationship whatsoever to the “factual” statement;

  3. Offering long complete verbatim quotes from sources that support the author’s viewpoint or argument, but abbreviating quotes from witnesses whose testimony weakens the author’s viewpoint or argument;

  4. Inaccurately paraphrasing or distorting the context of a primary source;

  5. Inserting an un-sourced assertion of fact into a paragraph containing multiple factual statements supported by correct sourcing.

  Sometimes the best way to expose these unethical or sloppy methodologies is to provide the full quote of an eyewitness, which can run to many paragraphs. The advantage is that it not only offers what these witnesses said or wrote in their own words, but it allows readers to fully grasp the context of entire quote. I have always been much more interested in an eyewitness’s own words than how an author chooses to paraphrase him or her—especially agenda-driven authors.

  The documentary film The Battle of Franklin: Five Hours in the Valley of Death offers an example of No. 3 (above). Hood’s name is mentioned in the hour-long film 54 times, making him by far the most prominent character of the entire production. The film’s script heavily relies upon verbatim quotes from Franklin veterans and other witnesses. Of the 58 veteran/eyewitness quotes cherry-picked by the producers of this film, however, General Hood accounts for precisely three. One of his quotes concerns his relationship with his fiancée, which is unrelated to anything else in the film, while his other two quotes are followed immediately by derisive comments from the narrator.7

  More appalling is the selective disclosure of historical evidence. Many Hood critics routinely fail to include material that contradicts their thesis or anti-Hood viewpoint. The American Historical Association, Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct, insists that historians “should report their findings as accurately as possible and not omit evidence that runs counter to their own interpretation.” Unfortunately, nearly every book written on Hood and the Tennessee Campaign routinely includes just such omissions. One example is when both pro-Hood and anti-Hood comments appear in the same primary source material, and sometimes within the same page or paragraph. So often in these cases, only those portions critical of Hood are reproduced for the reader. Courts don’t ask witnesses to swear to tell the truth; they demand witnesses swear to tell the whole truth. Regretfully, too many writers toil under no such constraints.8

  Unfortunately, the word “hagiography” (defined as “a worshipful or idealizing biography”) has no antonym. I use “malportrayal” to refer to an intentionally malicious portrayal of a character designed to destroy his or her legacy and compromise the accuracy of historical events. “Malportrayal” doesn’t exist in the English language, though perhaps it should.

  Equally destructive to Civil War history is the innocent compromising of historiography by writers swept up in the prevailing current with otherwise no intent to prejudice or bias readers. They do this by simply repeating what others have written believing it to be true. As authors Scott Bowden and Bill Ward put it in their study of Lee at Gettysburg, “As is often the case in military history, if a story is repeated frequently by a legion of writers, it becomes accepted as fact by many readers. These stories acquire a life of their own and become part of the popular culture; their factual foundation is no longer questioned, much less critically evaluated.”9

  Most authors are heavily influenced by earlier writers, especially when the tone and content of books and articles are similar. “One of the greatest difficulties in understanding how Civil War generals functioned,” wrote late author and historian Thomas Buell, “is that much of the war’s history is biased and distorted. Upon scholarly inquiry, truisms about popular historical events and personalities are often discovered to be wrong.”10 Writers hesitant to counter prevailing orthodoxy (or too lazy to perform their own firsthand research) often join an Amen chorus and repeat the same interpretation and imagery that exists in the broad Civil War culture. The result, if I may be so bold, is that much of what appears to be scholarship is in fact pop history decorated with sourcing notes.

  Although some authors engage in intentional distortion and fact-filtering to establish and disseminate their own unique portrayal (behavior that could be termed “historiographic activism”), most writers do not intentionally repeat misinformation. Their mistake is their unquestioning confidence in the accuracy and completeness of earlier works, and faith that publishers scrupulously demand this before they will print a book or article. Awards and public recognition for books and authors,
so often based on style, eloquence, and name-recognition rather than historical substance, exacerbate this problem. The most influential book on the 1864 Tennessee Campaign (and the most damaging to Hood’s legacy) is Sword’s Embrace an Angry Wind: The Confederacy’s Last Hurrah, which was honored with the New York Civil War Round Table’s prestigious Fletcher-Pratt award for the “best non-fiction book on the Civil War published during the course of the calendar year.” As readers of John Bell Hood are about to learn, however, this title is riddled with questionable conclusions, factual errors, citation problems, and incomplete disclosure of vital historical evidence, none of which was likely known to the judges who bestowed the honor. Awards imply validity, and so make any book an attractive source for subsequent writers. The eloquence of the pen compounds these problems. I was often mesmerized by the gifted writing style of some of the authors mentioned in this book, only to later discover the beautifully expressed assertions incomplete or even spun from whole cloth.

  It is not my intent to exploit honest mistakes by ethical writers. Nobody is perfect, and everyone makes errors. Some careful readers may well find mistakes in my own work. A careless keystroke, for example, can change the meaning of a sentence or provide an incorrect citation. Paraphrasing an eyewitness quote can unintentionally mischaracterize the original writer’s true intent. Authors can only be expected to “know what they know,” and might be unaware of existing primary evidence, and new archival records are routinely discovered after a book’s publication. The issues I raise in this book deal only with errors that in my opinion appear to be part of a consistent pattern, or when a specific mistake or mischaracterization—intentional or otherwise—alters the correct understanding of an important event or issue.

  Many authors employ qualifying language such as “perhaps,” “might,” “may,” or “could.” These conditional words are of course necessary in all books—including this one—to qualify legitimate theories or opinions and to provide what are assumed to be facts when undeniable proof can’t be found. However, these words also offer a shield of sorts that allow authors to present personal opinions and interpretations under the guise of fact, cleverly inducing readers to draw an incorrect inference that supports the writer’s premise. According to Weasel Words: The Dictionary of American Doublespeak, Teddy Roosevelt (at the time a U.S. Army colonel) coined the term “weasel words” for those that undermine or contradict the meaning of the word, phrase, or clause it accompanies. According to Herbert M. Lloyd in a letter to the New York Times on June 3, 1916, Roosevelt said, “Weasel words are words that suck all the life out of the words next to them, just as a weasel sucks an egg and leaves the shell. If you heft the egg afterward it’s as light as a feather, and not very filling when you’re hungry, but a basketful of them would make quite a show, and would bamboozle the unwary.”11

  A classic illustration of the application of Roosevelt’s pet peeve is found in Sword’s The Confederacy’s Last Hurrah when alleging that Hood attempted to save face after the disastrous Tennessee Campaign (italics added): “Already when en route to South Carolina, he had passed though Augusta and probably met with a distant relative, Gustavus Woodson Smith, the crusty old army engineer who was Hood’s good friend. Hood apparently poured out his bitterness to Smith, who then may have published the long, rambling article that appeared in the Augusta, Georgia, Daily Constitutionalist on February 5, 1865.” Read that again. Those two sentences tell us precisely … nothing. There is no proof that Hood met with Smith, no proof Hood “poured out his bitterness,” and no proof that Smith wrote the published article. Sword’s source for these claims is two modern authors who also had no proof.12

  Gary Ecelbarger’s otherwise excellent The Day That Dixie Died: The Battle of Atlanta offers a similar example. While in Richmond in November 1863, wrote Ecelbarger, John Bell Hood “perhaps” aroused by the “teasing” of his flirtatious girlfriend Buck Preston, “found an outlet to his needs by frequently visiting a young prostitute.” Ecelbarger’s source is Thomas Lowry’s book The Stories the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell: Sex in the Civil War. Lowry’s source, in turn, is purportedly a quote from the diary of a Richmond prostitute who wrote about her encounter with a wounded general. Lowry suggested that the officer might have been Hood simply because a Richmond newspaper reported he was in the city at that time. Richmond was one of the South’s primary locations for generals wounded or otherwise, and so it is fair to conclude there was more than one wounded general in the Southern capital at the time. Accusing Hood of using Richmond prostitutes as “an outlet for his needs” without reliable historical proof adds nothing to a book on the 1864 battle of Atlanta other than titillation and sensationalism. Lowry’s speculation induced Ecelbarger, an otherwise careful researcher and writer, to make the leap from supposition to absolute fact, cloaked within one of Teddy Roosevelt’s least favorite words: “perhaps.”13

  Sometimes authors define and employ their “literary license” rather elastically, stretching it in ways that lead readers to connect subjects and issues that are unrelated. Colorful and expressive writing makes for good reading, but when artistry morphs into hyperbole, when eloquent embellishment funnels readers in the direction of false or inaccurate inferences, the bounds of literary license cross into unethical writing. For example, Hood’s fiancée Sally “Buck” Preston receives little or no ink in the pre-1975 books penned by Thomas Hay, Stanley Horn, and Thomas Connelly. In Sword’s 1993 The Confederacy’s Last Hurrah, however, she has more page listings in the index than do four of the six generals who were killed at the battle of Franklin combined. And yet, Preston had nothing at all to do with the Tennessee Campaign in general, or Franklin in particular. Were Hay, Horn, and Connelly negligent or was Sword’s use of “artistic license” to weave in a love story and somehow try to tie it to Hood’s battlefield decision-making excessive?

  It is simply a fact that many casual readers skip past source notes, and those who flip to the back of a book to check a citation often do not have a cited book or a primary record used by the author. Even if a reader wants to examine a primary source document, most are located in private hands, in the National Archives or Library of Congress in Washington, DC, or reside in the library of a distant university or museum. Few readers (or amateur historians, for that matter) have the motivation, time, or resources to research and confirm what other authors assert as true.

  The old adage that “The facts don’t always equal the truth” is more valid in history than in any other literary genre. A letter from 1864 may prove that Johnny Reb wrote home one day to tell his wife that he and his comrades had “just whipped the Yankees” (and maybe in his limited field of vision that was was happened), but it may not be true that in the Yankees “got whipped.” Healthy skepticism is important to a conscientious historian, who has a duty to reasonably examine available historical records to corroborate (or disclaim) Johnny’s account. Unfortunately, as you will find in the pages ahead, too many modern authors do not research for themselves the primary sources cited by writers who have come before them. And thus, regrettably, John Bell Hood’s reputation has, for the past few decades, marinated in erroneous, inaccurate, and often malicious portrayals of his words and deeds. For the sake of the accuracy of the historical record it is important that some of us find the motivation, make the time, and do the research to confirm what has been written and seared into the public’s mind as historical truth.

  “I came to the study of Hood’s life by an indirect route,” wrote historian Richard McMurry, who continued:

  At Virginia Military Institute in 1960 and 1961 in Tyson Wilson’s course in Military History and John Barrett’s in the Civil War and Reconstruction, I first began serious inquiry into the Atlanta Campaign. This study continued in graduate school at Emory University. At first I shared the belief that Hood was totally incompetent as a general and that his critics were correct in what they believed about the war in general and about Hood in particular. Years of study, however, led to the convictio
n that Hood’s career had never been fairly evaluated and that his place in Confederate history was misunderstood. He was a victim of historians who assumed that he could do nothing right and that his chief critic could do no wrong. It seemed time to try to restore the balance.14

  What is my motivation? As my name implies, I am a relative of John Bell Hood. Although I descend directly from his grandfather Lucas Hood, my line descends from Lucas’s son Andrew, the brother of Hood’s father, John. If this explanation is too headache-inducing, let’s just say that I am a second cousin to the general. Although I have the honor of sharing his surname, there are many people alive today who share more of the general’s DNA than I do.

  My journey began innocently enough in July 2000 when I attended a “Staff Ride” tour of the battles of Spring Hill, Franklin, and Nashville. The high-powered staff and faculty included the legendary Edwin C. Bearss, A. P. Stewart biographer Sam Davis Elliott, Hood biographer Richard McMurry, and author Wiley Sword, whose The Confederacy’s Last Hurrah was, at that time, the most influential book on Hood and the Tennessee Campaign. Sword’s beautifully written award-winning study has almost single-handedly defined Hood’s modern historical reputation, and the Civil War culture in general has embraced his charismatic portrayal of the campaign and battles as the definitive interpretation and presentation of the war in Middle Tennessee in the autumn of 1864. The tour included visits to, among other places, the Rippavilla plantation in Spring Hill, the Carter House and Carnton Plantation in Franklin, and Traveller’s Rest in Nashville. The portrayal of Hood at most or all of these sites was universally derogatory. At one historic site, the only image of Hood to be found was on the inside of the men’s restroom door. After a complaint the picture was moved from inside the restroom door to the outside. Soon thereafter, however, the restroom photo was removed and images of Hood (and Union General John M. Schofield, whose photo was also absent at this site) were respectfully presented in the facility, alongside other commanders and prominent historical figures.