11 OR 39, pt. 2, 836.
12 Ibid., 42, pt. 2, 731; ibid., 65, pt. 2, 756; Sword, The Confederacy’s Last Hurrah, 427.
13 Steven Woodworth, The Chickamauga Campaign (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University, 2010), 84.
14 B. W. Frobel letter to John Bell Hood, July 24, 1867, and Leopold Perot letter to John Bell Hood, February 8, 1876, John Bell Hood Personal Papers.
15 McMurry, Atlanta 1864, 144-145.
16 Larry Daniel, Soldiering in the Army of Tennessee: A Portrait of Life in the Confederate Army (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 142.
17 Richard McMurry, “Confederate Morale in the Atlanta Campaign of 1864,” Georgia Historical Quarterly, vol. 54, No. 2 (Summer 1970), 229, 232. Obviously only a fraction of Confederate deserters actually crossed into enemy lines. Many or most simply went home. Still, the number of deserters processed by the Federals outside Atlanta is illustrative of the general point of this argument.
18 Ibid., 230.
19 Bonds, War Like the Thunderbolt, 48.
20 Ibid., 49; Sam Watkins, Company Aytch or, A Side Show of the Big Show and Other Sketches, Thomas Inge, ed. (New York: Plume, 1999), 104.
21 Bonds, War Like the Thunderbolt, 49.
22 OR 38, pt. 3, 985.
23 W. J. Byrne letter to John Bell Hood, June 26, 1874, John Bell Hood Personal Papers.
24 Bonds, War Like the Thunderbolt, 59.
25 S. F. Fleherty, Our Regiment: A History of the 102ndIllinois Volunteer Infantry (Chicago: Brewster and Hanscom, 1865), 86.
26 McMurry, “Confederate Morale,” 232-233.
27 Bragg Papers.
28 McMurry, “Confederate Morale,” 236-237; Cornelius Irving Walker, Great Things Are Expected of Us: The Letters of Colonel C. Irvine Walker, 10th South Carolina Infantry, CSA, William L. White and Charles D. Runion, eds. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009), 134.
29 McMurry, “Confederate Morale,” 238.
30 McMurry, Atlanta 1864,142; Larry Nelson, Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric: Confederate Policy for the U.S. Presidential Contest of 1864 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 83.
31 U. S. Grant, General Grant’s Letters to a Friend, 1861-1880, James Grant Wilson, ed. (New York: Crowell and Company, 1897 [1973]), 39; U. S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Webster and Company, 1886), vol. 1, 345; Henry Clayton Papers, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.
32 OR 45, pt. 1,1,247. Robert Hudson’s letter is dated November 25, 1864—after Lincoln was reelected. A transcriptionist may have misdated the letter for inclusion in the OR, but it is more likely the date is correct and that Hudson was simply making the point that war weariness was destroying the Southern will to fight on for much longer.
33 Johnston, Narrative of Military Operations, 356-357.
34 OR 52, pt. 2, 680.
35 Ibid., 47, pt. 2, 1,303.
36 Ibid., 1,304.
37 Ibid., 1,304, 1, PAGE305.
38 Ibid., 1,305.
39 Ibid., 1,PAGE306.
40 Ibid., 1,306, 1,307.
41 Ibid., 1,PAGE307.
42 Ibid., 1,308.
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid., 1,309.
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid.
48 Ibid., 1,PAGE309, 1,318.
49 Ibid., 1,310.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid; G. W. Smith letter to John Bell Hood, January 23, 1879, John Bell Hood Personal Papers.
52 OR 47, pt. 2, 1,311.
53 Ibid.
54 Samuel T. Foster, One of Cleburne’s Command: The Civil War Reminiscences and Diary of Capt. Samuel T. Foster, Granbury’s Texas Brigade, CSA, Norman D. Brown, ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980), 129.
55 Connelly, Autumn of Glory, 423. Examples of this are provided later in this chapter.
56 Watkins, Company Aytch, 105, 206, 210, 225.
57 S. A. Cunningham, “The Battle of Franklin: The Carnage as Seen from the Center of the Conflict,” in Confederate Veteran, 40 vols. (April 1893), vol. 1, 101-102; S. A. Cunningham, Reminiscences of the 41st Tennessee: The Civil War in the West, John A. Simpson, ed. (Shippensburg, PA: White Mane Books, 2001), 117; Louise Wigfall Wright, A Southern Girl in ‘61: The WarTime Memories of a Confederate Senators Daughter, Mrs. D. Giraud Wright, ed. (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1905), 182.
58 Judge Frank. H. Smith, “History of the 24th Tennessee,” Columbia, TN, March 1904.
59 Foster, One of Cleburne’s Command, 105, 107.
60 Virgil Murphey diary, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; J. N. Wyatt, “Dalton-Atlanta Campaign,” Confederate Veteran, vol. 5 (October 1897), 521.
61 James H. Wilson, Under the Old Flag: Recollections of Military Operations in the War for the Union, The Spanish War, The Boxer Rebellion, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1912), vol. 2, 44-45.
62 Craig Symonds, A Battlefield Atlas of the Civil War (Mount Pleasant, SC: Nautical and Aviation Publishing Company of America, 1983), 79.
63 S. D. Lee letter to John Bell Hood, August 25, 1875, John Bell Hood Personal Papers.
Chapter 4
“The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down.”
— A. Whitney Brown
The Cassville Controversy
One of the most hotly debated incidents of the Atlanta Campaign prior to Joseph Johnston’s dismissal as commander of the Army of Tennessee occurred at Cassville, Georgia, on May 19, 1864. After the May 13-15 battle of Resaca, Johnston retreated across the Oostanaula River and marched about 15 miles south to Adairsville, pausing briefly at Calhoun. Neither position satisfied the cautious Johnston, but the Confederate commander saw an opportunity to isolate and attack a portion of Sherman’s larger force.
Hoping to catch and engage Johnston before his army could withdraw south across the Etowah River, Sherman split his army into four columns to facilitate a more rapid pursuit. The Federals spread farther apart as they approached Adairsville, which provided Johnston with a tactical advantage and the opportunity to strike. Poor roads south of Adairsville ensured that Sherman would have to keep his forces divided. One of these roads ran south from Adairsville via Kingston, about 16 miles, and another ran generally southeast for about 10 miles directly to Cassville. Johnston correctly anticipated that Sherman would send one column, comprising Gen. Joe Hooker’s XX Corps and Gen. John Schofield’s XXIII Corps (the Army of the Ohio) on the Cassville road. Rugged terrain in the area made cross-country travel difficult, which in turn impeded Sherman’s ability to support the Cassville-bound portion of the Federal army.1
“The probability that the Federal army would divide … ,” Johnston later wrote, “gave me a hope of engaging and defeating one of them before it could receive aid from the other.” His plan involved the conspicuous march of William Hardee’s corps and most of the army’s wagons and cavalry on the road from Adairsville to Kingston to ensure Sherman’s pursuit, while Hood’s and Leonidas Polk’s corps proceeded directly to Cassville. Rather than continuing south, however, Hardee would turn and march rapidly toward Cassville to unite with the rest of the army, giving the Confederates overwhelming numerical superiority over the isolated Federal column. Hood was tasked with initiating the Rebel attack against the Federal left flank as it approached Polk’s command to the front.2
Johnston’s plan took shape when, on May 18, Hooker’s and Schofield’s Federals advanced down the Adairsville-Cassville road toward Polk, whose corps had deployed for battle. Hood took up a position on Polk’s right, while Hardee, who had completed his longer diversionary march, aligned on Polk’s left west of Cassville. Hardee’s position controlled the road from Kingston, over which any reinforcing troops from Sherman would have to travel to support Hooker and Schofield. On the morning of May 19, the long-retreating Army of Tennessee was poised to strike a potentially serious blow. Spirits were high, and Johnston exhorted his men with
an eloquent, blood-stirring order.
Just as Hood’s forward movement began, however, an enemy force of unknown size appeared unexpectedly on his exposed right flank. Hood, who did not have cavalry to protect his flank, exercised appropriate caution by halting his advance and repositioning his divisions to face the new threat. Hood’s decision delayed the entire Confederate attack. When Johnston learned of the threat beyond Hood’s right flank, he abandoned his attack plan altogether and renewed his retreat by crossing the nearby Etowah River, one of the few remaining natural obstacles between Sherman and Atlanta.
In exchange for minimal casualties, Sherman had driven some 35 miles in just four days and was now within 50 miles of Atlanta. Federal morale soared. On the Confederate side, hearts sank when the positions were abandoned and another demoralizing retreat resumed. “The sword of the army had been drawn,” explained Johnston’s biographer Craig Symonds, “but it did not strike.”3
After the campaign, a debate raged between Hood and Johnston over the affair at Cassville that ended only with Hood’s death in 1879. According to Johnston, Hood ruined one of the campaign’s best opportunities to cripple Sherman by reacting to erroneous reports of enemy forces on his right flank “without informing me of this strange departure of instructions.” Referring to Hood’s movement as “erratic” and “based upon a wild report,” Johnston accused Hood of “extraordinary disobedience.” “The Federal army had been under our unceasing observation for thirteen days,” Johnston wrote, “so the report on which General Hood acted was manifestly untrue.”4
Hood, however, insisted that he had prudently shifted his command to face a wholly unexpected threat, and that to have done otherwise would have been careless and irresponsible. In his own memoirs, Hood stated that if Johnston was correct, his corps had been attacked by “an imaginary enemy” that killed and wounded several members of Gen. Thomas Hindman’s division. Hood wrote that he acted appropriately. He informed Johnston’s chief of staff Mackall of the situation, halted his advance, and repositioned his corps to “force the enemy to develop his strength and object.” Hood added, “Five thousand witnesses, moreover, could be produced to testify to the truth of my assertion.”5
The controversy continues in various forms up to the present day. In the late 1990s, however, Richard McMurry confirmed that Hood was correct. Federal troops from Dan Butterfield’s brigade, part of the Hooker-Schofield column, “stumbled onto a country road leading into Cassville … and in following that route blundered into Hood’s column.” McMurry concluded, “For Hood to have launched an attack to the west with a Federal force of unknown strength to his rear would have been foolish in the extreme. His men could have been caught between fire from two hostile forces.”6
Of the many controversies regarding Hood’s tenure as a corps commander under Johnston, the interpretation and portrayal of the Cassville affair in Civil War scholarship is the most perplexing. Given the evidence, it is difficult to imagine how anyone could blame Hood for his actions. Still, many Civil War writers and scholars have come down on Johnston’s side of the argument.
In the early 1940s, Stanley Horn seemed to have understood the imperilment of Hood’s corps at Cassville when he wrote in his The Army of Tennessee that “Johnston just could not believe that enemy troops were there; even as late as 1874.” The author acknowledged Hood had indeed been “briskly engaged” by a fragment of Hooker’s column that had become lost and “blundered into the right wing of the whole Confederate army.”7
Three decades later Thomas Connelly, unmoved by Horn’s assessment as well as other historical evidence, was highly critical of Hood’s actions at Cassville. “Hood told a curious story that does not coincide with other accounts,” argued Connelly, who went on to make harsh assertions about Hood’s forthrightness, relying exclusively on the widely discredited journal of committed Johnston devotee W. W. Mackall. According to Connelly, “Hood argued that the reason he fell back was not because a force appeared on his rear.” In fact, Hood explained his withdrawal and repositioning for precisely that reason. Continuing his curious assertions, Connelly misinformed his readers that Hood “maintained that he knew all along what was later found to be true”—that the enemy encountered at Cassville “was only a cavalry reconnaissance.” This is untrue. Hood never deviated from his contention that his right flank was attacked by a force that included not just cavalry, but artillery and infantry as well. Connelly also censured Hood for not ordering a reconnaissance of the enemy force. It must be remembered that Hood did not have cavalry to send out, so he ordered Hindman to advance infantry skirmishers to ascertain the identity and strength of the Federals. Connelly further criticized Hood for repositioning his corps without awaiting permission from Johnston. Surely Connelly did not expect Hood to maintain his command in an exposed position, and leave Hindman’s division aligned to receive enfilading fire from Federal artillery while awaiting permission from Johnston to react and respond?8
Twenty years after Connelly wrote his study of the Confederate army, Albert Castel penned Decision in the West, which remains the most detailed analysis of the Atlanta Campaign to date. Hood, declared Castel, was blameless at Cassville. The historian presented a detailed analysis of the threat to Hood’s exposed right flank, and provided primary source evidence to support his opinion. Curiously, Castel went out of his way to excuse Connelly’s earlier analysis and condemnation of Hood at Cassville. In an endnote, Castel speculated that Connelly might not have known of the existence of the letter of a member of Hood’s staff, Col. Taylor Beattie, who was an eyewitness to the events at Cassville. However, this is a difficult argument to make: Beattie’s acount appeared in a March 29, 1874, letter reprinted in Hood’s Advance and Retreat, which is cited extensively in Connelly’s book.9
In his letter, Beattie recalled that during the commencement of the attack at Cassville, “a dark line” of troops appeared on the right of Hood’s corps. Hood halted his corps, recalled the staff officers, and ordered Hindman to send out skirmishers to identify the unknown body of men. “In a few minutes a sharp skirmish was in progress,” Beattie wrote, “and several of our men were wounded and killed.” Beattie continued, “I recollect very distinctly that five men were hit at one time by the fragments of a shell, which exploded not more than twenty-five yards” from where Hood was sitting on horseback. According to Beattie, Hood turned his corps to face the enemy, who remained there throughout the day “erecting batteries in front and in flank of us, enfilading our line.” Connelly cites Hood’s memoirs numerous times throughout his Army of Tennessee, and Beattie’s Cassville testimony appears in Hood’s memoirs.10
Hood’s memoirs also contain a May 26, 1874, letter from Maj. J. E. Austin, commander of the 14th Battalion Louisiana Sharpshooters. Austin’s men were positioned on Hood’s extreme right at Cassville. According to Austin, there was a “short and severe engagement” with enemy troops that had unexpectedly appeared “in force in my front, with artillery and infantry.” After the initial repulse of the Federals, Austin stated that the enemy gathered reinforcements and moved around his unit “until I was completely isolated and cut off” from Hood’s corps. “From my observations,” Austin concluded, “I am forced to believe that General Johnston makes an error in his book in discrediting the presence of the enemy.”11
Federal sources also record the fighting on Hood’s flank. Federal Captain (later brevet general) Paul A. Oliver wrote to Daniel Butterfield on March 3, 1877, and described the attack on Johnston’s (Hood’s) right flank at Cassville. “Smith’s battery first arrived together with yours,” Oliver wrote, “and opened spiritedly and the arrival of Ward’s brigade, just at the right moment, forming line of battle on your left, gave a display of force, which induced the enemy to halt and retire.” Oliver, who realized that he had “imprudently attacked” a larger Rebel force, was “relieved from the unpleasant solitude” by the arrival of Hooker’s main force late in the afternoon. After riding into Cassville later, Oliver continued, “I f
ound that had I pushed Ward’s brigade forward on the road they were on, they would have got right in the rear of Johnston’s line of earthworks.” “It is evident now that the enemy did not care to initiate an attack,” because of the move “made on the right and rear of his right flank.”12
Among those historians who have written recently on the Atlanta Campaign, authors McMurry and Stephen Davis recognize Hood’s perilous position at Cassville and endorse the actions he took to protect his troops. As McMurry wrote, ignoring the threat “would have been foolish in the extreme.”13
Despite the overwhelming evidence that Federals did indeed appear on his flank, harsh criticisms of Hood’s actions at Cassville persist. The most acerbic written assault appeared in David J. Eicher’s The Civil War in Books. The author of several books on Civil War history, Eicher berated Hood’s memoirs and, without providing specific examples or sources, claimed that during Hood’s tenure as a corps commander under Johnston, “Hood repeatedly ducked responsibility for unfolding actions, and occasionally placed others in command during times of risk.” Eicher reserved his most outrageous charge for Hood’s actions at Cassville, writing, At times, Hood “may have intentionally neglected his own duties to make his superior, Johnston, look bad,” such as at the battle of Cassville.14
Eicher’s accusations of gross insubordination (and perhaps criminal, treasonous conduct) by Hood transcend reason and is without evidence—credible or otherwise.
John Bell Hood: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of a Confederate General Page 11
