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

by Hood, Stephen

  Hood’s planning for the Tennessee invasion extended well beyond his own army. Unlike the careless commander of customary portrayals, Hood left a force behind under Gen. Philip D. Roddey, cavalry commander of the District of Northern Alabama, to repair bridges and maintain a retreat route in case the army suffered a severe defeat in Tennessee and was forced to withdraw.32

  In celebration of the Civil War centennial, the editors of the Nashville Banner published a special 36-page insert on Sunday, February 22, 1964, entitled “The Civil War in Middle Tennessee, Commemorating the Centennial.” Even though the highly critical books by Thomas Connelly, James McDonough, and Wiley Sword had yet to appear, the publication seemed to anticipate the deterioration of Hood’s public image. The only major studies of the invasion available were Thomas Hay’s Hood’s Tennessee Campaign (1929) and Stanley Horn’s Hood’s Tennessee Campaign (1941) and The Decisive Battle of Nashville (1956). The authors of the special newspaper centennial supplement primarily relied upon Horn’s studies. Near the end of the feature, the authors referred to Horn’s description of Hood’s campaign as “fantastic,” due to its difficulty and ambition. Sympathetic toward Hood’s courageous attempt to liberate Tennessee from Federal occupation, the 10,000-word treatise concluded with a poem:

  Fantastic, Middle Tennessee?

  No! I saw you lift your weary head

  To the windrows of my dead;

  To Hood, the headlong, dead-wrong man—

  How mad could I be?

  Well before you hiss

  When you think of me,

  Remember this—

  I was trying to set you free.

  Fantastic, Nashville?

  No, not then!

  When I saw you captive, trembling,

  At the end of Johnson’s rope.

  For I, Hood, the one-legged man,

  I and my ragged, shoeless men—

  I was your only hope.33

  The Nashville Banner poem seems to mirror the view of James H. McNeilly, a Confederate chaplain in Gen. William A. Quarles’s brigade, who wrote of the Tennessee Campaign, “Thus ended a campaign inspired by a sense of our need, entered upon in hope, carried forward with dauntless courage against overwhelming forces, and exhibiting the most heroic devotion to a righteous cause. Our compensation for failure is that it is better to have deserved success than to have won it unjustly.”34

  1 Hood, Advance and Retreat, 266-269.

  2 McMurry, John Bell Hood and the War for Southern Independence, 167; Richard McMurry, Two Great Rebel Armies: An Essay in Confederate Military Histoy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 130-131; James L. McDonough and Thomas Connelly, Five Tragic Hours: The Battle of Franklin (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 15; McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 811.

  3 Jacobson, For Cause and For Country, 45, 49.

  4 Tennessee Senator Gustavus A. Henry speech before the Confederate senate, November 29, 1864. A typescript of Henry’s speech was retained by John Bell Hood and is among a small collection of Hood’s personal papers and other artifacts owned by Wesley Clark, hereafter cited as The Gen. John B. Hood Collection of Wes Clark, Dallas, Texas.

  5 Ibid.

  6 Connelly, Autumn of Glory, 483, 490-493.

  7 Ibid., 490.

  8 Henry Clayton Papers, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa; Jacobson, For Cause and For Country, 84.

  9 Winston Groom review of Russell Bonds’s War Like the Thunderbolt, in the Wall Street Journal, August 28, 2009; John Russell Young, Around the World with General Grant, 2 vols. (New York: The American News Company, New York, 1879), vol. 2, 294.

  10 OR 39, pt. 1, 810; Bromfield L. Ridley, Battles and Sketches of the Army of Tennessee (Mexico, MO: Missouri Publishing, 1906), 443.

  11 “Hood’s Version of His Tennessee Campaign,” Louisville Daily Journal, November 19, 1865. Typescript provided to the author by Jamie Gillum, Franklin, TN.

  12 J. B. Hood letter to Sarah A. Dorsey, March 30, 1867, John Bell Hood Personal Papers.

  13 John Bell Hood, Oration, delivered before the Annual Meeting of the Survivors’ Association of the State of South Carolina, December 12, 1872 (Charleston, SC: Walker, Evans and Cogswell, Printers, 1873), Rosanna Blake Library of Confederate History, Marshall University, Huntington, WV.

  14 OR 39, pt. 3, 871; Sam Davis Elliott, Doctor Quintard, Chaplain C.S.A. and Second Bishop of Tennessee: The Memoir and Civil War Diary of Charles Todd Quintard (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 161; Rick Warwick, Williamson County: The Civil War Years Revealed Through Letters, Diaries and Memoirs (Nashville, TN: The Panacea Press, 2006), 181; Henry Clayton Papers, University of Alabama; Watkins, Company Aytch, 214.

  15 The United States of America, vol. I, “Through the Civil War,” by David S. Muzzey, Ph. D. (Barnard College, Ginn & Company, 1922), 589.

  16 Garnet Joseph Wolseley, “An English View of the Civil War,” in North American Review (December 1889), 713-727; George Henderson, The Science of War: A Collection of Essays and Lectures (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1908), 643.

  17 Hay, Hood’s Tennessee Campaign, 21, 69.

  18 Ibid., viii-ix.

  19 Horn, The Army of Tennessee, 379; Stanley Horn, The Decisive Battle of Nashville (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1978), viii-ix.

  20 Jacobson, For Cause and For Country, 50.

  21 OR 47, pt. 2, 1,309; Watkins, Company Aytch, 186; Augusta Constitutionalist, October 4, 1864; William T. Sherman, Memoirs of William T. Sherman, by Himself, 2 vols. (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1957), vol. 2,141; Hood letter to L. T. Wigfall, April 5, 1864, John Bell Hood Personal Papers.

  22 Alfred Roman, The Military Operations of General Beauregard in the War Between the States 1861-1865, 2 vols. (New York: Franklin Square Harper and Brothers, 1884), vol. 2, 305-306.

  23 Ibid., 303; OR 45, pt. 1, 1,242; ibid, 44, pt. 1, 910.

  24 Horn, The Decisive Battle of Nashville, ix.

  25 Sword, The Confederacy’s Last Hurrah, 63.

  26 Horn, Decisive Battle of Nashville, ix; Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, vol. 2, 503.

  27 Wilson, Under the Old Flag, 28, 30.

  28 David S. Stanley, Personal Memoirs of MajorGeneral D.S. Stanley, U.S.A. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1917), 189, 198.

  29 John N. Beach, History of the Fortieth Ohio Volunteer Infantry (London, OH: Shepard & Craig Printers, 1884) 93.

  30 Charles T. Clark, Opdycke’s Tigers: 125th Ohio (Columbus, OH: Sparr & Glenn, 1895), 446-447.

  31 Horn, The Decisive Battle of Nashville, 6-7.

  32 OR 45, pt. 1, 655.

  33 Nashville Banner, “The Civil War in Middle Tennessee, Commemorating the Centennial, Part III, 1864,” February 22, 1964. The newspaper that published the centennial insert is now the Nashville Tennessean.

  34 James H. McNeilly, “With Hood Before Nashville,” Confederate Veteran (June 1918), vol. 26, 254.

  Chapter 7

  “To look back upon history is inevitably to distort it.”

  — Norman Pearson

  John Bell Hood: Feeding and Supplying His Army

  When he was promoted on July 17, 1864, six weeks after his 33rd birthday, John Bell Hood became the youngest full general in American military history and the youngest officer to command an army. Because he had served as a corps commander for only five months, his inexperience at logistics is frequently emphasized. The supply problems suffered by the Army of Tennessee are usually attributed solely to his alleged inattention to detail and lack of appreciation for logistics. Some recent books toss in the allegation of an acrimonious relationship between Hood and his immediate superior, Gen. P. G. T. Beauregard during the planning stages of the Tennessee Campaign. As is typical of most portrayals of Hood, the depth and degree of the criticism has increased over time.

  Hood’s predecessor Joseph Johnston is unanimously praised for his successful supplying of the Army of Tennessee during his tenure as commander d
uring the first seven months of 1864. The circumstances facing Johnston, however, were much different from those of his successors, Hood and Richard Taylor. Except for brief interruptions, Johnston’s Army of Tennessee was served by the Western and Atlantic Railroad every day of his command tenure. Each of his persistent withdrawals shortened the distance to his supply base in Atlanta, which was itself served by the Georgia Railroad from the east, the Macon and Western Railroad from the southeast, and the Atlanta and West Point Railroad from the southwest. Because of these many advantages, it is unfair to compare Johnston’s logistical performance to virtually any other commander, Federal or Confederate, during any major campaign of the war.

  Even Robert E. Lee fighting throughout the war in proximity to the Confederate capital, struggled mightily to keep his army supplied. On August 31, 1862, Col. J. B. Robertson of the 5th Texas wrote that the supply of clothing was insufficient for “cleanliness necessary for health. Many of the men are barefooted.” “Starvation, literal starvation, was doing its deadly work,” wrote Gen. George B. Gordon about the dire situation outside Petersburg by March of 1865. “So depleted and poisoned was the blood of many of Lee’s men from insufficient and unsound food that a slight wound, which would probably not have been reported at the beginning of the war, would often cause blood-poison, gangrene and death.”1

  Criticism of Hood’s army management does not begin with the Tennessee Campaign. Before the evacuation of Atlanta, Hood was forced to destroy a trainload of ammunition and supplies. The blast, so vividly portrayed in the motion picture Gone with the Wind, resulted in a giant firestorm. Some historians have described the event as the greatest explosion of the American Civil War. Flames illuminated the sky and damaged or destroyed numerous buildings (which had survived Sherman’s relentless bombardment) within a quarter-mile radius of the train. Historian Thomas Connelly blamed the debacle on Hood, who “simply waited too late to get many of his stores out of Atlanta [due to] a confusion of orders.” Wiley Sword echoed Connelly by writing that “Hood had waited too long” to remove the army’s enormous stockpile of supplies.

  As Connelly and Sword aptly demonstrate, the destruction of Hood’s ordnance train is often presented as a dramatic illustration of his incompetence and inattention to detail. However, the facts suggest something different. The Confederate defeat at Jonesboro on September 1 severed the last open rail line feeding Atlanta. Before it was cut, Hood’s quartermaster, Col. M. B. McMicken, had failed to evacuate a trainload of supplies and ordnance that included cannon, caissons, howitzers, 14,000 artillery rounds, and 5,000 Enfield muskets, as well as numerous small arms, ammunition, tools, and other equipment.2 Hood, via his chief of staff Gen. Francis Shoup, had issued “repeated instructions” to remove the valuable train before the fall of the city. “Owing to the wanton neglect of the chief quartermaster of this army a large amount of ammunition and railroad stock had to be destroyed at Atlanta,” Hood explained to Braxton Bragg from Lovejoy’s Station on September 4. “He had more than ample time to remove the whole and had repeated instructions. I am reliably informed that he is too much addicted to drink of late to attend to his duties. Am greatly in want of an officer to take his place. Can you not send one?” The quartermaster general in Richmond granted Hood’s request and appointed a replacement for McMicken on September 23.3

  Even under the difficult circumstances at Atlanta, Hood not only kept the Army of Tennessee reasonably well supplied, but provided assistance to needy civilians. Hood, wrote the Augusta Constitutionalist, “had been supplying up to 1,500 rations per day to the city’s poor during the month of August.”4

  Thomas Hay, the earliest book-length chronicler of the Tennessee Campaign, made no mention of negligence or disregard of supply and logistics by Hood in his 1929 study Hood’s Tennessee Campaign. The same was true of Stanley Horn’s The Army of Tennessee, which mentioned nothing about Hood’s inattention to supply and logistics. Even Connelly, one of the earliest of Hood’s critics, made no mention of any laxity or ineptitude in logistics by Hood in his influential 1971 Autumn of Glory. The first major author to slam Hood’s lack of logistical ability was Wiley Sword, whose influential 1993 The Confederacy’s Last Hurrah claimed the general displayed both ineptitude and negligence.5

  Extraordinary circumstances made planning the Tennessee Campaign and supplying Hood’s army especially difficult. Soon after the fall of Atlanta, the Confederate government in Richmond established a new administrative entity, the Military Division of the West, and appointed P. G. T. Beauregard its first commander effective October 17, 1864. The new theater command encompassed Richard Taylor’s Department of Alabama, Mississippi, and East Louisiana, and Hood’s department, which included Tennessee and northwest Georgia. Departmental politics further complicated matters because Hood was expected to draw supplies for the campaign from Taylor’s department, even though he would be operating outside Taylor’s purview when in Tennessee. While Beauregard’s new Western theater command was being organized, the earliest logistical preparations for the campaign had to be communicated by Hood directly to Jefferson Davis’s chief military advisor Braxton Bragg, and to the Confederate Secretary of War James Seddon. Instead of demonstrating ineptitude or sloth, Hood repeatedly displayed a keen appreciation for logistical matters and the importance of launching the invasion as soon as possible.6

  On September 23, two weeks before Beauregard was available and the new theater command established, Hood asked that an ordnance reserve be accumulated at Selma, Alabama, or Columbus, Mississippi. That same day, after acknowledging the need for footwear—the absence of which would torture many of Hood’s men throughout the ensuing fall and winter campaign—Hood requested an order of shoes from Columbus, Georgia. This was his second request for shoes, the first having been made to Richmond more than two weeks earlier on September 6.7

  On October 8, Hood wired Bragg from Cedartown, Georgia, the first of his many requests to have key railroads repaired: “Please have the Memphis and Charleston Railroad repaired at once to Decatur [Alabama], if possible.” The anticipated river crossing at Decatur was later changed because neither Richmond nor Taylor’s department made any effort to repair the railroad.8

  Beauregard and Hood first met on October 9 at Cave Springs, Georgia, “and conferred in regard to Hood’s future movements.” Beauregard departed the next day and rejoined the army at Gadsden, Alabama, on October 21 for two days of meetings with Hood.9

  Hood’s plans constantly evolved because of changing circumstances. These included the presence of the enemy, a lack of adequate supplies, the absence of sufficient cavalry, inaccurate and incomplete intelligence, convoluted and inefficient administrative entities, and ineffective and often nonexistent communications. The original plan for the Tennessee invasion was for the Army of Tennessee to cross the Tennessee River at Guntersville. Hood, however, was informed by cavalryman P. D. Roddey on October 18 that Guntersville was heavily guarded by Federal infantry, while Decatur was but lightly defended. This important intelligence, coupled with the absence of Nathan Bedford Forrest’s veteran cavalry, convinced Hood to change his plans and move the army west toward Decatur. Wiley Sword disparaged this wise and necessary decision when he wrote that, while en route to Guntersville, Hood “impulsively changed the army’s destination to Decatur.”10

  During the Gadsden meeting on October 22 and 23, Beauregard instructed General Taylor to cooperate with Hood and provide him with supplies for the campaign from his own department, with Tuscumbia as the designated supply base. Repairs to the Mobile and Ohio Railroad were also ordered. Taylor informed Hood that supply trains were en route to Tuscumbia from Corinth, Mississippi, but failed to tell him that a 15-mile stretch of track from Cherokee, Alabama, to Tuscumbia was unusable. It is not known whether Taylor was unaware of the severed state of the railroad, or whether he simply neglected to tell Hood. William T. Sherman knew of its dilapidated condition, however, and told George Thomas on October 29, “I don’t see how Beauregard can support
his army.” Sherman also wired Henry Halleck in Washington on November 3, “The country round about Florence has been again and again devastated during the past three years, and Beauregard must be dependent on the Mobile and Ohio Railroad, which also has been broken and patched up in its whole extent.”11

  It was after departing Gadsden and during the march toward Guntersville that Hood learned about the strong Federal defenses there and changed his planned river crossing to Decatur. Once at Decatur, however, Hood learned that Roddey’s information was incorrect. Rather than a small garrison, the town was in fact heavily fortified and defended by 3,000 entrenched Federals supported by gunboats. Beauregard, who had remained in Gadsden, caught up with the army at Decatur. With the soldiers hungry and supplies scarce, Hood and Beauregard flooded available telegraph wires and courier lines asking for rations. On October 28, Hood wired Taylor to request that 20 days of food for 50,000 men be sent “as rapidly as possible.”12

  Hood’s army remained outside Decatur for three days awaiting supplies and information regarding the whereabouts of Forrest’s cavalry. A river crossing at Decatur required the defeat of the well-entrenched Federal garrison. Hood believed that a forced crossing at Decatur would result in a “great and unnecessary sacrifice of life,” and he had still not heard from Forrest. Hood marched the army westward to Lamb’s Ferry, Bainbridge, and arrived at Tuscumbia on October 30. During the seven-day period since departing Gadsden, Hood was obliged to change plans because of the continued absence of Forrest’s cavalry, the proximity of Federal forces at various crossing points, and communications impeded by enemy control of important telegraph lines.13