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

by Hood, Stephen

  As a medical professional, Darby was clearly aware of the addictive nature of opiates, so he prescribed them as little as possible and recorded when their use was discontinued. Although we do not know with certainty whether Hood was aware of the risks of opiates, their addictive effect was common knowledge and his doctor would surely have communicated as much. We do know that Darby recorded on September 26, 1863, a mere six days after the amputation of his entire leg, that Hood “refused morphine.”25

  It is worth noting that not a single Hood biographer—O’Conner, Dyer, or McMurry—ever alluded to the use of opiates in their studies of the general, although each speculates about the effects of his wounds. For example, while offering a glimpse of Hood’s physical difficulties, O’Conner quoted Sam Watkins’s description of Hood on horseback: “How feeble and decrepit he looked, with an arm in a sling and a crutch in the other hand, trying to guide and control his horse.”26

  Other contemporary descriptions of Hood, however, offer nothing about the commander’s mental or physical incapacitation. Although Dr. Urban Owen reported on November 5, 1864, that the army was concerned because Hood was “very sick with pneumonia,” he wrote to his wife the following day, “I am glad to inform you that General Hood is again in the saddle.” Hood’s friend and confidant Dr. Charles T. Quintard, who was both a chaplain and a physician, accompanied the army on the invasion of Tennessee. After noting Hood’s excellent “health and spirits” in his diary on November 25, Quintard wrote on November 29 that the general rose at 3:00 a.m. and, when Hood came to tell him goodbye, “I prayed God’s blessing, guidance and direction upon him.” Hood’s reply, as recorded by Quintard: “Thank you, Doctor. That is my hope and trust.” While not definitive, none of these descriptions or conversations indicates an intoxicated or hung-over man, and educated observers like Drs. Owen and Quintard would have recognized signs of drug use or intoxication and commented upon them.27

  Hood shared a bedroom with Tennessee Governor Isham Harris and another staff officer on the night of November 29, 1864. He received visitors throughout the night, including Gens. Frank Cheatham, A. P. Stewart, and Nathan Bedford Forrest. All of these men survived the war. None of them wrote (or spoke in the presence of another who recorded it) anything suggesting that Hood was in any way impaired during that time frame. Cheatham, one of Hood’s most outspoken postwar critics, would have gladly exposed any drug or alcohol use by Hood had he witnessed it.

  One justification critics use for assuming Hood took laudanum is the alleged fact that his prosthetic legs came from France, where it was supposedly customary for manufacturers to include a complementary vile of laudanum with a prosthesis. There is no evidence that Hood’s “cork legs” came from France. There is, however, evidence that his artificial legs were made in London and were called “Anglesey” legs—state-of-the-art prosthetics in the 19th century named for the Marquis of Anglesey, who was wounded at Waterloo. These were not manufactured out of cork wood, but were called “cork legs” because they were popular and widely used in County Cork, Ireland. An article in the December 1, 1864, Muncie, Indiana, Delaware Free Press described the dispatch of a Confederate surgeon to London, where he spent several weeks superintending the manufacture of artificial limbs for wounded Confederate officers, “supplied in sets of two and three each that amid the perils of blockade running one at least should reach its destination in safety.” The article went on to state, “On one particular specimen of ingenuity particular care was bestowed and the surgeon took charge of it himself. This was the artificial limb—an Anglesey leg, as it is called—which enabled Gen. Hood to take active service again, and assume command of the army at Atlanta.” Even if 19th century French prosthetics manufacturers delivered laudanum in their packaging, Hood’s legs were of English design and construction and there is no proof they shipped with an opiate inside.28

  Historian Stephen Davis observed an encouraging shift in later scholarship produced by Hood’s biographer Richard McMurry, correcting the flawed consensus of Hood’s alleged drug use. Ten years following the publication of his 1972 booklet The Road Past Kennesaw, in which he indicated that Hood “may have been taking a derivative of laudanum,” Dr. McMurry published his biography John Bell Hood and the War for Southern Independence. In that influential study, McMurry naturally examined the mental and emotional aspects of Hood’s terrible wounds, but refrained from any mention of drug use. Davis wrote, “Richard has reaffirmed to me personally that this non-mention is in effect an admission that in researching his book he found no evidence to support his earlier conjecture.”29

  The historical record is devoid of any evidence of drug or alcohol use by Hood, but Civil War history is permeated with myths, biases, and falsehoods— and change is often a frustratingly slow process. For example, Craig Symonds wrote in Stonewall of the West, his award-winning 1997 biography of Patrick Cleburne, that Hood took “an early dinner and a laudanum-induced sleep” on the night before the battle of Franklin. In 2009, Webb Garrison Jr., citing Connelly, McDonough, and Sword in his fittingly named book Strange Battles in the Civil War, wrote that Hood “assuaged his pain with laudanum, which affected his judgment.” In his 2002 book The Finishing Stroke, John Lundberg claimed that Hood was “confused and half asleep” when A. P. Stewart visited him at his Spring Hill headquarters on the night of November 29. Stewart and others present in Hood’s room wrote nothing of Hood acting out of the ordinary, let along being “confused and half asleep,” yet Lundberg felt compelled to make the assertion. His only citation is Wiley Sword, who himself made the baseless charge that Hood’s mind was perhaps “clouded” by laudanum.30

  A stunning example of the evolution of the drug addiction myth is the 2007 book Nathan Bedford Forrest: In Search of the Enigma by Eddy Davison and Daniel Foxx, which elevated Hood’s alleged use of laudanum to an altogether new level of abuse. Hood’s wounds, claimed Davison and Foxx, should have disqualified him from army command, “not to mention his addiction to alcohol and laudanum.” Based upon absolutely nothing, Hood’s speculated “possible” and “occasional” drug and alcohol use had now evolved into a portrayal of Hood as a full-blown drug addict and alcoholic.31

  Russell Blount, an author generally sympathetic to Hood, carried the myth even further in his recent book The Battles of New Hope Church. Hood, argued Blount, “often turns to laudanum and whiskey for relief.” Not only did Blount perpetuate the drug and alcohol myth, but apparently discovered that Hood’s liquor of choice was whiskey. His source for these assertions is a single page in Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, in which the famous diarist makes no mention whatsoever of anything akin to laudanum or alcohol use by Hood.32

  The most preposterous scholarship on the subject appeared in Dr. Barbara G. Ellis’s 2003 The Moving Appeal, where the toxic mixture of “Hood and drugs” was so prominent that it warranted its own listing in the book’s index! Eschewing evidence of any kind, Ellis boldly declared to her readers that Hood’s abilities were “increasingly skewed by a growing dependence on opiates,” and that Jefferson Davis mistook Hood’s look of enthusiasm and resolve on the battlefield as “eyes ablaze with a need for narcotics.”33

  Myths and legends grow easily—and die hard.

  If historians and other authors aren’t satisfied with accusations that John Bell Hood was a drug addict, alcoholic, and cavorted with prostitutes, we now also “know” that he was a compulsive gambler. According to Thomas Connelly, “By nature Hood was a gambler and the army knew this. There were many tales afloat concerning his gambling habits in the old army, one of which told how he put a thousand dollars on one card in faro game and won.” Except for the wild rumor about a one-card bet (which seems more than unlikely given Hood’s economic status as an Army officer), Connelly offered no examples of gambling stories supposedly circulating within the Army of Tennessee, and neither do the sources he cited. If they existed, surely at least one of these “many tales” would appear somewhere in the thousands of pages of letters, diaries, and memo
irs produced by members of the Army of Tennessee who served during Hood’s tenure from April 1864 in Dalton, Georgia, until his resignation in Mississippi in January of 1865.34

  The myth about Hood’s gambling provides an excellent illustration of how some authors disregard historical evidence, or the lack thereof. Decades after Connelly’s rendition appeared, Douglas Lee Gibboney included his own story of Hood’s gambling in his ominously titled book Scandals of the Civil War. In this version, Schofield’s card game is not at West Point but in Texas when Hood was serving with the U.S. Army. In addition to changing the location, Gibboney added to the story by claiming that Hood was “flat broke” and had borrowed $600 (not Connelly’s $1,000) to place the bet. Hood’s infamous faro game was changed to poker and the amount rose to $2,500 in Christopher Losson’s Tennessee’s Forgotten Warriors: Frank Cheatham and his Confederate Division.35

  ‘But the Gallant Hood of Texas Played Hell in Tennessee”

  Numerous books on the Army of Tennessee and the Tennessee Campaign include some variation on a story of the defeated soldiers singing the familiar song “The Yellow Rose of Texas” during the retreat from Nashville, with the final line changed to, “But the gallant Hood of Texas played hell in Tennessee.” Like so much about Hood, this too is false.

  For support of this claim, most authors cited Bell Wiley’s 1943 classic The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy. Dr. Wiley’s source, in turn, was Robert Selph Henry’s 1931 book The Story of the Confederacy, which included the Hood-related lyrics, but did not offer any source to support the change. An exhaustive search for the origin of the revised lyrics suggests that they initially appeared in Judge Frank H. Smith’s 1904 book entitled History of the 24th Tennessee, and also in W. J. McMurray’s History of the 20th Tennessee Regiment Volunteer Infantry, published in the same year. It is worth examining each in turn.36

  Although Judge Smith was a respected jurist and citizen, much of his essay on the 24th Tennessee relied on information provided to him by others. As a result, the accuracy of many of his assertions is questionable. For instance, countless veterans, Federal and Confederate alike, recorded the treacherous condition of the swollen Harpeth River on November 30, 1864, but Smith wrote that a flank movement by Hood would have been “comparatively easy, with the river fordable almost everywhere.” This is patently untrue. Smith offered no details or source to support the revised lyrics that Hood “played hell in Tennessee” and the claim that this version became a popular “camp song.”37

  W. J. McMurray provided what appears to be the only eyewitness account of the song being sung with the “played hell in Tennessee” lyric. The author described Hood and his staff riding past some troops south of Pulaski, Tennessee, near the end of the retreat, when a single soldier of the 39th North Carolina Infantry, demonstrating “the spirit, wit and fun there was in the Confederate soldier,” sung “The Yellow Rose of Texas” with the words:

  You may talk about your dearest maid

  and sing of Rosalie,

  but the gallant Hood of Texas

  played hell in Tennessee.38

  Two years later in 1906, B. L. Ridley cited McMurray’s earlier book in his memoirs Battles and Sketches of the Army of Tennessee 1861-1865: “Dr. McMurray ought to have given the first part of the parody that the old soldier dwelt on as follows:

  And now I’m going Southward

  for my heart is full of woe.

  I’m going back to Georgia

  to find my Uncle Joe.

  You may talk about your dearest maid

  and sing of Rosalie,

  but the gallant Hood of Texas

  played Hell in Tennessee.”

  It is unclear whether Ridley meant that McMurray had neglected to include the first part of the verse or that the first four lines should have been added to the song being sung by the North Carolinian. It is highly unlikely that Ridley, a member of A. P. Stewart’s staff, would have personally heard the song during the retreat (or any other time) since the 39th North Carolina was a part of Cheatham’s corps. Ridley was a committed devotee of Joseph Johnston (in his book, opposite the title page, is a portrait of Johnston with the photo caption “General Joseph E. Johnston: The Idol of the Army of Tennessee”), and his memoir is replete with praise for the former commander. It is more than likely that Ridley was facetiously suggesting the addition of those first four lines to the song, and made them up himself.39

  If any version of the “played hell in Tennessee” version of lyrics was indeed sung by any number of soldiers during the retreat out of Tennessee, proof appears nowhere in the many memoirs, letters, or diaries of the more than 20,000 Tennessee Campaign veterans who survived to tell the tale.

  My interest to research such an admittedly trivial historical item was piqued as a result of correspondence I received in 2008 from an active-duty navy captain from Mississippi, who at the time was stationed in Turkey and as of this writing is stationed in Germany. He wrote to me as follows:

  I just happened upon your site on General John B. Hood—the Lion. Two of my great-great grandfathers went north with him to Nashville. The stories were told to me by my mother’s father, whose grandfather was Private George W. Bell of the Third Mississippi Infantry, Featherston’s brigade. I don’t know how widespread was the army’s admiration for General Hood, but I do know they made up a song as they marched south, presumably after Nashville. It was something like this:

  They can talk about their Jackson

  and sing of General Lee,

  but the one-legged Hood

  gave ‘em Hell in Tennessee.

  I have always held that jewel close. It was given to me by my grandfather, Elwin Livingston of Pulaski, Mississippi, a member of the Mississippi Legislature from Scott County. He stated that his grandfather (Private George Bell) had taught him that song. I am afraid I am the only one who still has knowledge of it and I do not want it lost to history.40

  This stanza about Hood giving them hell [“gave ‘em hell”] in Tennessee is of course quite different from the oft-repeated and widely accepted “played hell in Tennessee” version. Although skeptics might question the source (George Bell or Elwin Livingston) of the “gave ‘em hell in Tennessee” lyric, its legitimacy is at least equal to that of the famous “played hell” version which, although repeated countless times since 1904, has itself only a single source— an unidentified North Carolinian, as reported by W. J. McMurray.

  The earliest major book on the invasion of Tennessee, Thomas Hay’s 1929 Hood’s Tennessee Campaign, made no mention of the “Yellow Rose of Texas” song, nor do more recent books on the campaign, such as Eric Jacobson’s For Cause and For Country or Thomas Connelly’s Autumn of Glory. However, many authors not only included the disparaging lyrics—which evidence suggests might have been sung just one time by a single soldier or made up from whole cloth—but also created additional details from thin air. Without citing a source, Stanley Horn crafted new specifics and provided yet another variation of the lyrics in his book The Army of Tennessee:

  The cold December rain drummed down noisily on the tent, but not noisily enough to shut out the confused babble of an army in retreat… . If the heartbroken commander had listened he might actually have heard them singing as they splashed barefoot along the muddy road. The tune they sang was that old favorite, “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” but the words they used had been improvised by some camp wit, words that would have seared the wounded heart of Hood:

  So now I’m marching southward,

  My heart is full of woe.

  I’m going back to Georgia

  To see my uncle Joe.

  You may talk about your Beauregard

  And sing of General Lee,

  But the gallant Hood of Texas

  Played hell in Tennessee.41

  A few years later in The Decisive Battle of Nashville, Horn wrote, “Somewhere along the line some irrepressible wag, with the indestructible elan of the Army of Tennessee, had improvised a p
arody of the popular song ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’ [that] he and his sodden, bloody comrades were singing.” As with his earlier book, Horn offered no source for his claim, but this time he slightly changed the first two lines of the verse to “So now we’re going to leave you, our hearts are full of woe.”42

  James R. Knight chose Horn’s version of the lyrics in his recent monograph The Battle of Franklin: When the Devil Had Full Possession of the Field. Without citation, the lyrics appeared as the epigraph to a chapter grimly titled “The Death of Hood’s Army”:

  “You can talk about your Beauregard and sing of General Lee, but the gallant Hood of Texas played hell in Tennessee.”

  — song reportedly sung to the tune of ‘Yellow Rose of Texas” by the remnants of the Army of Tennessee as they retreated into northern Mississippi.43

  Wiley Sword called upon his fertile imagination for ancillary details of the incident. Citing W. J. McMurray’s eyewitness account, Sword accurately related that during the retreat some soldiers had to move to the side of the road to make room for Hood and his staff to pass. Sword added, “As Hood went by he heard the men singing a familiar tune… . Only the words seemed somewhat strange. He listened closely.” Although he cited McMurray, Sword provided the longer lyrics that appear in Ridley’s book, not in McMurray’s. In either case, neither McMurray nor Ridley wrote of anyone other than a single North Carolinian singing, and neither author wrote anything about Hood hearing the song, much less listening closely. Taking full advantage of artistic license and thus venturing into the world of fiction, Sword gave his readers details that have no basis in fact but made his portrayal more convincing.44

  John Lundberg fashioned yet another scene when he described Granbury’s brigade crossing the Tennessee River into Alabama on December 26: “As they marched over the pontoons, the Texans sang an altered version [of] “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” Lundberg provided the lyrics that appear in Ridley’s book, but cited the published diary of Capt. Samuel Foster as his source. Foster, however, mentioned nothing about anyone singing any song on the page cited by Lundberg. The “played hell in Tennessee” lyric appeared only in the notes of the book’s editor, who cited Stanley Horn, who provided no source of his own. Lundberg’s footnoting created the illusion that the source for the song was a member of Granbury’s Texas brigade, when in fact there is no evidence that any Texan sang the song, let alone wrote about it.45