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

by Hood, Stephen

  One can reasonably argue that W. J. McMurray’s 1904 mention of the modified “Yellow Rose of Texas” established that one soldier sang the altered lyrics at least one time. What is disturbing is the degree to which authors feel free to embellish and fabricate details, creating perceptions and imagery in the minds of readers that have absolutely no factual basis—and then cite sources they must know do not support what they wrote. Such is the level of scholarship when dealing with so many issues related to John Bell Hood.

  The great-great-grandson of Pvt. George Bell of the 3rd Mississippi provided an oral—and now written—record of some of Hood’s soldiers singing “The Yellow Rose of Texas” with lyrics praising their war-wounded commander’s noble efforts to liberate Tennessee. As the decades pass, it will be interesting to see if George Bell’s testimony finds its way into Civil War literature.

  I suspect it will not.

  Nowhere in the genre of Civil War campaign studies is irrelevant titillation and sensationalism on greater display than in Wiley Sword’s The Confederacy’s Last Hurrah. Sword presented as a prominent character Hood’s reluctant fiancée Sarah Buchanan (“Sally” or “Buck”) Preston, and spun their relationship into and around virtually all of Hood’s actions as commander of the Army of Tennessee from July of 1864 until his resignation in January of 1865—and beyond. According to Sword, Hood was obsessed with Preston (who was by all accounts an attractive and flirtatious ideal of a Southern belle) and that all of his major decisions were in some way influenced by how she would interpret and react to his accomplishments or failures as an army commander. The index of Sword’s book listed Preston on 13 pages, but numerous other references to her influence over Hood’s actions appeared throughout the book. Similarly, Susan Tarleton—Patrick Cleburne’s fiancée— was listed in the index on nine pages. By way of contrast, four of the five brigadier generals killed at Franklin—Otho Strahl, John Adams, John Carter, and States Rights Gist—appeared on fewer pages than either Miss Preston or Miss Tarleton, with only the fallen brigadier general Hiram Granbury appearing more times than the two women. In fact, in a book whose subtitle included the epic Franklin combat, Buck Preston, an immaterial woman in Richmond, garnered more attention from Sword than did fallen generals Adams, Gist, and Carter combined!46

  Earlier authors writing on the Army of Tennessee and the Tennessee Campaign gave Preston little attention, and none at all to Tarleton. Thomas Hay and Stanley Horn, for example, made no mention whatsoever of either woman. Thomas Connelly ignored Tarleton completely and found the Hood-Preston courtship important enough to demand only six sentences in a single paragraph—all based on a single source (Mary Chesnut’s diary). Influential and acclaimed historians either completely missed the point that Hood was mesmerized by Preston to the point of delirium, or Wiley Sword sought to create melodrama where none existed.

  In Ken Burns’s acclaimed 1990 PBS documentary film “The Civil War,” narrator David McCullough introduced John Bell Hood during the Atlanta portion of the film by saying that Army of Tennessee commander Joseph Johnston was replaced by “Thirty-three year-old John Bell Hood of Texas. His own men called him ‘Old Woodenhead,’” an assertion Burns and co-author Geoffrey Ward later repeated in their 1994 book based upon the film. This perception of Hood as “Old Woodenhead” has become so common that the popular Internet sites Wikipedia and New World Encyclopedia list John Bell Hood’s nicknames as “Sam” and “Old Woodenhead.” There is no historical evidence that anyone ever called Hood “Old Woodenhead.”47

  The genesis of this derogatory epithet seems to be Lost Cause historians (and Joseph Johnston devotees) such as E. A. Pollard. As the wartime editorial page editor for the Richmond Examiner, Pollard provided no source whatsoever when he wrote in Southern History of the War in 1866 that Hood “had the heart of a lion, but, unfortunately, with it a head of wood.” In 1914, James C. Nisbet, possibly paraphrasing Pollard, wrote in Four Years on the Firing Line: “It has been said of Hood, ‘He was a man with a lion’s heart, but a wooden head.’” Because of Hood’s physical condition, it is likely that some of his men called him “Old Pegleg,” but “Woodenhead” seems to have evolved from later writers who combined “Old Pegleg” with the disparaging remark from Pollard and Nisbet.48

  In typical fashion, authors have been quick to repeat deprecating labels for Hood, while simultaneously ignoring compliments, such as the one offered by Maj. James Ratchford, who praised Hood’s military skill and “the great generosity of his nature, which often led to the remark that he possessed a heart as big as that of an ox.”49

  Wiley Sword provided one of the best illustrations of how an author’s selective use of historical records can alter their true meaning. In his closing chapter of The Confederacy’s Last Hurrah, Sword persisted in his attack upon Hood’s character by providing the general’s oft-repeated postwar comment, “They charge me with having made Franklin a slaughter pen, but, as I understand it, war means fight and fight means kill.” Sword did not reveal to the reader where Hood’s quote came from or the quote’s context—both of which are important. Below is the quotation as framed and presented by Sword:

  Hood, ultimately, was a tragic failure, a sad, pathetic soldier whose ambitions totally outstripped his abilities. Essentially, he was an anachronism: an advocate of outmoded concepts, and a general unable to adapt to new methods or technology. Always prone to blame others, and unable to admit his mistakes, to the bitter end Hood never understood his failings. “They charge me with having made Franklin a slaughter pen,” he admonished a group of aging veterans, “but, as I understand it, war means fight and fight means kill.” Perhaps Hood’s own words, written in anticipation of defending his military career, should serve as an epitaph: “To conquer self is the greatest battle of life.” Unfortunately for many of his men, that had never occurred.50

  Sword’s readers would have been better served had he not extracted just the 21-word “war means fight and fight means kill” quotation from the eloquent 1,150-word tribute written by others about Hood. Instead, Sword’s readers were led to believe that Hood “admonished a group of aging veterans.” In fact, the audience was the Army of Tennessee Association of Louisiana, soldiers who had fought under Hood in Georgia and Tennessee, and the tribute was on Hood’s behalf—and there wasn’t even a suggestion of admonishment in their words. The entire tribute—an epitaph published in a New Orleans newspaper one week after Hood’s death—has been reproduced in an appendix in this book. As a convenience to readers, an excerpt presenting the “war means fight and fight means kill” sentence in context is reproduced below:

  An Eloquent Tribute to the Memory of the Late Gen. J. B. Hood

  To his men it mattered not what doubt of success or what intimation of danger might be suggested; those men felt that Hood would make a grand and stupendously bold effort, and they could afford to follow his lead and stand by this man of marvelous daring; that even if defeat should follow they would at least have given to the world another example that would excite wonder and approbation and mark the bloody field with indelible and imperishable fame, serving to teach future generations the limit of human effort and human endurance.

  As expressed in his own forceful language, when last with us, five short months since; “They charge me with making Franklin a slaughter pen, but, as I understand it, war means fight and fight means kill.”

  The recollections of his incomparable daring, his eminent skill, his fidelity to duty, his unselfish patriotism, the splendor of his service, his loftiness of purpose, lead us to realize that in the firmament of our military history a brilliant star has suddenly sunk below the horizon of the present; its departure arouses us to what its brightness was, and brings reflections as to how greatly it transcended and differed in glory from other stars, and we stand watching for lights of equal magnitude, wondering if we shall ever look upon its peer.51

  Context is crucial to understanding meaning. The contrast between Wiley Sword’s extract of 21 words and the orig
inal source in which they appear drives that point home.

  1 Davis, “John Bell Hood’s Historiographical Journey; or, How Did a Confederate General Become a Laudanum Addict?”, 218-232.

  2 Ibid.; Percy Hamlin, “Old Bald Head” (General R. S. Ewell): The Portrait of a Soldier (Strasburg, VA: Shenandoah Publishing House, 1940), x.

  3 Davis, “John Bell Hood’s Historiographical Journey; or, How Did a Confederate General Become a Laudanum Addict?”, 229; Garrison, Atlanta and the War, 138.

  4 Davis, “John Bell Hood’s Historiographical Journey; or, How Did a Confederate General Become a Laudanum Addict?”, 229.

  5 Sword, The Confederacy’s Last Hurrah, 136.

  6 Horn, The Army of Tennessee, 392; O’Connor, Hood, 232.

  7 Sword, The Confederacy’s Last Hurrah, 244. Whether or not Sword suggested or approved the caption is unknown.

  8 Ronald H. Bailey, The Battles for Atlanta (Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, 1985), 91, quoted in Stephen Davis, Confederate Generals in the Western Theater, 230.

  9 Steven Woodworth, “A Reassessment of Confederate Command Options During the Winter of 1863-1864,” The Campaign for Atlanta and Sherman’s March to the Sea, ed. Theodore Savas and David Woodbury (Campbell, CA: Savas Woodbury Publishers, 1994), 16. Woodworth’s description is incorrect, as laudanum is a derivative of opium.

  10 Dr. John T. Darby’s Medical Report of Hood’s Chickamauga Wounding and Recovery, John Bell Hood Personal Papers.

  11 Jack Welsh, M.D., Medical Histories of Confederate Generals (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1995), 106.

  12 Stephen Davis, “John Bell Hood’s ‘Addictions’ in Civil War Literature,” Blue and Gray (October 1998).

  13 Ratchford, Some Reminiscences of Persons and Incidents of the Civil War, 58.

  14 Miller, John Bell Hood and the Fight for Civil War Memory, 109.

  15 Chesnut, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, 102; Miller, John Bell Hood and the Fight for Civil War Memory, 101.

  16 Paul E. Steiner, Medical-Military Portraits of Union and Confederate Generals (Philadelphia: Whitmore Publishing Co., 1968), 225, 229.

  17 Connelly, Autumn of Glory, 500; Davis, Confederate Generals in the Western Theater, 230.

  18 Welsh, M.D., Medical Histories of Union Generals, 302, 303.

  19 Paul D. Casdorph, Confederate General R. S. Ewell: Robert E. Lee’s Hesitant Commander (Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 2004), 209; Welsh, Medical Histories of Confederate Generals, 64.

  20 Welsh, Medical Histories of Confederate Generals, 64.

  21 Davis, “Hood’s Addictions,” Blue and Gray. Here is how Davis put it: “How odd that General Ewell’s first chronicler, Hamlin, would assume the need for pain medicine in one amputee, Hood, when his own subject suffered more frequent and painful complications of surgery without opium use.”

  22 David Courtwright, Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 54.

  23 Dr. Darby’s Medical Report of Hood’s Chickamauga Wounding and Recovery, and Dr. Darby’s Medical Report of Hood’s Gettysburg Wounding and Recovery, John Bell Hood Personal Papers. A grain equals .065 grams and was a common unit of measure in 19th century medicine. Thanks to Ms. Terry Reimer of the National Museum of Civil War Medicine.

  24 Dr. Darby’s Medical Report of Hood’s Chickamauga Wounding and Recovery, John Bell Hood Personal Papers. Medicinal use of iron conveyed to the author by Ms. Terry Reimer, National Museum of Civil War Medicine, Nov. 27, 2012.

  25 Dr. Darby’s Medical Report of Hood’s Chickamauga Wounding and Recovery, and Dr. Darby’s Medical Report of Hood’s Gettysburg Wounding and Recovery, John Bell Hood Personal Papers.

  26 O’Connor, Hood: Cavalier General, 243.

  27 Quintard and Elliott, Doctor Quintard, 185.

  28 Delaware Free Press (Muncie, IN: December 1, 1864); Kim M. Norton, “A Brief History of Prosthetics,” In Motion, vol. 7, Issue 7 (November/December 2007). Special thanks to David Fraley for finding and providing the author with this newspaper article.

  29 Davis, “Hood’s Addiction,” Blue and Gray.

  30 Symonds, Stonewall of the West, 254; Garrison Jr., Strange Battles of the Civil War, 269; Lundberg, The Finishing Stroke, 82.

  31 Davison and Foxx, Nathan Bedford Forrest, 348.

  32 Russell Blount Jr., The Battles of New Hope Church (New Orleans: Pelican Publishing, 2010), 47.

  33 Ellis, The Moving Appeal, 290, 311, 334, 648.

  34 Connelly, Autumn of Glory, 431. Connelly’s $1,000-bet tale was a story purportedly told by John Schofield about how Hood placed a $1,000 bet in a faro (card) game at West Point. The story does not appear in Schofield’s memoirs, and readers are expected to believe that a West Point student from rural Kentucky in 1853 would have access to what was in those days a fortune.

  35 Douglas Lee Gibboney, Scandals of the Civil War (Shippensburg, PA: Burd Street Press, 2005), 132; Christopher Losson, Tennessee’s Forgotten Warriors: Frank Cheatham and His Confederate Division (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 173. See also Lawrence Officer, Ph. D. and Samuel Williamson, Ph.D., Measuringworth.com, 2011. Skeptics might consider that $1,000 in 1853 is equal to $29,100 in 2012, and $2,500 in 1859 is the equivalent of $68,000 in 2012. How realistic was it for a 21-year-old West Point student from rural Kentucky to have the modern equivalent of $29,000 to gamble away in 1853, or that a young cavalry lieutenant earning a salary of approximately $64.00 per month, stationed in an adobe and thatch frontier fort in Texas in 1859, had $2,500 cash on hand to be risked in a card game?

  36 Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007), 122; Robert S. Henry, The Story of the Confederacy (Cambridge, MA: DaCapo Press, 1989), 434.

  37 Frank H. Smith, “History of the 24th Tennessee,” Columbia, TN, March 1904.

  38 W. J. McMurray, History of the 20th Tennessee (Nashville, TN: Publication Committee, United Confederate Veterans, 1904), 352.

  39 Ridley, Battles and Sketches, 439.

  40 Correspondence to author from Captain Randy Stroud, USN, Summerville, SC, 2006, reproduced with permission.

  41 Horn, The Army of Tennessee, 418.

  42 Horn, The Decisive Battle of Nashville, 153.

  43 James Knight, The Battle of Franklin: When the Devil Had Full Possession of the Earth (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2009), 103.

  44 Sword, The Confederacy’s Last Hurrah, 422.

  45 Lundberg, The Finishing Stroke, 119-120.

  46 Sword, The Confederacy’s Last Hurrah, index entries: Strahl (six), Carter (two), Adams (four), and Gist (four).

  47 Ken Burns and Geoffrey Ward, The Civil War, Vintage eBooks, Chapter 4.

  48 Pollard, Southern History of the War, 86; Nisbet, Four Years on the Firing Line, 305.

  49 Ratchford, Some Reminiscences of Persons and Incidents of the Civil War, 56.

  50 Sword, The Confederacy’s Last Hurrah, 439-440.

  51 New Orleans Times-Picayune, September 8, 1879.

  Afterword

  “Truth will ultimately prevail where there is pains taken to bring it to light.”

  — George Washington

  John Bell Hood knew that his career would be open to criticism. He ended the war as a failure, and was acutely aware that some might find him to be the villain. As a man and as a soldier, he was no fool. But there was one thing he wanted above all—to have the truth presented accurately and in context. Hood knew that he had made mistakes. He only wanted the entire truth to be known.

  Now, finally, if much of that unvarnished truth has not yet been fully told, it has been set forth in a much brighter light. The control by a select few of the Hood story and that of the Tennessee Campaign of 1864 is over.

  So much of what happened during the American Civil War is still being evaluated today, 150 years after the end of that epic conflict. New scholars, writers, and thinkers review the sources, wa
lk the fields, ponder what happened and what could have been, and set pen to paper. Most scrupulously labor to be fair and to let the facts fall where they may. And this is as it should be, for words written today are nearly as important as deeds performed in the past in forming the public understanding or “truth” of the present and the future. As Sophocles stated so well and succinctly, “What people believe prevails over the truth.”

  Having lived and worked with the historical memory of John Bell Hood for more than two decades, this book is a welcome addition to the ongoing evolution of his story. The facts and accounts presented here have, for the most part, always been readily available. But humans are subjective creatures of habit. Occasionally our own prisms of understanding take root and shove aside facts that conflict with our preconceived notion of what must have happened. And thus, as this book aptly demonstrates over and over again, otherwise good writers and historians neglect facts and sources that conflict with their version of truth. It is easy to go along with a generally accepted story—even if its origins remain murky at best. But as Sam Hood has demonstrated, this approach extracts a historical cost from those who have come before us, and imposes on present readers a false sense of history and what really happened.

  Let John Bell Hood: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of a Confederate General serve as a cautionary tale for those of us who seek to plow the ground of history.