John Bell Hood

• 1. Introduction

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  John Bell Hood carried the physical toll of the Civil War in his own body long before he reached his highest command. The historian Bruce Catton later judged the decision to hand him that command harshly. Putting Hood in charge of the Army of Tennessee, Catton wrote, "was probably the single largest mistake that either government made during the war." What made a general so badly wounded also look, to his own president, like the right man for that job? What happened once he got it? And what became of the family he built once the war was finally behind him?

• 2. West Point And The Frontier

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  Owingsville, Kentucky recorded two possible birthdates for the boy who would become a general: the 1st of June and the 29th of June, 1831. His father, Dr. John Wills Hood, was reluctant to see his son pursue a military career at all. It was his uncle, U.S. Representative Richard French, who secured the appointment to the United States Military Academy. His cousin, G. W. Smith, would later serve as a Confederate general as well.

  At West Point, Hood nearly did not make it to graduation. In his final year he racked up 196 demerits out of a permissible 200, narrowly avoiding expulsion. He graduated in 1853 ranked 44th in a class of 52 that had originally numbered 96. Friends knew him as "Sam," a nickname that stuck through his later Army years. His classmates included James B. McPherson and John M. Schofield, and he received his artillery instruction from George Henry Thomas. The academy's superintendent at the time, Brevet Colonel Robert E. Lee, would later command Hood in the field. In 1860, Hood was offered the post of chief instructor of cavalry at West Point. He turned it down, preferring to stay with his active regiment as war loomed.

  His first commission was as a brevet second lieutenant in the 4th U.S. Infantry, posted to Fort Jones, California. He later transferred to the 2nd U.S. Cavalry in Texas, serving under Col. Albert Sidney Johnston and Lt. Col. Robert E. Lee. On the 20th of July, 1857, Hood led a reconnaissance patrol out of Fort Mason. He took an arrow through his left hand fighting the Comanches at Devil's River, Texas. He was promoted to first lieutenant in August 1858. That commission would matter a great deal within a few short years, once the Southern states began to secede.

• 3. The Making Of A Fighter

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  The Battle of Fort Sumter prompted Hood to resign his United States Army commission almost immediately. Dissatisfied with the neutrality his native Kentucky had declared, he chose instead to serve Texas, the state that had adopted him. He joined the Confederate army as a cavalry captain, and was soon promoted to major to command the cavalry of Brig. Gen. John B. Magruder on the lower Virginia Peninsula. On the 12th of July, Hood's horsemen won a skirmish at Cedar Lane near Newport News. They captured a dozen men of the 7th New York Regiment, along with two deserters from Fort Monroe. Generals Lee and Magruder praised the action, and by the 30th of September Hood had been promoted colonel of the 4th Texas Infantry Regiment.

  On the 20th of February, 1862, Hood took command of a new brigade built mainly from Texas regiments, later known simply as the Texas Brigade. It had first formed the previous fall under former U.S. Senator Louis T. Wigfall, who resigned the post to take a seat in the Confederate Congress. Hood was promoted brigadier general on the 26th of March. He led the Texans into the Peninsula Campaign, where they quickly earned a reputation as one of the army's elite units. At the Battle of Eltham's Landing, his men helped stop an amphibious landing by a Union division while executing an order from Gen. Joseph E. Johnston "to feel the enemy gently and fall back." Johnston later asked, half joking, what the Texans would have done if he had ordered them to charge instead. Hood replied, "I suppose, General, they would have driven them into the river, and tried to swim out and capture the gunboats." The brigade was held in reserve at the Battle of Seven Pines.

  At the Battle of Gaines's Mill on the 27th of June, Hood led a charge that broke the Union line. It was the single most successful Confederate attack of the Seven Days Battles. He came through unhurt, but more than 400 of his men, along with most of the brigade's officers, were killed or wounded. Hood broke down and wept at the sight of the dead and dying on the field. Afterward, Stonewall Jackson inspected the captured entrenchments and remarked that "the men who carried this position were truly soldiers indeed." When division commander William H. C. Whiting left on medical furlough on the 26th of July, Hood took permanent command of the division, now assigned to James Longstreet's corps. Reorganization had shrunk it from five brigades at Seven Pines to just two: the Texas Brigade and a Mississippi brigade under Col. Evander M. Law.

  At Second Bull Run, Hood spearheaded the assault that broke the Union left flank and forced a retreat. His two brigades alone lost more than 1,000 men, a toll that neared 1,500 once the attached South Carolina brigade was counted. A dispute over captured ambulances with that brigade's commander, Brig. Gen. Nathan "Shanks" Evans, led Evans to have Hood arrested, though Lee intervened and kept him in service. Just before the Battle of South Mountain, Hood's Texas troops shouted to Lee, "Give us Hood!" Lee restored him to command even though Hood refused to apologize. At Antietam, his division relieved Stonewall Jackson's corps in the infamous cornfield and turned back a Union assault. It then fought the Union XII Corps as well. When Lee later asked where his division was, Hood answered, "They are lying on the field where you sent them. My division has been almost wiped out." Of his 2,000 men, nearly 1,000 became casualties. Jackson recommended him for promotion to major general, which took effect on the 10th of October, 1862.

  At the Battle of Fredericksburg that December, Hood's division saw little fighting, positioned between Longstreet's lines on Marye's Heights and Jackson's lines. In the spring of 1863, most of Longstreet's First Corps, including Hood's and George Pickett's divisions, was detached to Suffolk, Virginia. They missed the Battle of Chancellorsville entirely. When news reached him of Stonewall Jackson's death soon after, Hood grieved for the man he admired more than any other, both personally and militarily. Longstreet's Corps was still away from Lee's main army that spring, as it turned north toward a Pennsylvania town called Gettysburg.

• 4. Gettysburg And A Reckless Courtship

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  On the 21st of May, 1863, Lee wrote to Hood, sharing his growing confidence in the army ahead of the Gettysburg campaign. "I agree with you in believing that our army would be invincible if it could be properly organized and officered," he wrote. "There never were such men in an army before. They will go anywhere and do anything if properly led." Longstreet's Corps arrived at Gettysburg late on the 1st of July. Lee planned an assault for the following day, sending Longstreet's men northeast up the Emmitsburg Road. Hood objected to his assigned ground, a boulder-strewn area called Devil's Den. He asked Longstreet for permission to swing around the mountain known as Big Round Top and strike the Union rear instead. Longstreet refused, citing Lee's orders, despite Hood's repeated protests. Hood's division finally stepped off around four in the afternoon on the 2nd of July. It veered east toward Little Round Top instead of its intended line. As the attack began, an artillery shell exploded over Hood, severely damaging his left arm without requiring amputation. The wound put him out of the fight. Brig. Gen. Evander M. Law took over the division, and confusion over the change in command blunted the strength of the Confederate attack.

  Hood recuperated in Richmond, where he made a strong impression in Confederate social circles. In August 1863, the diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut described him. Hood came, she wrote, "with his sad Quixote face, the face of an old Crusader, who believed in his cause, his cross, and his crown." She admitted "we were not prepared for such a man as a beau-ideal of the wild Texans." She added that a Major Venable had once carried orders to Hood from Lee in the heat of battle. He told her he never forgot "the fierce light of Hood's eyes."

  While recovering, Hood pursued the young South Carolina socialite Sally Buchanan Preston, known to her friends as "Buck." He had first met her passing through Richmond in March 1863. He later confessed that the flirtatious belle had caused him to "surrender at first sight." As he prepared to return to duty that September, he proposed marriage and received only a noncommittal answer. He packed for the Western Theater with a battle waiting for him and a question from Buck still unresolved.

• 5. Chickamauga's Price

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  On the 18th of September, Hood rejoined his men at Chickamauga Creek. He arrived with two of Longstreet's divisions that Lee had sent west to reinforce Gen. Braxton Bragg's struggling army. Bragg ordered him to form a makeshift corps by merging one of his brigades with Brig. Gen. Bushrod Johnson's division. Hood drove Col. Robert Minty's Union brigade back from Reed's Bridge, then stopped at Alexander's Bridge, where John T. Wilder's men opened up with their Spencer repeating rifles. As darkness fell, he crossed paths with Gen. John C. Breckinridge, a former U.S. vice president, presidential candidate, and senator from Kentucky. Breckinridge, it happened, was also Buck Preston's cousin.

  On the afternoon of the 19th, Hood repulsed an attack from Jefferson C. Davis's Union division, then moved to assist Brig. Gen. Henry D. Clayton's outnumbered men near Lafayette Road. With Longstreet now on the field, Hood took temporary command of the I Corps, part of Longstreet's wing. On the 20th, Hood led the assault that exploited a gap in the Union line, routing Maj. Gen. William Rosecrans's Army of the Cumberland. In that same attack, his right femur was shattered, and his leg was amputated four inches below the hip. His condition was so grave that the surgeon sent the severed limb along with him in the ambulance, assuming the two would be buried together.

  He recovered for weeks at the home of Col. Francis Little before returning to Richmond to continue his convalescence. Longstreet recommended his promotion to lieutenant general dated to the day of his wound, the 20th of September, 1863. The Confederate Senate confirmed it on the 11th of February, 1864. During this second Richmond recovery, Hood befriended President Jefferson Davis, a friendship that would later shape his career. He also resumed courting Buck Preston, who dashed his hopes on Christmas Eve after giving him mixed signals for months. Hood told Mary Chesnut the courtship "was the hardest battle he had ever fought in his life." In February he proposed again, demanding a direct answer, and received a reluctant, embarrassed yes. The Preston family disapproved of the match, and Hood left for the field still unmarried.

• 6. The Youngest General

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  Despite two ruined limbs, Hood could still ride as much as 20 miles a day, his cork leg strapped stiffly to the saddle. An orderly followed close behind with crutches. Members of his old Texas Brigade had collected $3,100 in a single day to buy him that leg. It had been imported through the Union blockade, along with a couple of spares. On the 12th of May, 1864, Lt. Gen. Leonidas Polk, the former Episcopal Bishop of Louisiana, baptized Hood in the field. A witness, Col. Walter H. Rodgers, said Hood "looked happy and as though a great burden had been lifted."

  As Sherman drove from Chattanooga toward Atlanta that spring, Gen. Joseph E. Johnston kept withdrawing rather than risk open battle, and Hood pushed him to be more aggressive. At the Battle of Cassville, Johnston tried for once to strike decisively, ordering Hood to hit the flank of one of Sherman's columns. Hood instead pulled back and dug in when a small, unexpected detachment appeared. The one chance at a decisive blow slipped away.

  As the army withdrew to the Chattahoochee River, Hood sent Richmond letters sharply critical of Johnston, bypassing the normal chain of command. President Davis eventually sent Gen. Braxton Bragg to Atlanta to interview Johnston directly. Bragg also questioned Hood and cavalry commander Joseph Wheeler, both of whom said they had repeatedly urged Johnston to attack. Hood handed Bragg a letter branding Johnston ineffective and weak-willed. "I have, General," he told Bragg, "so often urged that we should force the enemy to give us battle as to almost be regarded reckless." Johnston's biographer Craig L. Symonds later judged that the letter "stepped over the line from unprofessional to outright subversive." Historian Steven E. Woodworth wrote that Hood was "letting his ambition get the better of his honesty." In truth, Woodworth noted, it was Hood, more often than fellow corps commander William Hardee, who had counseled retreat. Hardee himself had written to Bragg on the 22nd of June. "If the present system continues," he warned, "we may find ourselves at Atlanta before a serious battle is fought."

  On the 17th of July, 1864, Davis relieved Johnston of command. Bragg, carrying old resentments against the more senior Hardee, recommended Hood instead. Hood was promoted to temporary full general and given the army on the 18th of July. At 33, he became the youngest man on either side of the war to command an army. Lee's assessment of the promotion was ambiguous. He called Hood "a bold fighter, very industrious on the battlefield, careless off," and praised his "gallantry, earnestness, and zeal." Still, Lee admitted he remained "doubtful" Hood had every quality an army command required.

  Hood launched four major attacks that summer trying to break Sherman's grip on Atlanta, beginning with an assault along Peachtree Creek. During the Battle of Atlanta, his old classmate James McPherson was mortally wounded, and Hood deeply regretted the loss. Every offensive failed, with especially heavy Confederate losses at the Battle of Ezra Church. On the evening of the 1st of September, 1864, Hood evacuated the city. He burned as many military supplies and installations as he could before he left.

• 7. Franklin And Nashville

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  "If he will go to the Ohio River, I'll give him rations....my business is down south," Sherman said. He was responding to news that Hood planned to march north into Tennessee rather than give chase. Hood and Davis had devised the plan together, aiming to threaten Sherman's supply lines and draw him away from Georgia. They hoped to recruit fresh troops in Tennessee and Kentucky, then march through the Cumberland Gap to reinforce Lee at Petersburg. Sherman refused to take the bait, sending Maj. Gen. George Henry Thomas to organize the Union defense in Tennessee. The bulk of Sherman's own army turned toward Savannah instead. Davis, meeting with Hood before the campaign, voiced disappointment that Atlanta had cost nearly 20,000 men in failed frontal assaults for no real gain. He hinted at replacing him. He decided against it, telegraphing Hood from Montgomery, Alabama, and agreed to Hood's request to transfer Hardee out of the army.

  The resulting Tennessee Campaign ran from September to December 1864, seven battles and hundreds of miles of marching. Hood tried to trap Maj. Gen. John Schofield's Army of the Ohio at Spring Hill before it could reach Thomas at Nashville. Command failures let Schofield's men slip past in the night. The next day, at the Battle of Franklin, Hood sent his troops across nearly two miles of open ground without artillery support. It was a last attempt to destroy Schofield before he crossed the Harpeth River to safety. The assault failed to break the Union breastworks and cost the army heavily, in fighting sometimes called the "Pickett's Charge of the West." Hood later wrote that "never did troops fight more gallantly" than at Franklin. Some popular accounts claim he attacked in a rage over being outmaneuvered at Spring Hill. Recent scholarship by Eric Jacobson and Stephen M. Hood finds this unlikely, describing him as determined rather than angry.

  Still unwilling to abandon the campaign, Hood pushed on to besiege Nashville with a badly weakened force as a severe winter set in. Thomas attacked and routed him there two weeks later. The Army of Tennessee ceased to exist as an effective fighting force. The campaign had cost it about 23,500 men out of its initial strength of 38,000. Hood retreated as far as Tupelo, Mississippi, and some survivors eventually joined Johnston for the Carolinas campaign against Sherman. Gen. P. G. T. Beauregard had Hood replaced by Lt. Gen. Richard Taylor on the 23rd of January, 1865. In his farewell, Hood told his men he hoped they would avenge comrades "whose bones lay bleaching upon the fields of Middle Tennessee." He returned to Richmond on the 8th of February.

  In March 1865, Hood asked to travel to the Trans-Mississippi Theater to assess moving troops east across the river. Meeting Taylor in Mississippi in late April, he agreed that Taylor's remaining force should surrender. He set out to carry that recommendation to the last commanders still in the field. Before he could reach them in Texas, Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith had already surrendered. Hood gave himself up in Natchez, Mississippi, and was paroled on the 31st of May, 1865. A different kind of struggle was waiting for him now, one fought with a cotton ledger instead of a saber.

• 8. After The War

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  In a letter to Sherman on the 12th of September, 1864, Hood had spelled out his belief that Black Americans were an inferior race. He accused Sherman of trying "to place over us an inferior race, which we have raised from barbarism to its present position." In the same letter he vowed that "true men" of the South would rather die than submit. He wrote that they would "die a thousand deaths than submit to live under you or your Government and your Negro allies." Within a year, Hood had surrendered.

  He settled afterward in Louisiana, working first as a cotton broker and later as president of the Life Association of America, an insurance firm. In 1868 he married Anna Marie Hennen, a New Orleans native. The couple had 11 children in ten years, including three sets of twins. During these years he began a memoir, Advance and Retreat: Personal Experiences in the United States and Confederate States Armies. It was left rough and unfinished at his death and published only afterward. He wrote it largely to answer accusations from Joseph E. Johnston and unflattering portrayals in William Tecumseh Sherman's own memoirs.

  His insurance business collapsed during the Lower Mississippi Valley yellow fever epidemic of 1878. In a single week the epidemic killed his wife, then his eldest daughter Lydia, then Hood himself, who died on the 30th of August, 1879. His ten surviving children were left orphaned and destitute. The Texas Brigade Association supported them for more than 20 years. Seven families scattered across Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Kentucky, and New York eventually adopted all ten.

  Hood is buried in the Hennen family tomb at Metairie Cemetery in New Orleans. Hood County, Texas, and the Army post of Fort Hood were both named for him. Fort Hood kept his name until the 9th of May, 2023. That date marked a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, passed by Congress over a presidential veto. The provision required renaming all ten Army bases named for Confederate officers. Two junior high schools once bearing his name, in Dallas and in Odessa, Texas, were renamed in 2016 and 2015. A Hood Street in Hollywood, Florida, was renamed in 2018.

  Writers kept returning to him for decades. Stephen Vincent Benét's poem "Army of Northern Virginia" pictured him as "Yellow-haired Hood with his wounds and his empty sleeve." It described him, leading his Texans, as "a Viking shape of a man." It warned that once he replaced Johnston, "he is lost, and his army with him." Private Sam Watkins served under him at Franklin and Nashville. He later wrote an epitaph calling him a man for whom "war left him nothing whole, except his heart." Watkins judged plainly that "our cause had been lost before he took command." Decades afterward, the historian Bell I. Wiley recorded that Hood's own troops, after the Tennessee disasters, sang a bitter verse set to "The Yellow Rose of Texas." "You may talk about your Beauregard, you may sing of Bobby Lee," it went, "but the gallant Hood of Texas, he played hell in Tennessee." On screen, Patrick Gorman played him in the 1993 film Gettysburg and in Gods and Generals. Levon Helm played him in the 2009 film In the Electric Mist. An old soldier's face was still finding its way back into rooms he never lived to sit in.