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

  When the maimed young officer learned that General E. Kirby Smith had surrendered the Confederate forces in the Trans-Mississippi, Hood surrendered to Federal authorities in Natchez, Mississippi, on May 30, 1865. The remarkable military career of John Bell Hood had come to an end. How he and his actions would come to be judged was now a matter for history.

  1 John Dyer, The Gallant Hood (New York: Konecky and Konecky, 1950), 17-26.

  2 Bell Family Papers, 1796-1927, compiled by Harriet C. Owsly, August 4, 1964, Tennessee State Library and Archives, IV-H-1, Microfilm 1289.

  3 Special thanks to Ms. Colleen Mattson of Ripon, Wisconsin, a native Canadian and student of British and Canadian military history, for the theory on the origin of General Hood’s nickname “Sam.” West Point cadets studied military commanders in world history, among them famous British war admiral of the late 1700s Samuel Hood. Admiral Hood, one of the British navy’s most celebrated commanders, was the namesake of Mount Hood, Oregon, so named on October 29, 1792, by Lieutenant William Broughton, a member of Captain George Vancouver’s discovery expedition of the northwest coast of North America.

  4 George Crook, General George Crook: His Autobiography (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986), 14.

  5 R. S. Williamson, Official Report, Explorations and Surveys for a Railroad Route from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. Explorations for a Railroad Route from the Sacramento Valley to the Columbia River, U.S. War Department, 1855.

  6 Oliver C. Hood, “Hood’s Epic: The Devil’s River Fight,” John Bell Hood Historical Society Newsletter, June 2005, from James R. Arnold, Jeff Davis’s Own: Cavalry, Comanches, and the Battle for the Texas Frontier (New York: James Wiley and Sons, 2000), 130-164.

  7 Dyer, The Gallant Hood, 48-69. Lee served as superintendent at West Point from 1852-1855.

  8 James E. Bagg Jr., “Hood’s Dilemma.” John Bell Hood Historical Society Newsletter, September 2005.

  9 John Goddard, M. D., “Baptism of Fire: John Bell Hood and the Texas Brigade at Eltham’s Landing,” John Bell Hood Historical Society Newsletter, January 2007.

  10 Hood was promoted to major general on October 10, 1862, and given an infantry division in James Longstreet’s First Corps. Richard McMurry, “John Bell Hood,” in William C. Davis, ed., The Confederate General, 6 vols. (Harrisonburg, 1991), vol. 3, 121.

  11 Dyer, The Gallant Hood, 192.

  12 Hood, Advance and Retreat, 58-59.

  13 The promotion was decided upon in October of 1863 but not formally made until February 11, 1864. It was backdated to rank from September 20, 1863, the day Hood was wounded at Chickamauga. McMurry, “John Bell Hood,” 121.

  14 Kentucky Historical Society, historical marker at the former home of Lexington, Kentucky, postmaster Joseph Ficklin.

  Chapter 2

  “Every historian must learn to live within the limits which his own freely chosen assumptions impose upon him.”

  — David H. Fischer

  Robert E. Lee’s Opinion of John Bell Hood

  Among the many myths of the Civil War is the commonly repeated assertion that Robert E. Lee advised Jefferson Davis against the appointment of John Bell Hood to command of the Army of Tennessee. This is patently untrue.

  In the oft-cited The Wartime Papers of Robert E. Lee, editors Clifford Dowdey and Louis Manarin wrote that in the middle of July 1864, Jefferson Davis “decided to remove Joe Johnston from command. Lee wrote an extremely strong letter, for him, advising him against a change of commanders, but Davis placed Hood in command.” Albert Castel, in his Decision in the West: The Atlanta Campaign of 1864, claimed that Lee counseled Davis that “if Johnston is removed, it would be better to replace him with Hardee than with Hood,” and Thomas Hay proclaimed assertively in Hood’s Tennessee Campaign that “General Lee favored General Hardee, over all others, as Johnston’s successor.” In The Confederacy’s Last Hurrah, Wiley Sword declared that Hardee “seemed to have Robert E. Lee’s endorsement.” These authors cited correspondence between Lee and Davis dated July 12, 1864.1

  The facts, fully revealed, paint quite a different picture. On July 12, 1864, Davis sent a telegram to Lee, apprising him of the command situation with regard to the Army of Tennessee and asked his opinion of Hood. Lee sent two replies the same day: the first a short telegram, the second a longer letter written that same evening.2

  The complete text of General Lee’s responses to Davis’s request for his opinion on the replacement of Joseph Johnston yields a much different tone and interpretation than what these and other authors often characterize. Lee’s prompt and brief initial reply from his headquarters near Petersburg reads as follows:

  Telegram of today received. I regret the fact stated. It is a bad time to release the commander of an army situated as that of Tennessee. We may lose Atlanta and the army too. Hood is a bold fighter. I am doubtful as to other qualities necessary.3

  At 9:30 p.m. on the same day, Lee sent a longer, more detailed letter to Davis. The first paragraph concerned results of actions involving Gens. Jubal Early and Fitzhugh Lee and the Federal general David Gregg, but the remainder of the letter addressed the replacement of Johnston as commander of the Army of Tennessee. Lee wrote:

  I am distressed at the intelligence conveyed in your telegram of today. It is a grievous thing to change commander of an army situated as is that of the Tennessee. Still if necessary it ought to be done. I know nothing of the necessity. I had hoped that Johnston was strong enough to deliver battle. We must risk much to save Alabama, Mobile and communication with the Trans Mississippi. It would be better to concentrate all the cavalry in Mississippi and Tennessee on Sherman’s communications. If Johnston abandons Atlanta I suppose he will fall back on Augusta. This loses us Mississippi and communications with Trans Mississippi. We had better therefore hazard that communication to retain the country. Hood is a good fighter, very industrious on the battle field, careless off, and I have had no opportunity of judging his action, when the whole responsibility rested upon him. I have a high opinion of his gallantry, earnestness and zeal. General Hardee has more experience in managing an army. May God give you wisdom to decide in this momentous matter.4

  In the morning, Lee had rejected not Hood, but rather the act of changing the Army of Tennessee’s command. However, later the same day, after considering the broad geopolitical and military consequences of losing Atlanta, Lee agreed that a change in commanders was necessary. Lee, upon further thought, seemed to endorse Hood, making five positive comments and one negative about his former subordinate. Lee—referring to Hardee’s temporary command of the Army of Tennessee for three inactive months during the winter of 1863-64—noted only Hardee’s previous army management experience but had nothing else to say about him. (Hardee had been offered permanent command of the army after Bragg’s resignation, but declined.)

  Considering that Sherman had steadily advanced over 100 miles into the heart of the Confederacy, Johnston’s tactics clearly were not working, and a change of commanders was, in Davis’s mind, absolutely necessary. With the enemy at the gates of Atlanta, would Davis want a new commander (Hardee) who could draw only a comment from Lee about his management experience, or Hood, a commander whose battlefield abilities, gallantry, and zeal were praised by Lee?

  Lee’s cautious advice to Davis about one of his favorite former subordinates can hardly be taken as a rejection of the proposal to install Hood, although many authors and historians have stated that Lee advised against elevating Hood. The full text of Lee’s longer reply to Davis, rarely provided by authors, speaks for itself.

  Combining presumptuousness and poor historiography, Gerard Patterson perpetrated another mischaracterization of Lee’s opinion of Hood in his 1987 book Rebels from West Point. A member of Lee’s staff had visited the camps of Hood’s division near Fredericksburg, Virginia, in December 1862 and was critical of the living conditions of a single (unidentified) Texas regiment. Patterson wrote that the conditions “reflected ‘inexcusable neglect’ on
the part of its officers” and after reading the report, “Lee concluded that ‘Hood is a good fighter, very industrious on the battlefield, careless off.’” Without any evidence, Patterson named an inspector’s report of Hood’s division—citing neglect by unnamed officers in one of the division’s 15 regiments, dated December 1862—as the inspiration for Lee’s “careless off comment to Jefferson Davis in July 1864.5

  Due to Lee’s lack of specificity, scholars have never been able to identify what he was alluding to when he stated that Hood was “careless off” the battlefield. Their personal relationship began at West Point in 1852 and continued on the Texas frontier as officers in the elite U.S. Second Cavalry Regiment in the mid-to-late 1850s. Hood served under Lee as a brigade and division commander in 1862 and 1863 at Gaines’s Mill, Second Manassas, Antietam, and Gettysburg. For Patterson to conclusively state that a report of a single inspector in December 1862 (which did not even mention Hood) was the source of Lee’s “careless” comment is baseless speculation. Patterson should have noted Pvt. Henry Morehead of the 11th Mississippi Infantry, Army of Northern Virginia: “Gen. Hood would feed his men if he had to have a fight with the commissary department,” or Major James Ratchford, who wrote of Hood’s care for the soldiers of the Texas brigade: “He was very careful of their comfort, looking after every detail very much as if caring for his family.”6

  It is difficult to find a modern book or article on Hood that fails to mention the assertion that Lee called Hood “All lion, no fox,” “Too much lion, not enough fox,” or some variation. Nowhere in the vast archives of Civil War documents is there evidence of Lee ever saying that about Hood, one of his favorite young subordinate commanders. The iconic Virginian had much to say about Hood, mostly positive, some negative, but the words lion and fox appear nowhere. Nevertheless, repeated countless times, the witty label and its alleged source have stuck to both Hood and Lee.

  In fact, this reference to Hood, repeatedly attributed to Lee, comes from a verse in the poem “Army of Northern Virginia,” by Stephen Vincent Benet. The verse is an excerpt from Benet’s Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative poem “John Brown’s Body” (1928). Far from being an insult to Hood, the poem honors Lee’s army and its commanders, beginning with the line, “Army of Northern Virginia, army of legend. Who were your captains that you could trust them so surely?” In praising Lee’s subordinates—among them Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, James Ewell Brown (Jeb) Stuart, Richard Ewell, A. P. Hill, and James Longstreet—the verse honoring Hood reads as follows:

  Yellow-haired Hood with his wounds and his empty sleeve,

  Leading his Texans, a Viking shape of a man,

  With the thrust and lack of craft of a berserk sword,

  All lion, none of the fox.

  When he supersedes

  Joe Johnston, he is lost, and his army with him,

  But he could lead forlorn hopes with the ghost of Ney.

  His bigboned Texans follow him into the mist.

  Who follows them?7

  Many authors not only carelessly place “All lion, none of the fox” into General Lee’s mouth, but—even worse—also distort the context. Benet clearly sought to express the admiration and respect that Lee had for his young warrior Hood, not words of doubt or disrespect for the soldierly abilities of his young protégé.

  Nevertheless, in acts that would surely distress both Lee and Benet, examples abound of writers misusing the eloquent description. Without providing a source, Eddy Davison and Daniel Foxx wrote in Nathan Bedford Forrest: In Search of an Enigma, “Lee had advised Jefferson Davis against placing Hood in command because he was ‘all lion and no fox.’ Lee was absolutely right.”8

  Wiley Sword, in The Confederacy’s Last Hurrah, not only included the quotation but also titled a chapter “Too Much Lion, Not Enough Fox.” Although he did not assert that the words came from Lee, here is what Sword wrote:

  Said another of the suspicion that Hood might not prove to be the general for the job at hand, there was perhaps too much “lion” in the man, and not enough “fox.” Indeed, wrote Georgia Colonel James C. Nisbet, Hood might have a “lion’s heart,” but there was also a deep suspicion he had a “wooden head.”9

  By placing quotation marks around “lion” and “fox,” Sword implies that Colonel Nisbet wrote the words, but Nisbet’s memoir mentioned nothing about Hood being too much lion and not enough fox. In effect, Sword provided no source for the lion and fox quotation, cloaking it within a sentence with a legitimate citation. The paragraph cited by Sword is part of a longer un-sourced commentary by Nisbet regarding the affection the army had for Joseph Johnston and the disappointment of many of the soldiers upon hearing of his removal. Nisbet wrote:

  But we also knew Hood. He was simply a brave, hard fighter. There were no better fighters than Hood’s Division. There were few equals of Hood’s Texas Brigade. There was no better Division commander than John B. Hood. But as the commander of an army in the field, he was a failure. The same may be said of Burnside, Fighting Joe Hooker, and others. It has been said of Hood, “He was a man with a Lion’s Heart but a Wooden Head.” He soon demonstrated his incapacity to take Joe Johnston’s place. Jeff Davis unwittingly hit the Southern Confederacy a heavy blow that morning.10

  In his recent book War Like the Thunderbolt: The Battle and Burning of Atlanta, Russell Bonds mentioned the lion and fox reference in a curious manner. In the very chapter where Bonds persuasively argued that Hood was not the unintelligent man he is so often portrayed to be, and disproved the myth that Hood was nicknamed “Old Woodenhead” by some of his troops, the author wrote this: “He was, as the saying goes, all lion, none of the fox.” By including the reference, Bonds at least implies that he considers the “saying” credible, but he doesn’t provide a source.11

  Dr. Jean Edward Smith wrote in his acclaimed biography Grant, “All lion and no fox, said Lee dismissively, when he learned of Hood’s appointment.” Smith’s source for this statement was a pair of pages from Dowdey and Manarin’s The Wartime Papers of Robert E. Lee, which contain only the previously mentioned July 12, 1864, telegram from Lee to Jefferson Davis regarding Lee’s opinion of Hood, and Lee’s longer, more detailed letter to Davis penned later that day on the same subject. As we now all know, this correspondence between Lee and Davis does not mention “lion” and “fox.”12

  Archer Jones and Herman Hattaway wrote in How the North Won the Civil War, “‘All lion, none of the fox,’ Robert E. Lee had said of Hood.” Although Jones and Hattaway’s book is heavily footnoted, they rather curiously offer no citation for this purported comment by Lee.13

  In one of the most acclaimed Civil War books of modern times, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Battle Cry of Freedom, historian James M. McPherson wrote of Hood, “‘All lion’ Lee said of him, ‘none of the fox.’” Disappointingly, the only citation Dr. McPherson provided pointed readers to Jones’s and Hattaway’s unsubstantiated quotation.14

  It would be difficult indeed to track down every reference in Civil War literature of the claim that Lee called Hood “all lion, no fox.” As an illustration, when I searched the words “lion fox Lee Hood” in Google Books, 1, 240 results appeared. Of the first 25 books listed that included Lee’s purported lion and fox reference to Hood, not a single one was published before Benet’s poem appeared in 1928. If indeed Robert E. Lee had said in 1864 that General Hood was all lion and no fox, it stands to reason that this quotation would have appeared in Civil War literature prior to 1928.

  1 Clifford Dowdey and Louis Manarin, The Wartime Papers of Robert E. Lee (New York: Da Capo Press, 1961), 800; Albert Castel, Decision in the West: The Atlanta Campaign of 1864 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992), 353; Hay, Hood’s Tennessee Campaign, 24; Sword, The Confederacy’s Last Hurrah, 32.

  2 Dowdey and Manarin, Wartime Papers of Robert E. Lee, 821.

  3 Ibid.

  4 Ibid., 821, 822.

  5 Gerard Patterson, Rebels from West Point (New York: Doubleday, 1987), 66.


  6 Mamie Yeary, Reminiscences of the Boys in Gray, 1861—1865 (Dayton, OH: Morningside Press, 1986), 539; James W. Ratchford, Some Reminiscences of Persons and Incidents of the Civil War (Austin TX: Shoal Creek Publishers, 1971), 56. In recently found Hood papers (cited herein as John Bell Hood Personal Papers) is an April 2, 1863, letter from Robert E. Lee to Hood regarding the murder of two civilians around Suffolk, which a Richmond newspaper claimed was done by members of Hood’s division during a robbery. Lee sternly lectured Hood and implored him to appeal to the soldiers of his division to identify and punish the guilty men. We will likely never know for certain, but perhaps Lee was recalling this incident in the spring of 1863 when characterizing Hood as “careless off the battlefield.

  7 Stephen Vincent Benet, John Brown’s Body (Lanham, MD: Ivan R. Dee Publisher, 1990), 186.

  8 Eddy Davison and Daniel Foxx, Nathan Bedford Forrest: In Search ofan Enigma (Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing, 2007), 348.

  9 Sword, The Confederacy’s Last Hurrah, 32.

  10 James Cooper Nisbet, Four Years on the Firing Line, ed. Bell I. Wiley (Wilmington, NC: Broadfoot Publishing, 1987), 206.

  11 Bonds, War Like the Thunderbolt, 78.

  12 Jean Edward Smith, Grant (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 388; Dowdey and Manarin, Wartime Papers of Robert E. Lee, 821-822.

  13 Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones, How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 607.

  14 James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 753.

  Chapter 3

  “An army of lions commanded by a deer will never be an army of lions.”

  — Napoleon Bonaparte

  Jeff Davis, Joe Johnston, and John Bell Hood

  Many modern Civil War authors, citing John Bell Hood’s correspondence with the authorities in Richmond, Virginia, accuse the general of secretly scheming to replace Gen. Joseph Johnston as the commander of the Army of Tennessee. Although it is possible that Hood did attempt to do so, there is no conclusive evidence to support the charge.