John Bell Hood Extracting Truth From History

The year 2011 brings us the sesquicentennial celebration of the American Civil War. Surprisingly, 150 years later, students continue to find themselves asking many of the same questions about the great national tragedy faced during the centennial in 1961. For example, did slavery cause the great conflict, or did constitutional questions act as the catalyst? Does the Battle of Gettysburg represent the turning point of the War, or did that occur elsewhere? In connection with the last question, Lost Cause advocates, those great pro-Confederacy propagandists, found convenient villains to blame for the Southern defeat. One of these, Confederate General John Bell Hood, plays an important role. This paper contends that in his case, the Lost Cause is wrong and that Hoods historical treatment has been false. Standard critical treatment of John Bell Hood over the years has tended to characterize the general as rash, overaggressive, and lacking in strategic imagination. For such critical historians, Hood appears as old-fashioned and someone limited logistically to the frontal assault. These accounts mainly stress his negative aspects as a soldier and tend to center around the Battle of Franklin. This thesis, by analyzing every battle that Hood commanded as a leader of the Army of Tennessee, particularly those fought around Atlanta, reveals him to have been a far more bold, imaginative, and complex leader than has previously been portrayed.

An award-winning biography of one of the Confederacy’s most successful—and most criticized—generals. Winner of the 2014 Albert Castel Book Award and the 2014 Walt Whitman Award John Bell Hood died at forty-eight after a brief illness in August 1879, leaving behind the first draft of his memoirs, Advance and Retreat: Personal Experiences in the United States and Confederate States Armies. Published posthumously the following year, the memoirs immediately became as controversial as their author. A careful and balanced examination of these controversies, however, coupled with the recent discovery of Hood’s personal papers—which were long considered lost—finally sets the record straight in this book. Hood’s published version of many of the major events and controversies of his Confederate military career were met with scorn and skepticism. Some described his memoirs as merely a polemic against his arch-rival Joseph E. Johnston. These opinions persisted through the decades and reached their nadir in 1992, when an influential author described Hood’s memoirs as a bitter, misleading, and highly biased treatise replete with distortions, misrepresentations, and outright falsifications. Without any personal papers to contradict them, many writers portrayed Hood as an inept, dishonest opium addict and a conniving, vindictive cripple of a man. One went so far as to brand him a fool with a license to kill his own men. What most readers don’t know is that nearly all of these authors misused sources, ignored contrary evidence, and/or suppressed facts sympathetic to Hood. Stephen M. Hood, a distant relative of the general, embarked on a meticulous forensic study of the common perceptions and controversies of his famous kinsman. His careful examination of the original sources utilized to create the broadly accepted facts about John Bell Hood uncovered startlingly poor scholarship by some of the most well-known and influential historians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These discoveries, coupled with his access to a large cache of recently discovered Hood papers, many penned by generals and other officers who served with Hood, confirm Hood’s account that originally appeared in his memoir and resolve, for the first time, some of the most controversial aspects of Hood’s long career.

"In this first biography of the general in more than twenty years, Miller offers a new original perspective, directly challenging those historians who have pointed to Hood's perceived personality flaws, his alleged abuse of painkillers, and other unsubstantiated claims as proof of his incompetence as a military leader. This book takes into account Hood's entire life -- as a student at West Point, his meteoric rise and fall as a soldier and Civil War commander, and his career as a successful postwar businessman. In many ways, Hood represents a typical southern man, consumed by personal and societal definitions of manhood that were threatened by amputation and preserved and reconstructed by Civil War memory. Miller consults an extensive variety of sources, explaining not only what Hood did but also the environment in which he lived and how it affected him"--Jacket.

The Nashville Campaign, culminating with the last major battle of the Civil War, is one of the most compelling and controversial campaigns of the conflict. The campaign pitted the young and energetic James Harrison Wilson and his Union cavalry against the cunning and experienced Nathan Bedford Forrest with his Confederate cavalry. This book is an analysis of contributions made by the two opposing cavalry forces and provides new insights and details into the actions of the cavalry during the battle. This campaign highlighted important changes in cavalry tactics and never in the Civil War was there closer support by the cavalry for infantry actions than for the Union forces in the Battle of Nashville. The retreat by Cheatham's corps and the Battle of the Barricade receive a more in-depth discussion than in previous works on this battle. The importance of this campaign cannot be overstated as a different outcome of this battle could have altered history. The Nashville Campaign reflected the stark realities of the war across the country in December 1864 and would mark an important part of the death knell for the Confederacy.

John Bell Hood, a native of Kentucky bred on romantic notions of the Old South and determined to model himself on Robert E. Lee, had a tragic military career, no less interesting for being calamitous. After conspicuous bravery in leading a Texas brigade, he rose in the ranks to become the youngest of the full generals of the Confederacy. The misfortune in store for Hood, a far better fighter than a strategist, illustrates the strain and risks of high command. One of the lasting images to come out of the Civil War is that of the one-legged General Hood strapped in his saddle, leading his men in a hopeless counter-offensive against Sherman's march on Atlanta. In this prize-winning book Richard M. McMurry spares no details of Hood's ultimate "complete and disastrous failure," but he is concerned to do justice to one of the most maligned and misunderstood figures in Civil War history.

Scholars hail Confederate General John Bell Hood's personal papers as "the most important discovery in Civil War scholarship in the last half century." This invaluable cache includes documents relating to Hood's U.S. Army service, Civil War career, and postwar life. It includes letters from Confederate and Union officers, unpublished battle reports, detailed medical reports relating to Hood's two major wounds, and dozens of letters exchanged between Hood and his wife Anna. This treasure trove is being made available for the first time in paperback for both professional and amateur Civil War historians in The Lost Papers of Confederate General John Bell Hood, edited and annotated by award-winning author Stephen M. Hood. The historical community long believed General Hood's papers were lost or destroyed, and numerous books and articles were written about him without the benefit of these invaluable documents. In fact, the papers had been carefully preserved for generations by Hood's descendants. In 2012, collateral descendent Stephen Hood was given access to these papers as part of his research for his book John Bell Hood: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of a Confederate General (Savas Beatie, 2013). This 200+ document collection sheds important light on some of the war's lingering mysteries and controversies. For example, letters from Confederate officers help explain Hood's failure to entrap Schofield's Union army at Spring Hill, Tennessee, on November 29, 1864. Another letter by Lt. Gen. Stephen D. Lee helps to explain Maj. Gen. Patrick Cleburne's gallant but reckless conduct that resulted in his death at Franklin. Lee also lodges serious allegations against Confederate Maj. Gen. William Bate's troops. Other papers explain, for the first time, the purpose and intent behind Hood's "controversial" memoir Advance and Retreat, and validate its contents. While these and others offer a military perspective of Hood the general, the revealing letters between he and Anna, his beloved and devoted wife, help us better understand Hood the man and husband. Historians and other writers have spent generations speculating about Hood's motives, beliefs, actions, and objectives and the result has not always been flattering or even fully honest. Now, long-believed "lost" firsthand accounts previously unavailable offer insights into the character, personality, and military operations of John Bell Hood the general, husband, and father.