So that was that—or almost. Hood went in to see Johnston one last time and urged him, “for the good of the country, to pocket the correspondence, and fight for Atlanta, as Sherman was at the very gates of the city.” He pleaded that he “did not even know the position of the two remaining Corps of the Army,” and he begged Johnston, he said later, to at least “remain with me and give me the benefit of his counsel whilst I determined the issue.” Hood then described Johnston’s reaction to this request: “With tears of emotion gathering in his eyes, he finally made the promise that, after riding into Atlanta, he would return that same evening.” However, as Hood sourly put it, “He not only failed to comply with his promise, but, without a word of explanation or apology, left that evening for Macon, Georgia.”
There was one final flurry of reaction to the news of the change of command in the Army of Tennessee, and that came at Union army headquarters on the other side of Peachtree Creek, where some officers remembered Hood’s impulsive habits at the card table during the old army days on the frontier. It was generally agreed that the new Confederate commander, though brave and audacious, was “reckless.” General John Schofield, Hood’s old roommate at West Point, warned Sherman, “He’ll hit you like hell, now, before you know it.” Schofield proceeded to describe the new Confederate commander as “bold even to rashness and courageous in the extreme” and, when he wrote later, may even have provided the further intelligence that Hood was “not well up in mathematics” while at the military academy. (Hood had graduated forty-fourth out of fifty-two cadets.)
The tall, red-haired Sherman took all this in and then wrote to his wife, “I confess I was pleased at the change.”
2
I Will Go On While I Can
At West Point they called him “Sam” Hood, and while he was not a particularly good student, he was at least “a jolly good fellow,” according to his old classmate John M. Schofield, who had to tutor him through mathematics. Fifteen years later, as the fighting around Atlanta became ever more desperate, Schofield considered that he might have “made a mistake” in helping his new adversary through those studies.
John Bell Hood was not born into Southern aristocracy as it was practiced in the Virginias and Carolinas—and even in Kentucky—but he was certainly close enough to its fringes to become aware of aristocratic values and customs. His father was a physician whose family had been in America since the late 1600s and had moved from Virginia to Kentucky shortly after the Revolutionary War. By the late 1850s the Hood family had acquired more than six hundred acres of fertile farmland and several dozen slaves, but by the time John Bell turned eighteen he had rejected life as a farmer or doctor to become a soldier. In 1849 his maternal uncle, Richard French, an influential lawyer and congressman, secured for his tall, handsome nephew an appointment to the United States Military Academy.
West Point in those days was a difficult, almost draconian place with incessant hazing, meager food, a demanding curriculum, and exhaustive military drilling. Hood struggled through all that in the bottom third of his class and without incident until, in his senior year, he was caught absent without leave, busted to cadet private, and given nearly enough demerits to get him kicked out of the academy. The man who disciplined Hood was the superintendent of West Point, Colonel Robert E. Lee, but there nevertheless developed a close attachment between the two men that would continue through the war.
After graduating forty-fourth of the fifty-two in his class, Hood was commissioned as an infantry lieutenant and sent sailing around to California—just as Sherman had been seven years earlier—where he landed in San Francisco in the middle of the gold rush. He was rudely awakened to frontier economics when he and a fellow officer hailed a carriage to take them from the dock to their hotel. The price, the driver told them, was twenty dollars in gold. “This aspect of affairs,” Hood recalled,”—our pay being only about sixty dollars a month—compelled us to hold a consultation with our brother officers and to adopt the only alternative: to proceed on foot to whatever quarters we desired to occupy.” Soon posted to a fort farther north, Hood began to understand that California’s horribly inflated economy—he called it “this country of gold and extravagance”—was driving him to rack and ruin, and along with his fellow officers he began hunting expeditions in the plentiful countryside to supply their officers’ mess. There was enough game left over to sell at market. To improve matters further, Hood and another lieutenant, George Crook, later to win much fame as an Indian fighter, got some land and sowed a large crop of wheat. Just before its harvest, though, Hood was transferred to the soon-to-be-famed Second United States Cavalry in Missouri. Back in San Francisco to await his ship, he stopped in at a bank, where he met, for the first time, its president, William Tecumseh Sherman, whom he later remembered as possessing “a piercing eye and nervous impulsive temperament.”
At Jefferson Barracks, near St. Louis, Hood reported to his new commanding officer, Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston, later to be the first commanding general of the Army of Tennessee. The deputy commander was Colonel Robert E. Lee, and one of the majors was another Virginian, George H. “Pap” Thomas. Of the officers in this star-crossed regiment, seventeen would go on to become Civil War generals. In the autumn of 1855, Hood and the Second Cavalry marched southward to the Texas frontier, but not before Hood received a draft of a thousand dollars in gold from his old pal Crook, his share of the wheat crop sale.
Texas winters were bitterly cold and the summers were stiflingly hot as Hood and the regiment policed the frontier for marauding Indians. His only serious encounter occurred in 1857 when his troop of two dozen soldiers was patrolling a barren stretch of desert near the Mexican border. Two weeks and 150 miles out of camp, they stumbled on a band of about fifty Indians and promptly rode into a trap. Unsure whether the Indians were friendly or hostile, Hood was somewhat relieved when they began waving a white flag. He cautiously approached them with seventeen of his cavalrymen. Suddenly, the Indians threw down their flag and began firing on the soldiers, a moment later igniting a huge brush pile they had constructed. Simultaneously, warriors rose up from the sparse shrubbery, while others charged down a slope. “The warriors were all painted, stripped to the waist, with either horns or wreaths of feathers on their heads,” Hood said later. “They bore shields for defence, and were armed with rifles, bows and arrows.” The fighting was fast and furious, often hand to hand. Hood’s men fired until they had emptied their guns and then found that, “Owing to the restiveness of the horses, we could not reload while mounted.” The cavalrymen withdrew about fifty yards to assess their situation. Two men had been killed, and four, including Hood, were wounded. At nightfall the Indians gathered their wounded and dead and moved off, and Hood wisely did likewise.
For this brief but savage action, Hood received a commendation for gallantry from the department commander and not long afterward was promoted to first lieutenant, a rank he retained until the end of his service in the United States Army. In the autumn of 1860, after nearly ten years of military duty, Hood requested and received a leave of absence from the army, but just as he was headed back east, orders overtook him directing him to report to West Point as cavalry instructor. It was a plum of an assignment for any young officer, but Hood turned it down. As he recounted the story, the adjutant general of the army “turned quickly in his chair, saying, ‘Lieutenant, you surprise me; this is a post and position sought by almost every soldier.’” Hood later explained, “I feared war would soon be declared between the States, in which event I preferred to be in a position to act with entire freedom.” Thus ended the active career of Sam Hood with the United States Army, and, his prediction having come to pass, he resigned his commission in April 1861 and tendered his services to the Confederate states.
Aside from the desert Indian fight, one other incident of interest occurred during Hood’s service in Texas. While riding over the countryside one day with his colonel, Robert E. Lee, Hood became the recipient of some fatherly advice
that he later put to use. “While enjoying the scenery and balmy air as we passed over the high and undulating prairies of that beautiful region, the conversation turned to matrimony” Hood later recalled. Thinking that his young protégé “might form an attachment for some of the country lasses,” Hood remembered that Lee counseled him, “Never marry unless you can do so into a family which will enable your children to be proud of both sides of the house.” This aristocratic pronouncement made such a deep impression on the dashing lieutenant from Kentucky that he repeated it in his memoirs many years afterward. Within a few years, however, he was to put the advice to practice in a fiery romance with a young Confederate beauty that set Richmond society agog.
In the spring of 1861, when the United States was still breaking apart, Hood went back home to Kentucky and met with the former vice president, John Breckinridge, hoping to offer his services to his native state. But, “after long debate and considerable delay,” he became convinced that Kentucky would not secede, and he boarded a train for Montgomery, Alabama, then the Confederate capital, where he was appointed first lieutenant in the untested Confederate army. Sent to Richmond, he reported to his new commanding officer, none other than his old mentor, Robert E. Lee, and was immediately dispatched to Yorktown, Virginia, to join Colonel John Magruder, who was expecting an attack from the federal troops believed to be assembling at Fort Monroe. Years later, Hood recalled the anxiety of that first day in the field: “As no tent or quarters had been assigned me, I sent for my trunk and sat upon it in the sand a greater portion of the night, gazing intently every few minutes in the direction of Fortress Monroe, in the expectation momentarily of beholding the enemy. The following morning, it was ascertained that the Federals were not within thirty miles of this line. . . .”
Magruder put Hood in charge of all the cavalry companies around Yorktown and immediately promoted him to captain and then to major. This unusual leapfrog in rank was brought about so as to give young Hood seniority over the other officers commanding companies. Soon the companies were organized into the Fourth Texas Cavalry Regiment, and Hood was again promoted, this time to colonel in command. All through the winter of 1861 Hood drilled and instructed and honed his troops. At the beginning of spring 1862, to his own astonishment, he was promoted once more, to brigadier general, and given command of a brigade of Texans. On the 7th of May, the Union army, under General George McClellan, was advancing up the Yorktown Peninsula through Williamsburg toward Richmond, and Hood was ordered to drive it back. In its first serious action, the Texas brigade encountered federal troops near Eltham’s Landing and handily routed them with what Hood called “a happy introduction to the enemy.” Three weeks later, Hood and his brigade distinguished themselves at the battle of Seven Pines, or Fair Oaks, and a month later—under the direction of General Stonewall Jackson—they were embroiled in the confused Seven Days battles in the swamps and marshes outside Richmond. At the battle of Gaines Mill, the Texans swept the field and sent the federals tumbling back through White Oak Swamp and on to Malvern Hill, where the Confederate army suffered its first defeat of the campaign. But McClellan, convinced that the Confederates were about to bag his entire army, continued to retreat, and soon the threat to Richmond was ended. Hood emerged from the campaign with a shining reputation as a bold and able combat officer and was promoted to division commander.
At this point, Hood and his men were detached to the command of General James Longstreet and headed north toward what would be the celebrated Second Battle of Manassas, or Bull Run. There, Jackson’s corps swiftly and stealthily maneuvered around the army of General John Pope, while Longstreet, with Hood’s division in a prominent position, proceeded to savagely grind up the Union forces as they unsuccessfully tried to dislodge Jackson. Pope was thoroughly defeated, and his army went reeling back to Washington in disarray. Hood called it “the most beautiful battle scene I have ever beheld.” Again, he had acquitted himself brilliantly and had become a rising star among Confederate officers.
With little pause for rest, Lee now moved his army up into Maryland, but Hood was not at the head of his column—he had been put under arrest. On the final day at Second Manassas, his men had captured some federal ambulances, and Hood pressed them into service. General N. G. (“Shanks”) Evans, who was senior to Hood, declared that the vehicles should go to his men, and when Hood refused to turn them over, Evans had him arrested. Hood explained, “I would cheerfully have obeyed directions to deliver them to General Lee’s Quarter Master for the use of the Army, [but] I did not consider it just that I should be required to yield them to another brigade of the division, which was in no manner entitled to them.” In any case, he was on his way back to Culpeper, Virginia, to await court-martial when Lee was notified of the affair and sent instructions that he be brought along on the Maryland expedition, arrested or not. As the army moved toward Antietam, the Texans began to shout, “Give us Hood,” and Lee, who heard this, sent for Hood and said to him, “General, here I am just upon the eve of entering into battle, and with one of my best officers under arrest.” He told Hood that if he would apologize about the ambulances, he would release him, but Hood refused, again citing the justness of his position. Lee shook his head and then informed his stubborn young protégé that he was “suspending” his arrest until after the impending battle had been fought, and Hood cheerfully galloped to the head of his column.
What followed was one of the bloodiest and most fateful battles of the war. As Lee for the first time moved north to threaten Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, McClellan—back in command of the Union army after Pope’s disaster at Manassas—moved quickly to intercept him. Finally, on September 16, 1862, following two days of spiteful little conflicts in the surrounding mountains, Lee moved his forty thousand men out in the open to take on McClellan’s eighty-seven-thousand man army.
In the late afternoon, Hood’s division took position in an open field in front of the Dunker Church a little more than a mile from the town of Sharpsburg and about the same distance west of Antietam Creek. About sunset, he was attacked by almost an entire corps commanded by General Joseph Hooker. The fighting lasted late into the night, and Hood’s men held their ground. By this time, Hood later recalled, his men were on the verge of starvation—they “had had no meat for several days and little or no bread; the men had been forced to subsist principally on green corn and green apples.” When the firing died down, Hood sought out Lee and asked if his men could be relieved from the line for the rest of the night to cook up some rations. Lee told him he knew of no troops he could spare, but suggested that Hood apply to Jackson, who had come up on his left, for relief. Hood found the venerable Stonewall asleep under a tree, awakened him, and “made known the half-starved condition of [his] troops.” Jackson immediately dispatched several brigades to replace Hood’s and the Texans gratefully marched off to the rear to fry up some dough. “He exacted of me, however,” Hood said later, “a promise that I would come to the support of these forces the moment I was called upon.”
By this time it was near dawn, and as the sky turned from gray to pink, the full fury of a federal attack broke upon the line Hood’s men had recently occupied. Most of Hood’s division had not even had time to prepare their food when a messenger dashed up requesting that Hood move immediately into battle. His still hungry soldiers “were again obliged to march to the front, leaving their uncooked rations in camp.”
The brigades that had replaced Hood had suffered a violent and bloody assault through a forty-acre field of standing corn in which, as General Hooker himself described it, so much hot lead was flying that “every stalk in the northern and greater part of the field was cut as closely as could have been done by a knife.” Slowly the overwhelming federals pushed the Confederates back until they were forced into the woods and fled. Hooker was preparing for a final, victorious push when Hood’s starving and angry Texans arrived on the scene. No more than twenty-four hundred strong, they faced a full two corps massing in their fr
ont. As the heavy blue columns began moving toward them, Hood’s men emerged from the woods and attacked them head-on, pouring volley after volley into the Union ranks until men began to drop “like a scythe running through our line.”
Slowly and fiercely, the Texans drove Hooker’s men back across the corn field, stumbling and slipping through the mangled and dismembered remains of blue- and gray-clad alike. Hood himself described how “men were mowed down in heaps to the right and left” and said, “Never before was I so continuously troubled with fear that my horse would further injure some wounded fellow soldier, lying helpless upon the ground.”
In the thick of the battle, an officer of Jackson’s staff arrived to appraise the situation, and Hood’s message to him in reply became as famous in the Confederate army as Admiral Farragut’s “Damn the torpedoes” pronouncement was to become for the Union. “Tell General Jackson,” Hood said bleakly, “that unless I get reinforcements I must be forced back. But I am going on while I can.”
The reinforcements never came, and Hood, his exhausted men now out of ammunition and facing a galling fire from several new batteries of Union artillery, ordered a withdrawal to the little white Dunker Church, its outside walls now peppered and blasted away by shot and shell. Presently, the division of General Lafayette McLaws arrived, just as the federals were making a final assault. McLaws’s troops pitched into the unsuspecting blue line and drove it back with fearful slaughter, as Hood’s men marched to the rear to resupply their ammunition. When they returned to take up position in the woods behind the church, the day’s fighting was mostly over on this northern part of the field, though the battle raged nearly out of control southward and in the center. Hood and his men bivouacked for the night, and at dawn, as the sky began to glow over the rigid corpses of thousands of slain men in the corn field, Stonewall Jackson rode up to Hood, who had already arrived at the scene to survey the situation.