“Hood, have they gone?” Jackson asked.
Looking east and north toward the vast Union camps through the morning mists, Hood replied that “they” had not gone. Jackson said acidly, “I hoped they had,” and rode away to look after his used-up command. Without mentioning anything about it to Hood, who was not even in his corps but was still serving under Longstreet, Jackson wrote a letter to the adjutant general in Richmond, recommending Hood’s promotion to major general and calling him “one of the most promising officers of the army.”
All that day the Confederate army remained at Antietam, facing down the enemy and burying the dead. That night they pulled up stakes and headed southward, crossing the Potomac and marching into the autumnal beauty of the Shenandoah Valley. “Where is your division?” someone asked Hood after the battle. “Dead on the field,” he replied, and he was sadly correct; nearly two-thirds of the Texas brigade were casualties. During the campaign, more than thirteen thousand Confederates had fallen and nearly fifteen thousand federals.
The action on the Confederate left during the battle of Antietam had saved the day for Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia. Hood, McLaws, and General Alexander Lawton, who had taken Hood’s place when he went back to cook rations, had staved off three successive attacks from more than thirty thousand Union troops—nearly five-to-one odds.
Hood also regained a measure of personal relief after the battle. Expecting to be placed back under arrest for the ambulance-appropriation incident, he was released of those charges by Lee. “In lieu of being summoned to a court-martial,” Hood said, “I was shortly afterwards promoted to the rank of major general.”
Lee rested the Army of Northern Virginia in the Shenandoah Valley most of the autumn, its rich granaries and larders and calm pastoral beauty providing a wonderful restorative for the battered soldiers. Hood’s men, along with the others, received a supply of clothing and shoes. But soon it was time to move on. McClellan had again been replaced as Union commander, this time by General Ambrose Burnside, who promptly began to march his army toward Fredericksburg, about halfway between Richmond and Washington.
Lee reached Fredericksburg first, and, while he originally considered trying to frustrate Burnside’s designs by maneuver, he took a look at his position in the town and decided to stay and receive the federal assault. With one hundred twenty-five thousand men and more than three hundred pieces of artillery, Burnside held a decided advantage in manpower and firepower over Lee’s seventy-eight thousand soldiers and 275 guns, but with the Rappahannock River at its front and rising heights in the rear, Fredericksburg was a veritable fortress for Lee’s army. For example, Colonel Porter Alexander, in charge of a battalion of Longstreet’s artillery, remarked to his commander, “General, we cover that ground now so well that we comb it as with a fine-tooth comb. A chicken would not live on that field when we open up on it.” And the irascible Mississippian William Barksdale, commanding his brigade from within the town itself, told a messenger, “Tell General Lee that if he wants a bridge of dead Yankees, I can furnish him one.”
With these grim declarations in mind, Lee and his soldiers watched the huge federal buildup across the river. By December 11, 1862, Burnside had constructed enough pontoon bridges to carry his men across, which they did the following morning, his troops burning and looting the town. Lee’s army was drawn up on the heights behind the city; Longstreet’s corps, with Hood’s division in its center, was on the left, and Jackson’s corps defended the right flank. To get at them, the federals had to march straight up the long sloping heights into the face of all the rifle and cannon fire the Confederate army could bring to bear. That morning, Hood recalled, he was riding toward Lee’s headquarters, when he was joined by a solemn Stonewall Jackson. In a peculiarly outof-character lapse, Hood said, “[Jackson] asked me if I expected to live to see the end of the war. I replied that I did not know, but that I was inclined to think I would survive; at the same time I considered it mostly likely that I would be badly shattered before the termination of the struggle.” Hood then asked Jackson the same question, and “without hesitation he answered that he did not expect to live through to the close of the contest. Moreover, that he could not say that he desired to do so.” With this strange conversation ringing in his ears, Hood rode off to prepare his men for the attack.
Burnside’s Union troops were slaughtered, of course. During the late morning and long afternoon of December 13, the blue-clad soldiers were mowed down in ranks in a series of charges up and down the Confederate line. It was here that Lee, watching the battle with Longstreet, uttered his famous remark: “It is well that war is so terrible. We should grow too fond of it.” Hood’s division performed its duties, receiving and repulsing the federal attack by its old adversary from Antietam, “Fighting Joe” Hooker, and the next day the Union army withdrew across the river, leaving 12,600 casualties to the Confederate’s 4,200.
A lull enveloped the Virginia theater of war for nearly five months during the winter of 1862—63, and during that time a momentous event also enveloped John Bell Hood—he fell in love.
She was Sally “Buck” Preston, eighteen-year-old daughter of an aristocratic South Carolina family, who was staying in Richmond that winter at the home of family friends, Colonel and Mrs. John C. Chesnut. Chesnut was then an aide to Jefferson Davis; his wife, Mary Boykin Chesnut, was a fashionable hostess about town. Hood’s chief surgeon, John Darby, was engaged to Buck Preston’s sister, Mary, and, evidently thinking that his commanding officer might like to meet his fiancée’s younger sister, in mid-March the good doctor brought Hood to the Chesnuts’ for tea.
Hood’s reputation had preceded him, and he clearly impressed Mrs. Chesnut, who wrote in her diary: “When he came, with his sad Quixote face, the face of an old crusader who believed in his cause, his cross, his crown—we were not prepared for that type exactly as a beau ideal of wild Texans. Tall—thin—shy, blue eyes and light hair, tawny beard and a vast amount of it covering the lower part of his face—an appearance of awkward strength. Someone said that great reserve of manner he carried only into ladies’ society.”
Also present at this tea was Lieutenant Charles Venable, formerly a mathematics teacher at South Carolina College, who said that while he had often heard of the “light of battle” shining in a man’s eyes, he had seen it only once, and that was when he brought Hood orders from Lee. When he found Hood in the heat of the battle, Venable told Mrs. Chesnut, “The man was transfigured. The fierce light of his eyes—I can never forget.”
These flowing tributes notwithstanding, Buck Preston refused, for some reason, to appear when Hood visited the Chesnuts, and it was several days before he finally met her. His division was being marched through the streets of Richmond in a freezing snowstorm on the way back to the Rappahannock when Hood spotted his surgeon, the Chesnuts, and the Preston sisters watching from the sidewalk.
“Hood and his staff came galloping up, dismounted, and joined us,” Mary Chesnut wrote. Buck’s sister, Mary, gave him a bouquet, and Hood took out a bible from his pocket and pressed one of the flowers in it. As the marching troops joked and kidded their commanding general for keeping the company of the women, Buck “stood somewhat apart, rather as a spectator of this scene” until Dr. Darby introduced her to Hood.
After he had remounted his horse, Mrs. Chesnut remembered, Hood looked down at Buck, slowly turning the animal as he eyed her carefully, then leaned down and said something to Dr. Darby, who smiled. After Hood had ridden off, Buck went up to Darby and asked eagerly, “What was that he said to you? About me?”
“Only a horse compliment,” Darby replied. “He is a Kentuckian, you know. He says you stand on your feet like a thoroughbred”.
All through the cold spring Hood pursued Buck Preston whenever he could get down to Richmond. She was a true beauty, and she was smart, but she was also young and coquettish and a born flirt. Caught up in the midst of war, where it seemed like the handsome scions of every important family of th
e South were trooping weekly through Richmond—all for her taking—she was simply overwhelmed. And now came perhaps the handsomest and most famous and eligible bachelor of them all, thirty-two-year-old Major General John Bell Hood, as deadly earnest about courting Buck Preston as he was about killing Yankees.
Trouble was, Buck couldn’t make up her mind. As Mrs. Chesnut observed, “Buck, the very sweetest woman I ever knew, had a knack of being ‘fallen in love with’ at sight and never being ‘fallen out of love with.’ But then,” she added ominously, “there seemed a spell upon her lovers—so many were killed or died of the effects of their wounds,” and she went on to enumerate five of Buck’s fallen swains. One young visitor to the Chesnuts was teased about whether he was courting Buck. “I would rather face a Yankee battery,” he said, declaring that whoever fell in love with her, “You will see his name next in the list of killed and wounded.” The statement turned out to be prophetic.
The next fateful battle in the east found Hood away from the army. Lee had sent Longstreet’s corps south of Richmond to scrounge up food and forage when yet another Union commander—this time “Fighting Joe” Hooker—was appointed by the Lincoln administration. Hooker quickly attempted to get around Lee’s flank near the village of Chancellorsville, but the effort came to naught when Lee—with only half his army present—intercepted and routed him using the now legendary Jackson to sneak around and attack him from the flank. Here though, the Confederates were deprived of their ablest field commander when Jackson was accidentally shot down in the dark by his own men. Hood, who had tried to model himself in Jackson’s style, was deeply distressed at the news of the death and wrote so to Lee, who responded with a long letter that pierced the core of the Confederacy’s military dilemma in 1863 and on to the end of the war: “I agree with you also in believing that our Army would be invincible if it could be properly organized and officered. There never were such men in an Army before. They will go anywhere and do anything if properly led. But there is the difficulty—proper commanders—where can they be obtained?”
The pain and worry in Lee’s tone was inescapable. It wasn’t the loss of Jackson alone; every battle seemed to take a heavy toll on experienced, high-caliber officers both in Lee’s army and in the Confederate forces in the west. Colonels commanding regiments were shot down before they could make brigadier, brigadiers were lost before they got division command, and so on. Of the 425 men who reached the grade of general in the Confederate army, 77 were killed in battle and a far larger number wounded. By comparison, of the 583 individuals who served as generals in the Union army, only 47 were killed—18 percent and 8 percent, respectively. Two years into the war, the success of the Confederacy was largely due to the leadership of its officer corps, which was taught, à la Napoleon, to lead par exemple, thus exposing them to great dangers in combat. The simple fact was that the Confederacy was running out of good officer material, and Lee—and, presumably, Hood—knew it and deplored it.
In any event, huddled in winter quarters during the cold months of 1862—63, Hood—when he was not in Richmond courting Buck—was preparing for the big spring and summer campaign, which would take them north through Maryland and on up to the sleepy town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
Hood recorded that his division during this time was in “splendid condition.” Lee was in search of a big victory, badly needed, one that he hoped would cut the war short. His opponent this time was General George Meade, who replaced the hapless “Fighting Joe” Hooker after his debacle at Chancellorsville. All through June the Army of Northern Virginia advanced through the Valley of the Shenandoah, then crossed the Potomac, and was making its way toward Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, when it was intercepted, almost by accident, at Gettysburg on the 1 st of July, 1863. A division had detoured into the town to visit a shoe factory they heard was there and found, instead, part of the federal army.
Most of Lee’s army, including Hood’s division, did not arrive on the field until late in the night or the following morning. Hood recorded that he got there about daybreak. The previous day’s battle had seen the Union infantry shoved back by the Confederates through the town and up onto a rocky north-south eminence ominously called Cemetery Ridge, where they entrenched and braced for an attack. Lee’s forces were spread out opposite in what has been called a “fish hook,” with the shank at the southern end and the barb twisting around the town of Gettysburg to the north. Hood’s division occupied the end of the Confederate line—the eye of the fish hook—on the extreme left flank of the federal forces. That flank was anchored by a black rock-faced mountain, several hundred feet high, known as Little Round Top.
Lee was determined to attack Meade there and then, despite Longstreet’s plea to wait for the division of General George Pickett to arrive on the field. “I do not like to go into battle with one boot off,” Longstreet remarked to Hood, but Lee had already told Hood, “The enemy is here and if we do not whip him, he will whip us.” And so the fate was sealed.
The plan that day was that General Richard S. Ewell, who had replaced Jackson as Second Corps commander, would open a demonstration to the north near the barb of the fish hook. The newly formed Third Corps, under General A. P. Hill, would hold the center but not attack. The big show fell on Longstreet’s First Corps, which was to move in line opposite the federals at the southern end of the hook, then attack en echelon, obliquely from south to north—by brigades and divisions—sweeping up the Emmitsburg Road, which ran alongside Cemetery Ridge, in front of the federals and driving them back on themselves. It was a very complicated scheme of battle, for it required supreme coordination to maneuver twenty thousand men in twelve brigades to a timed objective—gathering strength as they came along like an avalanche—and of course the forty thousand federals in that part of the line would not just be sitting there watching them. Longstreet, unhappy with the arrangement and said to be in a sulk, moved his corps ponderously all that morning and most of the afternoon, placing Hood’s division, and that of Lafayette McLaws, in their jump-off positions.
Hood occupied the southernmost flank of the Confederate line. Just before he reached position astride the Emmitsburg Road, he sent scouts to find out just how far the federal left flank to his front extended. He was astonished to learn that it extended no farther than Round Top, and that by simply marching around to the southeast behind Round Top he could “assault the enemy in flank and rear” and also overwhelm all the Union wagon trains, which were parked there. It seemed to Hood an imminently more sensible design than the one Lee had concocted—namely attacking north along the Emmitsburg Road, where his men would be exposed to fire not only from their front, but from their flank and rear as well as they passed across the federal front.
Hood dispatched a messenger to Longstreet to offer this suggestion. Longstreet said No. “General Lee’s orders are to attack up the Emmitsburg Pike,” he told the messenger, who galloped off to deliver it to Hood, who, meantime, had opened up with his artillery batteries on the federals opposite him. Hood then sent a second request to Longstreet, asking that the attack be suspended and that he be allowed to move around the federal flank. He told Longstreet that he “feared nothing could be accomplished by an attack.” Again Longstreet sent the reply, “General Lee’s orders are to attack up the Emmitsburg Road.” In urgent frustration, Hood sent Longstreet a third request to call off the attack and suggested that the corps commander come up and look for himself. But the answer from Longstreet came back as before, “General Lee’s orders are to attack up the Emmitsburg Road.” Hood had just digested this bad news when a colonel on Longstreet’s staff galloped up and personally repeated the instructions. Hood threw up his hands and gave the order to attack. As his brigades were moving out, Longstreet himself appeared on the scene, whereupon Hood reiterated to him his fears that the attack as planned was doomed. Again he asked to be allowed to turn the flank at Round Top, and again, for a final time, the answer was No. “We must obey the orders of General Lee,” Longstreet declared,
and so Hood went riding off into the smoke and dust of battle after his troops.
Hood’s attack did not explicitly follow the plan that Lee had ordered, anyway; most of the division, rather than moving obliquely up the road, wound up attacking easterly to get at the Union infantry occupying an unholy spot of rock and boulders known as the Devil’s Den. Hood himself had ridden on northward to a peach orchard, where, about twenty minutes into the fight, as he recollected it, he was shot down by a shell fragment that shattered his left arm; he was carried off on a stretcher. The rest, of course, is history. Longstreet’s three-hour assault that day shoved the federals back, but it was confused and poorly executed and failed to rout them. Next morning, having tested the Union right the first day and its left the second, Lee decided he would now try to break its center. To this end he summoned General George Pickett and ordered him to lead an attack of some twelve thousand men on July 3, which resulted in the disaster of Pickett’s Charge and the Confederate defeat at Gettysburg.
Hood rode the two hundred miles back to the Shenandoah Valley in an ambulance with wounded General Wade Hampton. It was an excruciating journey. The doctors had managed to save his arm, but barely, and it would be withered and worthless to him from then on. Hampton, Hood recalled, “was so badly wounded he was unable to sit up, whereas I could not sit down.” The price the Confederacy paid at Gettysburg was dear indeed: seventeen of the fifty-two generals present were casualties, five killed and the others wounded or captured, including the indomitable Barksdale who had offered Lee “a bridge of dead Yankees” back at Fredericksburg. Eighteen colonels were killed or captured, and in excess of twenty-five thousand Confederate troops had become casualties. Union casualties were almost as high, except for the generals. Colonel Arthur Fremantle, a British officer of the famous Coldstream Guards who had been sent to observe the Confederate army and who was present at Gettysburg, said to his companions, “Don’t you see your system feeds upon itself? You cannot fill the places of these men. Your troops do wonders, but every time at a cost you cannot afford.” Fremantle summed up by praising the spirit of Lee’s army at Gettysburg. “But,” he added, “they will never do it again.” In this prediction he was sadly mistaken.