Hood’s wound was tended at Staunton and then at Charlottesville, and, finally, in August he was moved to Richmond, where undoubtedly he resumed his courtship of Buck Preston and also was reported to have criticized Lee’s action at Gettysburg. At about that time it had been decided to hurry most of Longstreet’s corps by rail out west near the Tennessee-Georgia border to counter the threat posed to General Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee by the federal general William S. Rosecrans, who was massing large numbers of Union troops near Chattanooga for a push on Atlanta. In the second week of September, Hood’s veteran division moved through Richmond to board the train in its circuitous passage into northern Georgia, and Hood, “but partially recovered,” could not restrain himself from “[placing his] horse upon the train and following in their wake.”
Rosecrans had nearly made a fatal mistake in dividing his army into three wings and marching them southeast out of Chattanooga around the ends and through the gaps of the Lookout Mountain massif that stretched nearly forty miles across the triangle that connected the Tennessee-Alabama-Georgia border. What it meant was that each of Rosecrans’s wings was nearly twenty miles from the next—more than a day’s march away—and thus none would be able to come to the support of the others. When Bragg learned of this obvious tactical blunder, he gleefully determined to lay a trap for one of the divided wings and crush it with two-to-one odds. The wing he first selected belonged to General George Thomas, coming down in the center of the federal formation through a gap smack in the middle of Lookout Mountain. Next, Bragg schemed to turn on one of the other two Union wings and administer the same treatment. Perhaps never in the war so far had the Confederates had such an opportunity—the virtual destruction of a Union army—with numerical odds for once favorable to themselves.
But it was not to be. Indecisiveness, confusion, and, above all, delays by Southern divisional commanders alerted Thomas to the peril, and before the trap could be sprung, the federal general withdrew his corps to a strong position in the rugged mountainous country where the Confederates could not immediately get at him. A similar attempt to ambush the northernmost Union column also failed, for the same reasons, and by September 17, 1863, the three federal wings had converged in the foothills of the mountains near a blackwater creek in northern Georgia called Chickamauga, which in the Cherokee tongue meant “river of death.” With their backs to the river of death and the entire federal army of sixty-five thousand in front of them, Bragg’s Army of Tennessee nevertheless enjoyed the knowledge that its own forces totaled about the same number as the enemy’s—a rare occasion. Fighting began to break out down the line the following day.
Meantime, Hood arrived on the battlefield. According to his memoirs, he mounted his big roan, called Jeff Davis, in the boxcar and, with his mangled arm in a sling, “had [his] horse to leap from the train,” and joined his division already in action. Bragg gave Hood command of the forces in the Confederate center—nearly a full corps. Night ended that day’s fight, and by sunup next morning, Bragg was ready to begin the assault he believed would grind up Rosecrans. Again, it was not to be—not that day at least. The same sort of confusion and poor intelligence that had marred the plan to trap Thomas now infected the Army of Tennessee at Chickamauga. Believing that he had located a flank of Rosecrans’s army, Bragg ordered an attack, only to find that it was not the flank at all, and his troops were in danger of annihilation. He withdrew from that situation, but basically the fight had gotten out of his control—it was simply soldiers versus soldiers in a melee of murdering in the tangled Chickamauga thickets. Night closed on the field without much of anything being accomplished on either side.
Next morning, September 20—a Sunday—Bragg ordered a big dawn attack by the right wing of his army, commanded by Bishop Polk, but the sun was four hours high in the sky before the movement got underway. As soon as Polk’s five divisions were thrown into the fight, Bragg ordered his left wing into the fray. These men, under the overall command of Longstreet but led on the field by Hood, smashed into the federal center and splintered it. In the midst of this, about noon, Hood dashed to the head of the smoke-hazy battlefield to realign one of his divisions that had gotten at angles with the federals in their front. This done, he watched with grim satisfaction as his men rushed forward to roll over the Union breastworks, killing and scattering foe and capturing prisoners. While he watched, a bullet shattered the thigh of his right leg, and, reeling in shock, he fell—“strange to say, since I was commanding five divisions—into the arms of some of the troops of my old brigade, which I had directed so long a period, and upon so many fields of battle.”
Thus ended Hood’s part in the battle of Chickamauga, but he got much if not most of the credit for its success. “Go ahead, and keep ahead of everything,” were his final instructions to his staff as stretcher bearers arrived to carry him off the field. In the hospital, surgeons were not sure his life could be saved, let alone his mutilated leg; they amputated at upper thigh, leaving a stump of only a few inches. Newspaper reports quickly circulated that Hood was dead. Friends of the fallen general began to grieve—including Robert E. Lee—but a few days later dispatches were received that he was alive and recuperating at the home of one of his divisional colonels in the Armuchee Valley about fifteen miles from the battlefield.
Meanwhile, Bragg’s Confederates had driven Rosecrans from the field and won the most important victory in the history of the Army of Tennessee. Unfortunately, Bragg failed to capitalize on it by thoroughly destroying Rosecrans’s army, a failure due in no small measure to the stubborn action of Union general “Pap” Thomas, Hood’s old West Point instructor and formerly his superior officer in the Second Cavalry, who refused to retreat in confusion like everybody else and held up the Confederates enough to earn himself the nickname, “The Rock of Chickamauga.” It would not be long before Hood would face Thomas again, this time in a dead earnest death-lock at Nashville.
3
Crazy Like a Fox
Just a couple of years earlier they were calling “Cump” Sherman crazy. In fact, in the autumn of 1861 the War Department had relieved him of his duties as head of the military department of the Cumberland at Louisville, Kentucky, and sent him home on sick leave for what in those days would have been called a nervous breakdown. Naturally, the newspapers had a field day, declaring that Sherman was “insane” and “stark mad.” Mostly, his crime was that he had told the truth, but with his distracting personal habits of fidgeting and nervousness, the truth got blown out of proportion. What Sherman had done wrong, among other things, was to inform the secretary of war that it was going to take two hundred thousand Union soldiers to beat the Confederacy just in the Mississippi Valley. In 1861, who would have dreamed of such a thing? And so he was branded a nervous Nellie and a nut. But he hadn’t been far from wrong; in fact, he was something of a visionary.
Before the outbreak of hostilities, Sherman was the superintendent of the Louisiana State Military Academy. On Christmas Eve, 1860, he was having dinner with one of his professors, David F. Boyd, a Virginian who taught languages. There was a knock at the door, and someone handed Sherman the mail, including a copy of the local newspaper announcing that South Carolina had just seceded from the Union. As Sherman read the passage containing the formal withdrawal language, he broke down and “cried like a little child,” as Boyd recalled it, but as soon as he composed himself, he delivered a prophetic oratory to his astonished dinner guest: “You people of the South don’t know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end!” Sherman went on to compare the resources of the North with those of the South, as well as the determination of the United States not to allow the Union to be broken, finally predicting to Boyd, “You are bound to fail. . . . If your people will but stop and think, they must see that in the end you will surely fail.”
Nearly four years later, here was Sherman at the threshold of Atlanta: the right man in the right place at the right time, and wit
h the very means to bring his prophecy true—namely, the Army of the Tennessee, one of the two most destructive military forces ever assembled on the planet (the other was with Grant, up around Richmond). Nobody was calling Cump Sherman crazy now.
William Tecumseh Sherman was born in Ohio in 1820, son of a state supreme court justice and prominent lawyer, but upon his father’s death the family “became very poor,” as Sherman remembered. He was happy to get an appointment to West Point in 1836, where, in 1840, he graduated sixth in his class. The tall, lanky, red-headed second lieutenant, barely twenty, was immediately shipped off to Florida to fight Seminole Indians who were refusing to join the “trail of tears” to the Oklahoma Indian Territory. Finishing his tour without killing any Indians, Sherman was relieved from Florida and, in an ironic but not unusual military fashion, was posted during the next several years to half a dozen Southern garrisons, which took him through practically every inch of the vast battleground over which he would lead the Army of the Tennessee twenty years down the road. As Sherman himself put it many years later, “The knowledge thus acquired was of infinite use to me. . . .”
In the summer of 1846 Sherman sailed around Cape Horn to California, stopping over in Rio de Janeiro, where he went to the opera; Valparaiso, Chile, which did not impress him; and finally on to Monterey, the capital of what was then called Upper California. When Sherman arrived, the state was in a curious flux involving the Mexican War, the discovery of gold, and a local insurrection stemming from a dispute between Colonel John C. (“Pathfinder”) Frémont and General Stephen Kearny. Typically, Sherman found himself embroiled in all these events. In 1850 he returned east long enough to marry Ellen Ewing, daughter of the secretary of the interior, in a fancy wedding attended by the president of the United States and practically every other political luminary of the day. In 1853 Sherman resigned from the army and began operating a bank, first in San Francisco and later in New York. Both failed, and he went to work for his brother-in-law’s Kansas law firm as a bill collector. But that didn’t work out either, and by 1859 he was so hard-pressed for money that he took the position of superintendent at the new Louisiana military academy, with fifty-six students and an annual salary of $3,500. Two years later, Civil War would change his fortunes forever.
Outside of Atlanta in July 1864, John Bell Hood did not wait long to validate General Schofield’s prediction that he would hit Sherman “like hell,” and he proposed to do it in such a way as to demonstrate his disdain for fighting behind breastworks. When Hood assumed command of the Army of Tennessee, it disgusted him that entrenching had become habit. Under Joe Johnston, every time the Confederates halted, they got out their spades and axes and constructed pits, trenches, and other earthworks, usually protected in front by an abatis of felled trees with sharpened stakes pointing toward the enemy. A proponent of the offensive, Hood deplored this practice because he thought it impaired the morale and fighting spirit of the men. “A soldier cannot fight for a period of one or two months constantly behind breastworks, with the training that he is equal to four or five of the enemy by reason of the security of his position, and then be expected to engage in pitched battle and prove as intrepid and impetuous as his brother, who had been taught to rely solely on his own valor.”
He stated his case in a nutshell: He knew the Union army always dug entrenchments when they halted, but to attack those fortifications he would ideally have wished to lead men who had never served behind them.
Often recalling his experiences in the hallowed Army of Northern Virginia, where, he declared, breastworks were frowned on under Robert E. Lee, Hood probably would have been surprised to learn that in his absence from that army during the long recuperation from his amputation and his subsequent transfer to the Army of Tennessee, Lee’s men had begun digging breastworks just like everybody else. In any case, from the moment he took command of the Army of Tennessee, Hood determined that his army was going to have to go on the offensive if it ever hoped to defeat the bluecoats and their overwhelming numbers, and he was resolute that his men must learn to get out from behind their breastworks and go on the attack, even if it killed them.
On July 20, 1864, little more than two days after taking command, Hood hurled two-thirds of his army at the right of Pap Thomas’s fifty thousand spread-out federals, who were anchoring Sherman’s right flank north of Atlanta, down by Peachtree Creek. The idea was to catch the bluecoats in motion up against the creek and destroy them before they could get back across. But something went wrong. First, the attack was delayed several hours for some unknown reason, and, when it was finally launched, Thomas was not exactly where he was supposed to be. By nightfall, the Confederates were back in their previous positions at a cost of five thousand men. Hood had gained nothing. This was the first of four attacks, or “sorties,” that Hood would order to decide the battle of Atlanta; it was called the battle of Peachtree Creek.
Sherman, noting that Hood’s attack “illustrated the future tactics of the enemy and put [us] on our guard,” quickly closed up his lines, thus depriving the Confederates of similar opportunities in the future. Next day, Hood pulled his army back to a new, shorter line closer to the city and ordered Hardee’s corps on a nightmare twelve-mile march south and then east, under cover of darkness, to come up on the Union left flank and launch a surprise dawn attack the following morning. It was a plan worthy of a Lee or a Stonewall Jackson, and, in fact, Hood, who had learned much under the tutelage of those two military novas, practically copied the strategy from Jackson’s famous sneak around Hooker at Chancellorsville. But this assault also was delayed, and it was not until noon that Hood heard the ferocious sounds of battle as the Confederates struck General James B. McPherson’s Army of the Tennessee.
McPherson, commander of one of Sherman’s three armies, himself had been conferring with Sherman back at an old house he was using for headquarters when the fighting broke out. He immediately excused himself and galloped back toward his position. Only a few minutes later, Sherman recalled, “One of McPherson’s staff, with his horse covered with sweat, dashed up to the porch and reported that General McPherson—Hood’s friend and West Point classmate—was either ‘killed or a prisoner.’” Within the hour the former proved true, and the body of the handsome and popular young commander was brought back to Sherman’s headquarters and laid out on a door someone had taken off its hinges. Riding accidentally into a Confederate position in some woods, McPherson had been ordered to surrender, but he cavalierly tipped his hat and dashed away at a gallop, only to be shot down.
All that sweltering July 22 afternoon—in what is usually called the battle of Atlanta—the Southerners hurled themselves at Sherman’s men, in some cases overrunning their positions and capturing prisoners, flags, artillery, and the like. At midpoint Hood threw his old corps, temporarily under command of General Benjamin Franklin Cheatham, into the fight. Tennessee Private Sam Watkins remembered that the roar of battle “sounded like unbottled thunder.” Watkins’s regiment was one of the few that actually took some federal breastworks, but soon the Union artillery was opened up on them. Watkins had taken refuge in a federal trench when he said, “A cannon ball came tearing down the works, cutting a soldier’s head off, spattering his brains all over my face. . . .” The attack nearly accomplished Hood’s designs, but nearly was not good enough. By dark the result was about the same as it had been two days earlier—nothing much accomplished except the loss of nearly eight thousand men and possibly revenge for the killing of Bishop Polk a month earlier, although Hood remarked of McPherson’s death, “No soldier fell in the enemy’s ranks, whose loss caused me equal regret.”
From the 22nd to the 27th of July things were fairly quiet on all fronts, except for the incessant skirmishing and sniping between the lines. But then Hood detected that Sherman was moving large bodies of infantry around by his right flank; it was the very plan Sherman had been discussing with McPherson the day he was killed. So Hood conformed to the Union movements by making shifts to t
he left, quickly realizing that Sherman’s objective was to sever the last of four rail lines connecting Atlanta with the rest of the Confederacy.
Following McPherson’s death, the Army of the Tennessee had passed into the hands of General O. O. Howard, a one-armed, thirtytwo-year-old West Point graduate, and it was this army Sherman had sent sidling around counterclockwise to get at the Macon Railroad. To frustrate that attempt, Hood dispatched again his old corps, now under the command of the newly arrived thirty-year-old General Stephen Dill Lee, who had superseded Cheatham. Lee’s orders were to get into position to block Howard’s advance and wait for A. P. Stewart’s corps to come up that night and smash into the unsuspecting federal flank first thing in the morning. Like the maneuvering of July 22, Hood’s was a daring, even brilliant plan, but when Lee found Howard near a meeting house called Ezra Church, instead of setting up to block him as he’d been told, Lee pitched into him, and a savage battle commenced. One private, noting the stretcher bearers shuttling back and forth, remarked, “Their litters . . . were as bloody as if hogs had been stuck on them.” Before the afternoon was over, Stewart’s corps had been sucked into the fray, and, again, the result of half a dozen brave charges and equally brave repulses was not much more than a body count, this time about twenty-five hundred Confederates, compared with seven hundred federals. The battle of Ezra Church marked the end of Hood’s third sortie.