Götterdämmerung in Tennessee
Hood’s 1864 Campaign
Roland Green
The roots of military catastrophes often go deep into the past. One might argue that the disastrous Confederate campaign in Tennessee in 1864 started with the decision of a Kentucky family named Hood to send their son John Bell to West Point. He barely graduated, and when the Civil War started, he went with his adopted state of Texas.
Commanding a brigade of Texans who were natural heads-down fighters like him, Hood distinguished himself early in the war. By 1864 he was a lieutenant general commanding a corps in the Confederate Army of Tennessee. He would also, in any modern army, have been in a veterans’ hospital, after having one arm crippled at Gettysburg and a leg shot off at Chickamauga. How much laudanum (liquid opium) he took to fight chronic pain remains a mystery; a reasonable guess is that it was occasionally enough to cloud his judgment.
Certainly his handling of his corps was less skilled than his work at the brigade and division level. Certainly also he showed ethical flaws in writing to Confederate President Jefferson Davis, impugning the competence of his army commander, Joseph Johnston.
This might not have made such a difference, except that Davis did not like Johnston, blaming him for the fall of Vicksburg the year before. It also did not help that Johnston had retreated eighty miles in the face of William Tecumseh Sherman’s advance on Atlanta. Atlanta was a transportation nexus and an industrial center that the South could not afford to lose. It was also a symbol of southern resistance. If Grant remained bogged down in front of Petersburg and Sherman got bogged down in front of Atlanta, it might swing the November elections in the North against the Republican administration.
A more aggressive strategy seemed worth a try. So Hood tried it, as soon as he replaced Johnston. He lost 20,000 men in three battles, without driving Sherman away. Then Sherman swung almost his whole army around to the south, cutting the last railroad into Atlanta. To save his army, Hood had to abandon the city.
That should have been the end of Hood and possibly the war. However, Hood was able to revert to a delaying strategy, raiding Sherman’s long railroad supply line back to Tennessee. He never quite broke it. Sherman’s repair crews were too good. But Sherman had to keep a large part of his army guarding his tunnels and bridges against Confederate raiders, reducing the strength he could bring to a decisive battle that would crush Hood once and for all.
This impasse put pressure on both parties. Sherman could not advance any farther as long as Hood’s army was intact and mobile. Hood was in the same situation, and it is possible that it also offended his sensibilities not to be able to lay Sherman’s scalp at the feet of Sally Preston, a flirtatious Charleston belle to whom he believed himself betrothed.
Jefferson Davis may have increased the pressure on Hood by speaking publicly of planting the Confederate flag on the banks of the Ohio River. He may have also increased Union knowledge of Confederate plans, not a good move, either.
So history saw the spectacle of two large armies trying to get at each other by marching in opposite directions. On November 15, Sherman burned Atlanta and took his stripped-down army off toward Savannah, planning on living off the rich and untouched agricultural heart of Georgia. Hood sidestepped to northern Alabama to be connected by rail to a food-producing area, loaded his wagons, and headed north.
This was a risky undertaking on Sherman’s part and outright folly on Hood’s. Sherman’s army had to keep moving or starve, and it was weak in artillery and cavalry. Hood would have done better to maneuver on Sherman’s flank (either one would have offered good foraging) and cut off Sherman’s detachments with cavalry. (That cavalry would have been under Nathan Bedford Forrest, about whose qualities nothing more need be said.)
But Hood was reluctant to retrace his steps to Georgia, and it was a long way. What he did instead was plunge north with an army of 38,000 men (all arms), the largest Confederate force left outside Virginia. He was plunging north, dependent on supplies brought forward by half-starved draft animals or foraged from a fought-over countryside. He even spun dreams of recruiting 20,000 men from Tennessee, although by this point in the war it is likely that every male Tennessean willing to bear arms for the Confederacy was already in a gray or butternut uniform.
Hood did believe in moving fast, however, and this military virtue nearly paid big dividends. When he marched south, Sherman had left his senior subordinate, George Thomas, to quite literally hold the fort in Nashville. Properly reinforced, Thomas would have an unbeatable edge in numbers. However, right now those potential reinforcements were scattered all over the upper Midwest. If Hood was lucky, he could defeat Thomas in detail.
After crossing into Tennessee on November 21, Hood marched straight for Nashville. On November 29, he reached Spring Hill, about thirty miles south of the city. So, very nearly, did two detached corps of Union veterans under John M. Schofield. If Hood could force Schofield to fight his way through superior numbers, the defeating of Thomas in detail might well begin.
It still isn’t entirely clear what went wrong for the Confederates. They had marched fast and far, most were hungry, some were already barefoot, and their leaders seem to have been stricken with complacency. (Certainly Hood was—he went to bed early, possibly full of laudanum, and resisted all warnings of Union movement.)
Those warnings were not hallucinations. Having sent his artillery and supply train on ahead, Schofield and his subordinates slipped nearly 20,000 men within four hundred yards of the Confederate pickets.
When Hood woke up, he was apoplectic. Schofield’s army was digging in at the town of Franklin nine miles to the north, using some old earthworks and busily creating more.
Hood’s tactics that day had all the subtlety of a bull charging a matador. Never mind that one whole corps of infantry, most of the artillery, and all of Forrest’s cavalry were not yet up. He would attack the enemy now, where he was—and test the courage of the men he blamed for Atlanta and Spring Hill through being too cowardly to press home a charge.
That accusation may have been bluster, both then and later. But made under circumstances that guaranteed it would be remembered until the end of time, it was a mistake.
It was late afternoon of an unseasonably warm Indian summer day when Hood launched two corps of infantry straight at Schofield’s line. They made a splendid spectacle, 18,000 men in immaculate formation, battle flags waving, the fading light still enough to make swords and musket barrels gleam a grander spectacle than Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, and just as certainly doomed.
The attack was in the best (or worst) “hi-diddle diddle, right up the middle” tradition, over more than a mile of open ground that offered neither cover nor concealment. The Confederate corps on the right got some help from a Union tactical error in deploying a heavy picket line ahead of the entrenchment. The pickets had to get back to their own lines before the artillery could open fire. Friend and foe tumbled into the trenches, some of the most intense hand-to-hand fighting of the war erupted, and for a few minutes it looked as if Hood’s tactical madness might pay off.
However, a Union brigade taking a break behind the lines thought it had been ordered to counterattack. They did this so effectively that they halted any Confederate breakthrough, and earned a brevet major generalship for their commander, who had initially tried to stop them.
On the Confederate left, the Union artillery had a clear field of fire, and the Confederates took punishment all the way to the Union lines. Here they also suffered their single most serious loss—Irish-born division commander Patrick Cleburne, a splendid leader and fighter, who might have commanded a corps except that he favored freeing and arming the slaves . . .
Within two hours the assault had irrevocably failed. The Confederate problem now was to get their men who were trapped before the Union trenches back through the killing zone behind them to friendly lines. Doing this kept the fighting going for three more hours, until well after dark, and it only died down after the Union Army started withdrawing over the newly repaired bridges across the Harpeth River to their rear.
The Battle of Franklin need never have been fought. Schofield had planned no more than a rearguard action, to allow a safe crossing of the Harpeth. What he got was one of the decisive victories of the war, in which he inflicted 7,500 casualties (including six dead generals) while losing only a third that many.
What Hood should have received was a strongly worded order to commit seppuku, or at least to resign his command and retire to his estates. He had not only fought the battle, he had fought it as an old-fashioned frontal assault, when by 1864 any reasonably sophisticated ten-year-old knew that was no way to run a battle.
So Schofield’s weary men hurried north to join the defenders of Nashville and catch up on their sleep, while those Confederates still fit to fight slogged after them, in weather that rapidly grew worse. Schofield’s men enjoyed the amenities of a well-supplied, dug-in army; Hood’s men shivered in hastily dug field fortifications, staring across their enemy’s positions at the Tennessee State Capitol.
Some of them had other things to stare at. Hood sent Forrest’s cavalry and a brigade of infantry off to Murfreesboro, thirty miles west. “Why?” the reader may well ask. “As a diversion” is the answer. A threat to Murfreesboro (on the railroad) was supposed to force the Union Army to send help to the garrison of the town.
It did no such thing. The Union garrison in Murfreesboro squatted down behind their defenses. The Union commander in Nashville watched Hood’s army sit outside the city like a stoned groundhog, all the while fashioning his army into an effective club.
That Union commander was George Thomas, nicknamed “Old Slow Trot” because of his riding style. This did not accurately describe his mental processes; he was probably the best tactician of the war on either side. But many people confused his methodical approach with slowness, and as he was also a Virginian who had remained loyal to the Union, there were long-standing suspicions about his motives.
In any case, Thomas was methodically going about solving his problems. He had to organize a motley crew of replacements into combat units. He had to equip thousands of dismounted cavalrymen with horses, for pursuit of a beaten enemy. (To this end, he confiscated Vice President–elect Andrew Johnson’s carriage horses.) Finally, he had to convince the high command that he was not George McClellan, unwilling to fight at all.
The worst offender in the high command back east was, of all people, the normally unflappable Ulysses S. Grant. He and Thomas were not friends, but during the first half of December, Thomas might have been pardoned for wondering if Grant was a worse enemy than John Bell Hood.
Grant’s hectoring telegrams arose from a rare attack of nerves. With the war so nearly won, he was afraid that Hood, a wild card if ever one wore uniform, could cause major problems. Suppose he got away from Nashville because Thomas was too slow? He could march north to the Ohio, as Jefferson Davis had foretold. Or he might march east, to join up with Lee, giving the Gray Fox the strength to break out of Petersburg and move south to crush Sherman.
With all due respect to Ulysses S. Grant, he was giving himself nightmares. Hood had neither the food, the clothing, nor the draft animals to march north, and not enough ammunition to fight when he got there. The same limits applied to marching across a winter-bound Virginia, not to mention that the Army of the Potomac fighting close to its main bases could have tackled both Lee and Hood at once. If Hood did the sensible thing and went back the way he had come, he was admitting defeat, and could be rounded up in the spring.
The one thing Thomas’s skill could not control was the weather. In the second week in December, it turned bitterly cold and the ground was a glaze of ice, too slippery for horses to move. Rather than undertake to teach the cavalry mounts to ski, Thomas held up any movement until the ground thawed.
Grant had a conniption. He had actually prepared a telegram relieving Thomas of command, and was in Washington preparing to go to Tennessee, when the telegraph line went down. The telegraph officer pocketed Grant’s telegram and crossed his fingers.
When the line came back up, the first thing to come through was a day-old telegram from Thomas, indicating that the weather was improving and he would attack tomorrow. An hour and a half later, another telegram came through, announcing a successful attack on the 15th and promising another on the 16th.
Thomas was true to his word. On the 15th he had spent part of the day twirling his club, because the Confederate groundhog was hidden in a pea-soup fog. Then he brought the club down hard, holding the Confederate right with a strong diversionary attack while pressing back their left. On the 16th Thomas repeated the same tactical combination, and broke through the system of mutually supporting redoubts on the Confederate left. (Hood was too short of artillery ammunition to make that arrangement work.)
This time there were groundhog parts scattered all over the hills around Nashville. Out of 55,000 men, Thomas lost no more than 3,000. Hood lost 6,000 out of 25,000 on the battlefield, and eventually more than that to exposure and desertion as Thomas sent his remounted cavalry in pursuit. Hood might have lost everything if on the 17th Nathan Bedford Forrest and a brigade of infantry hadn’t fought an effective rearguard action.
It was the end of the war in the West, as both armies got tired of fighting the weather while trying to fight each other. It was also the end of Hood’s career, as he had compounded all of his previous offenses by not giving a full and accurate report of the campaign. It was also the end of his betrothal to Sally Preston, although he later married and fathered eleven children before dying of yellow fever in 1879.
His soldiers had long since composed the best epitaph for their general’s career:
So now I’m marching southward.
My heart is full of woe.
I’m going back to Georgia
To see my Uncle Joe.
You may talk about your Beauregard
And sing of General Lee.
But the gallant Hood of Texas
Played Hell in Tennessee.