hood_tennessee

The Gallant Hood of Texas Played Hell in Tennessee

The fall of Atlanta was a crippling blow to the southern Confederacy, more than losing a major industrial center and rail hub the loss was a severe blow to the morale of the south. Confederate President Jefferson Davis arrived to try to give some cheer to the army and the local populace and predicted that Sherman, who had embarked on his infamous march to the sea, would suffer the fate of the legions of Napoleon in the interior of Russia. Buoyed by the presence of his friend and commander-in-chief, Confederate General John Bell Hood, true to form, was still full of fight even if he was missing a leg and the use of an arm. He planned to circle around behind Sherman and his blue horde, cut off his line of supply to Chattanooga and then attack his withering forces piecemeal. That done, he looked ahead to an invasion of Tennessee, replenish themselves and drive the Yankees back behind the Ohio River. President Davis hoped this would be decisive in strengthening the hand of the peace Democrats in the north who had recently lost the presidential race to Lincoln.

Union General Ulysses Grant was dismissive of such ambitions, however, there was a real danger. Sherman had become so obsessed with taking Atlanta that he seemed to forget that the real goal was the destruction of the Confederate army and that Confederate army, battered and bloodied though it was, remained in the field and remained a threat. Belatedly realizing something would have to be done Sherman left one corps of his army to hold Atlanta (mostly a burned out ruin at that point) and with the rest of his army set off in pursuit of the peg-legged General Hood and his 40,000 Confederates. As usual though, Sherman was reluctant to meet the southerners head on but neither did things work out well for Hood. Federal garrisons at Allatoona and Resaca repelled Confederate attacks and the command was hesitant to confront the forces of Sherman still glowing from their devastation of Atlanta. General Hood took his army into Alabama in late October and Sherman had no desire to pursue him. Instead, he dispatched two corps under General John Schofield and General David Stanley to reinforce George H. Thomas to oppose Hood while he and his troops cut ties with Washington and set out on their infamous march to the sea.

General Hood decided to gamble everything on a bold offensive into Tennessee. His belief that this would draw Sherman out of Georgia in pursuit of him proved incorrect (the north had more than enough troops for Sherman to deal with any resistance he might meet while still having the Confederates outnumbered in Tennessee) but Hood hoped that he could smash the Yankees in Tennessee and then march on Kentucky, replenish his strength and then move east to link up with General Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia to defeat Grant and force recognition of the independence of the Confederacy at last. Certainly there was no lacking in ambitious and reckless audacity in such a plan. With three infantry corps commanded by generals Benjamin Cheatham, Stephen D. Lee and Alexander P. Stewart to be joined by the independent cavalry corps of Nathan Bedford Forrest the Army of Tennessee first clashed with their northern foes at the battle of Spring Hill.

There was nothing wrong with the basic Confederate strategy which was essentially an effort by Hood to replicate the daringly won victories of Lee and Jackson in Virginia where he had learned his trade. His plan was to defeat the Union forces under Thomas before they could unite and bring overwhelming numbers to bear. His first target was the 30,000 troops under Schofield at Pulaski. Hood took his 38,000 Confederates northward toward Columbia to cut off Schofield from Nashville and George H. Thomas. However, word of the Confederate march reached Schofield who immediately took his five divisions and retreated north on November 22 and just managed to win the race to Columbia where they dug in to repel the attack that was sure to come. However, Hood stuck to his basic strategy and left Stephen Lee to pin down the federals at Columbia while he took the rest of the army on a flanking march to Spring Hill some 18 miles to the north. In some ways the campaign at this point looked a lot like that through northeast Georgia before the fall of Atlanta with Union and Confederate roles reversed. As soon as Schofield spotted Confederates marching north he quickly abandoned his works and retreated north again.

Schofield realized the danger he was in and sent a division under George Wagner to race ahead to Spring Hill to hold the area until he arrived early on November 29. The blue coats arrived just in time to beat back the Confederate cavalry under Nathan Bedford Forrest that afternoon. The lead elements under Cheatham arrived on their heels and he sent a division under the fighting Irishman Patrick Cleburne in a rather ill-planned attack which the Yanks threw back with heavy losses. Hood fumed at Cheatham for losing the race but in any event Schofield did not wait to give battle and as soon as he reached Spring Hill continued his retreat north to Franklin, Tennessee. The tired and bloodied Confederates counted their ammunition and trudged on in pursuit having lost what some historians consider their only chance to make the campaign a victorious one. By the morning of November 30, 1864 General Schofield had most of his troops concentrated at Franklin. He did not really want to fight there but feared with Hood so close at his heels he would not be able to get his wagon train across the Harpeth River in time so was left with no choice but to dig in and make a stand at Franklin.

The Union troops dug in around Franklin while Wagner fought a rear guard action and this time Schofield took the extra precaution of sending troops across the river to protect his rear. The Union commander may have been uncomfortable but his crippled, chronically pained opponent was furious. More times than he cared to remember his army had been robbed of victory because of slowness to attack. He placed some of the blame on his predecessor and former commander General Joseph E. Johnston. The army had retreated so often under Johnston, Hood griped, that they had forgotten how to attack. Hood decided to make a massive frontal assault on the Union lines at Franklin. He had broken the enemy at Gaines Mill, at Chickamauga and he was convinced he could do it again. The story has also been repeated enough to be somewhat accepted that Hood intended to punish his army and purposely ordered them to make what was sure to be an extremely costly assault at best to put some iron in their backbones. Nonetheless, whatever the reason, even though Stephen Lee was not up yet, even though the Yankees were well entrenched and even though there was a great deal of open ground covered by Union guns the southerners would have to cross, General Hood ordered his men to charge.

The attack was one to dwarf even the famous charge of General Pickett at Gettysburg. That Indian summer afternoon the Yankees looked on in awe as 25,000 Confederates formed up in their long gray lines, crimson flags fluttering in the breeze and sunlight glinting on their bayonets. With a rebel yell they charged forward into a hail of federal fire. Losses were horrific but two federal brigades had stayed out in front of the trenches and were routed by Cleburne and Brown who were able to use the fleeing Yanks as cover to reach the main lines and break through in fierce hand to hand combat. Federal reserves moved in and counter-attacked, forcing the depleted Confederates back. Elsewhere southern units were pinned down or cut to pieces by enemy fire. Striking with the ferocity of an angry rattlesnake the carnage was not ended until nightfall forced a halt to the fighting though both side continued exchanging shots for hours more until midnight when General Schofield began pulling his rattled troops out and retreated to Nashville. Hood had lost 7,000 men in the attack, including 6 generals wounded, 6 more dead and 54 colonels killed or wounded. Among those slain was General Patrick Cleburne, States Rights Gist and Brigadier General John Adams who was the only general to have made the charge on horseback, sword in hand, like a knight of old. If there was any doubt about the courage and willingness of the Confederates to attack they were soundly dispelled by Franklin.

The problem was, proving the point meant that the Army of Tennessee would now be all but incapable of ever making such an attack again and they faced a stronger Union force in Nashville commanded by General George H. Thomas whose solidity on the defense had earned him the nickname of the Rock of Chickamauga. Still, the Union high command was greatly unnerved by General Hood and his offensive. Beyond the casualty figures there was the undeniable truth that thus far the federals had been giving ground and the rebels were gaining it. On the evening of December 1, 1864 Hood and his battered forces reached Nashville and began laying siege. No one could have expected much realistically. Reduced to a scant 25,000 men and deployed along a thinly stretched front of four miles with both flanks in the air they were in a much more vulnerable state than Thomas and his 50,000 federals sitting easy behind their fortifications. Even the unfailingly ferocious Hood had to admit that there was no possibility of attacking with his skeletal army, but honor would permit no retreat and so the southerners waited. The best the Confederates could hope for was that the Yankees would make a mistake and launch an attack that could be easily beaten. It was an unrealistic hope as, whether on the attack or defense, the north held all the cards.

The north was extremely apprehensive simply by the presence of the Confederate army. Nervous ever since Sherman decided to ignore the rebel army in preference to a raid on a helpless countryside both General Grant and the Secretary of War were anxious for Thomas to do something to destroy the Confederates or at least drive them out of Tennessee. Hood was waiting for reinforcements from across the Mississippi, though there was little hope he would ever see them, but the apprehensive high command up north was worried enough that general-in-chief Grant actually set out for Nashville from Virginia but turned back when word came that General Thomas was finally taking action. The Rock planned a massive assault on the Confederate position. He would dispatch one division to hold down the Confederate right flank while the bulk of the Union army, three infantry corps plus cavalry, hit the rebel left and rolled up the line. The result would be the climax of the long fight for Tennessee that had been raging since the war began. As the fog lifted on the morning of December 15, 1864 the weary, hungry and shivering Confederates saw 50,000 federal soldiers sweeping toward them.

"Darkest of all Decembers" by Rick Reeves

It is to the remarkable credit of the tenacity of the Confederate soldiers that even though they were vastly outnumbered, demoralized by their recent heavy losses, poorly equipped and even more poorly supplied they fought with desperate courage. The blue hordes crashed forward like a tidal wave and time and time again came within a breath of breaking the southern line only to have the Confederates repel them in savage fighting. Blow after blow came, staggered the rebel positions but failed to break them. By the time darkness fell the battered and weary boys in gray gave thanks for their survival and marveled that they had managed to hold off such a massive offensive. Hood pulled his bloodied troops back two miles to a shorter line that was anchored by hills on both flanks and would be easier to defend. Hopefully, they would not have to.

That hope would prove forlorn, however, as to the dismay of the Confederates, as dawn broke on December 16 the blue tidal wave came crashing forward again. The punch drunk southerners staggered to their feet and gave battle but with increasing desperation. Two Union corps hit the Confederate left while cavalry worked around their flank, the troopers armed with the new repeating carbines that seemed so unstoppable. By mid afternoon the fight seemed clearly hopeless and a drenching rain began to fall. Suddenly, the Confederate units began to break, more followed and as darkness came on the rebel army disintegrated from left to right as they fled to the rear. Thousands were taken prisoners while others took to their heels. Officers trying to rally them to some sense of order were ignored as the iron will of the Confederates finally collapsed and the sheer instinct of survival took over. One soldier stumbled into the tent of his commander General Hood and recalled seeing the quixotic warrior tugging at his beard with his one hand and sobbing like his heart would break. Only a hard rear guard running fight by Nathan Bedford Forrest and his Confederate cavalry saved the remnants of the Army of Tennessee from total annihilation.

The Army of Tennessee had lost 6,700 men killed, wounded or captured at Nashville and the battle marked the only time in the war that a Confederate army abandoned the field in confusion. For all intents and purposes the war in the western theatre was over and the Confederate Army of Tennessee was no more. What was left gathered in Tupelo, Mississippi and General Hood, his heart mauled as much as his body by this time, resigned his command on Friday the Thirteenth of January in 1865. Word of the disaster hit the southern public at about the same time as the news that Sherman and his marauding horde had captured the Georgia port city of Savannah. The southern diarist Mary Chestnut wrote, "The deep waters are closing over us," and few could have disagreed with her. The war still had several more months to run but as 1865 opened it seemed more and more that anything the Confederates could do was only a postponement of the inevitable defeat. However, the south was loathe to ever say die and many more men in blue and grey would meet their maker before the Confederacy was finally beaten.

"I'm going back to Georgia, my heart is full of woe,

I'm going back to Georgia to find my Uncle Joe.

You may talk about your Beauregard and sing of General Lee,

But the gallant Hood of Texas played hell in Tennessee"

-song sung by Confederates to the tune of the Yellow Rose of Texas referring to Hood and General Joseph E. Johnston on their retreat from Nashville

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