In March a momentous event overtook Sherman. Congress passed a law reviving the rank of lieutenant general, highest post in the army, and the first recipient of this rank was Ulysses S. Grant, who was promptly ordered to Virginia to see—after all the previous failures—what he could do about Robert E. Lee and his army. On March 17, Sherman met with Grant in Nashville and was informed that he would now be in charge of the military division consisting of the armies of the Ohio, the Cumberland, and the Tennessee. With this new responsibility, Sherman began to turn his attention to plans for a push on the Confederate army now drawn up in Dalton, Georgia, and which, two weeks earlier, had been joined by John Bell Hood.
7
To Conquer the Peace
From the lovely valley of the Chattooga, where Hood made his fateful judgment to enter Tennessee, the Confederate army marched westward through a brilliant autumn landscape on October 19, 1864, until it reached Gadsden, Alabama, and the waiting Confederate supply train. It was there that Hood met with Beauregard for the second time, and the commanding general of the Army of Tennessee unfolded his plan to march northward to Nashville, Cincinnati, and all the rest. At first the little Creole general was skeptical, but after two days of deliberations and interviews with officers of the army, on October 22 he authorized the expedition.
That was great news for the soldiers, more than half of whom were Tennesseans who had not set foot in their native state since Grant expelled them so rudely nearly a year before in the battle of Chattanooga. As word spread that they were at last going home, great cheers rose from the campfires, and next morning Hood confidently marched them north toward Guntersville, where they were to cross the Tennessee River.
There was a lightheartedness at the beginning of this trek. The weather was good, and the soldiers had filled their bellies, and some even had been issued shoes and clothing before setting out. No longer did they resemble the scarecrow army that had been fighting almost continuously since May. Just outside of Gadsden, the Army of Tennessee filed past the home of a then famous southern heroine, young Emma Sansom, who stood on her porch most of the day waving to them.
The year before, sixteen-year-old Emma had figured prominently in Bedford Forrest’s celebrated bagging of an entire federal brigade that had come flying through north Alabama on what was supposed to be a raid on the Confederate foundries at Rome, just over the Georgia line. Culled from General Grenville Dodge’s division, a two-thousand-man blue-coated force under the command of Colonel Abel Streight left from Tuscumbia, Alabama. No horses being available, they set out aboard mules, many of them half-broken, and followed the Tennessee River toward Lookout Mountain. Forrest, with about half as many men, caught up with them about five days out, whereupon a running battle took place for the next four days until the Confederate pursuers arrived just outside Gadsden to discover that Streight and his men had burned the only bridge across Black Creek. Forrest was in danger of losing contact with his prey when, in the midst of a hot fight near the burning bridge, Emma Sansom called out from a farmhouse that she knew an old cow-path ford to the other side. With no time to waste, Forrest hoisted the girl behind him and dashed off to find the ford, which he quickly ordered his cavalry to cross. Returning the dark-haired young lady to her mother, Forrest hastily penned a note to her:
Hed Quaters in Sadle
May 2, 1863
My highest regardes to Miss Ema Sansom for hir gallant conduct while my posse was skirmmishing with the Federals a cross Black Creek near Gadsden Allabama
N.B. Forrest
Brig. Genl,
Comding N. Ala—
Forrest kept the pressure on Streight and his raiders all the way to the Georgia line, where he finally captured them with a trick. Reduced by broken down horses to six hundred men, Forrest wanted to avoid an out-and-out fight. About fifteen miles from Rome he approached Streight with a truce flag, demanding his surrender. Streight met him between the lines, saying that he would surrender only if Forrest could convince him that he was completely superior in force. Forrest declined to do that—and wisely, since he was actually outnumbered more than two to one—but he had secretly arranged with his artillery men to haul the only two artillery pieces he had around and around, in a circle, across and below a rise in the road, so that it would appear to Streight that whole batteries of guns were being brought up to the front.
Finally, Streight couldn’t stand it any longer. “Name of God! How many guns have you got?” he exclaimed. “There’s fifteen I’ve counted already!”
“I reckon that’s all that has kept up,” the wily Confederate replied.
Streight still wasn’t quite convinced, but after Forrest threatened to attack him then and there, the federal colonel decided prudence was the better part of valor and handed over 1,466 soldiers with all their arms and equipment, the victims of a ruse.
So more than a year later—a year that had seen the fall of Vicksburg, the carnage at Gettysburg, and the loss of Atlanta—the grateful Army of Tennessee marched past Emma Sansom’s doorstep on their way to Nashville—and possibly the Ohio—and the regiments cheered and felt good about her and about themselves.
But almost from the first, things started to go wrong.
Hood’s battle plan assumed that he would take with him at least half of Wheeler’s cavalry to guard his flanks, sending the rest back into Georgia to watch and harass Sherman—whatever he did next. But Beauregard insisted that all of Wheeler’s men be returned to the Sherman watch and, in their place, offered Hood the use of Nathan Bedford Forrest’s cavalry divisions, which were roaming around in west Tennessee, smashing up things in Sherman’s rear. Hood readily acceded to this stipulation—who wouldn’t have accepted the legendary Forrest?—but when he neared Guntersville, Alabama, the disturbing word was received that Forrest was then operating all the way at the other end of the Tennessee River, nearly two hundred miles northwest between Jackson and Johnsonville, near the Kentucky line. And rains had so flooded the river that he could not cross it.
This was dire news, for Hood needed Forrest’s cavalry to protect his army from a federal attack while he crossed the river at Guntersville. Worse, if the whole plan was to evolve, time was of the essence before Thomas could combine all the Union forces then rushing toward him at Nashville. Reluctantly, but with what he felt was no other choice, Hood turned the army westward again, toward Florence and Tuscumbia, Alabama, about midway between Forrest and himself. There he hoped at least to take advantage of the repaired Memphis and Charleston and Mobile and Decatur railroads to bring up all the supplies he would need for the Tennessee adventure, but again he was disappointed. “Notwithstanding my request as early as the 9th of October that the railroad to Decatur be repaired, nothing had been done . . . towards the accomplishment of this important object,” Hood fumed.
Mercifully unaware of these developments, the army trooped over Sand Mountain into the Tennessee River Valley, but it quickly turned into a hard march. “We have had nothing to eat since [yesterday],” wrote diarist Sam Foster, in Cleburne’s division. “Today a wagon drives through camp and issues two ears of corn to each man. We are living on parched corn. Have had no meat for several days.” They tromped past the Union garrison at Decatur with little more than an artillery demonstration, prompting Foster to huff, “Came away and left the Union flag flying in full view of us.”
The march continued toward the setting sun, following the Tennessee River. “The richest country I have seen since I left Texas,” Foster marveled, but he quickly added, “Now it is a desert waste. Fences burnt, large dwelling houses burnt, leaving two chimneys and their shade trees to mark the place, and as many as fifty negro cabins—but no sign of life unless an occasional old negro came out of a hut—No cattle, horses, hogs, chickens nor people—nothing but desolation on every hand.”
Leading elements of the army reached the area of Florence and Tuscumbia on October 30 to find more evidence of Sherman’s intent to drive the South into rack and ruin. Captain Thomas Ke
y, who commanded an artillery battery in Cleburne’s division, received permission to ride into Tuscumbia to stay overnight with some friends. “As I passed down the valley of the Tennessee I saw nothing but the wrecks of palaces and devastated plantations,” he wrote in his diary. “I visited the business part of Tuscumbia and found a large portion of the town burned and all the streets looking weather-worn and dilapidated,” said Key, who had previously owned a newspaper in the city. He blamed this “fiendish” handiwork on “the Federal General, Dodge” (the same General Dodge who had unleashed Streight’s unfortunate raid against Rome) and contented himself with imagining the “fiery torments that justice will heap upon his guilty soul.”
Meanwhile, Hood received more disturbing news. Jefferson Davis, it seemed—despite all his passionate rhetoric about Hood’s soldiers’ feet soon “pressing the soil of Tennessee”—was under a different impression of the way things should be done. Hood had telegraphed Davis on November 6, outlining the movement toward Nashville, and the following day Davis wired back telling Hood he should have kept after Sherman and should still do so now.
“If you keep his communications destroyed,” said Davis, “he will most probably seek to concentrate for an attack on you. But if, as reported to you, he has sent a large part of his force southward, you may first beat him in detail, and, subsequently, without serious obstruction, or danger to the country in your rear, advance to the Ohio River.”
This was a tall order, for Hood was now more than a hundred miles westward from Sherman’s army and communications. He reasoned that Davis was not, at this point, “acquainted with [the army’s] true condition.” He immediately sought out Beauregard for support, and several days passed before Hood responded to Davis, saying that until now, “I did not regard this Army in the proper condition for a pitched battle.” He went on to reiterate his plan to leave Sherman behind and move into Tennessee. There was some logic to Hood’s position; after all, he had fewer than forty thousand men with which to fight double that many under Sherman, who had already beaten him once face to face at Atlanta. Furthermore, Hood’s commanders remained of the opinion that the men were in no mood to tangle with Sherman’s army again. And finally, he had the Tennesseans to consider. They made up a majority of his army, and they were ready to go home.
Beauregard added his own two cents’ worth, telling Davis in a letter shortly after Hood moved out that he did not “countermand” Hood’s proposal because the weather and condition of the railroads back to where Sherman was in Georgia were such that Hood could not have caught up with Sherman anyway and because if Hood moved back east, Thomas would soon have taken his army into Alabama and removed that state from the Confederacy. Last, Beauregard said he was under the impression that the Georgia state militia could raise twenty thousand men to oppose Sherman’s advance. While this last assumption was much overblown, Beauregard nevertheless added the final weight of his authority for Hood to proceed.
Up in Richmond, surrounded by Grant’s army and with the Confederacy in distress, Davis privately complained of Hood’s intentions, calling them “ill advised,” but he did nothing to stop him. It showed something of the deterioration of the once indomitable Davis, who, in earlier days, if he thought a thing “ill advised” would have brought it to a screeching halt. By now Davis had become almost as embattled personally as Lee was in the field, buffeted by rebellious congressmen, governors, and newspapers. As Confederate territory shrank, crops were lost and Confederate money dwindled practically to nothing. When the war began, a paper dollar issued from the Richmond mint was presumed to be worth a dollar of gold. Two years later it took three paper “shinplasters” to buy one gold dollar, and by the end of the year it took twenty. Now, in the fall of 1864, a gold dollar, if it could be found, cost forty or more Confederate dollars. People of wealth were selling their silver, jewelry, paintings, and other family treasures to questionably scrupulous “auctioneers”—often from Europe—in exchange for gold enough to buy food, clothing, and fuel for heat. The poor, as usual, often went without. The Richmond government couldn’t pay its debts, nor could it pay its army, which actually didn’t matter too much anyway, since its money was becoming worthless. Some state politicians were making ominous noises about establishing a separate peace with the Union, and by now Davis’s cherished hope of recognition by England or France was a faded dream.
In any case, the beleaguered Davis seemed, if not overjoyed, at least content that somebody like Hood was willing to take the bull by the horns and attack the Union army someplace, maybe taking a little pressure off him, five hundred miles to the east in Richmond. Two days after Hood’s telegram to Davis, Forrest finally arrived with his cavalry. Captain Key recalled that his entrance into town was marked by a “band playing lively airs, interluded with vociferous cheering.”
While all of this was going on, another indelible milestone in the war was reached: Abraham Lincoln was reelected. The Democrats—or Peace Party—could muster only the electoral votes of Delaware, Kentucky, and New Jersey; the Republicans won the rest. The popular vote was closer—2,200,000 for Lincoln to 1,800,000 for “Little Mac” McClellan—but any remaining Southern hopes that the war could end in a peaceful settlement were finally dashed.
In the North, George Templeton Strong rejoiced in his diary, “The crisis has been passed. . . . The American people can be trusted to take care of the national honor.” But in the South a pall of gloom drifted over the Confederacy. “The victory of the Constitution was postponed, and its triumph reserved for another and uncertain time,” the Richmond Examiner moaned. And also, at this news, the bottom dropped out of the Confederate dollar; people could hardly give them away.
The defeat of the Northern Peace Party was in some measure laid at the feet of Hood and Johnston. “If only Atlanta had not fallen . . .,” and so forth. If Hood ever had a chance to redeem himself of these accusations, it was gone now—and had been gone from the moment he decided against crossing the Tennessee River at Guntersville back in October. Possibly a swift march and a quick victory over Thomas’s as yet unorganized forces and the recapture of Nashville could have changed the outcome of the election. No one would ever know.
Captain Thomas Key, standing in the cheering crowd as the band serenaded the newly arrived Forrest and his troopers at Tuscumbia, made the unpleasant forecast, “With [Lincoln] the executive we may now expect the War to continue for another term of four years unless we shall be able to conquer the peace.”
Conquering the peace was precisely what John Bell Hood was now preparing to do—he put no stores by politics or politicians. Besides, even if Lincoln had lost the election, it would have been three months before his opponent was installed, and in war—especially this one—three months was an eternity. On November 21, a week after Forrest and his command arrived, Hood set his army in motion, north, across the Tennessee River.
Back in the velvet-draped drawing rooms of the Chesnut family, a different kind of drama was being played out. Beautiful Sally Preston was “so sad, so utterly depressed,” Mary Chesnut wrote in her diary the same day Hood’s final, fateful telegram to Jefferson Davis was received. “She does not hear from Hood. Every insanity has entered her head, even that J.B. may be tired of his engagement.”
It was indeed true—Hood and Buck Preston were engaged. For Hood it must have been the culmination of his dreams: In four short years he had gone from being an obscure lieutenant in the U.S. Army to a full general of the Confederacy at the age of thirty-three—right up there with Robert E. Lee. Before the fall of Atlanta, glory and acclaim were heaped upon him; newspapers sang his praises; Southern society—including Jefferson Davis himself—welcomed him as a hero and a peer. And now he was engaged to be married to one of the most beautiful and sought-after women in the South, the great-grandniece of Patrick Henry; she and her sister had been described as “goddesses upon a heaven-kissing hill, tall and stately, with brilliant fresh complexions, altogether the embodiment of physical health.” Not only wa
s Buck the “sweetest woman I ever knew,” as Mary Chesnut recorded, she had “a mischievous gleam in her soft blue eyes; or are they gray, or brown, or black as night?” She went on, “I have seen them of every color varying with the mood of the moment.”
Mrs. Chesnut’s description might have been more telling than she realized, for, as Buck’s eyes changed color with her moods, so her moods changed as quickly as the leaves of autumn. It was later suggested that Hood’s romance with Buck Preston was actually a kind of metaphor for the plight of the Confederacy—the knight in shining armor goes out to slay the dragon but in the end does not get the girl. There is truth in this, and Hood—while he was no aristocrat, he was no backwoodsman, either—must have felt some hint of this as the affair progressed.
On the day he had been formally introduced to Buck by his surgeon, John Darby, when his men marched through Richmond the year previous, Hood had returned to the Chesnut house for dinner, and there the courting began in earnest. Before supper they played cards—Hood, Buck, Buck’s sister Mary, and Mary’s fiancé, Dr. Darby. “Certainly,” Mrs. Chesnut wrote, “never did a game of casino cause so much uproarious mirth.”
Hood was quickly on the move again, south, down to Suffolk with Longstreet and then on the long march to Gettysburg. After his wounding there, he was treated at hospitals in the Shenandoah Valley and then in early September brought to Richmond, where he resumed his courtship of Buck. The day he left for Chickamauga he proposed to her. “She would not say yes, but she did not say no,” he remembered later, “but she half-promised me to think of it.”
After his wounding at Chickamauga, Hood said he “gave it up,” but by November he was back in Richmond, recuperating from the loss of the leg, and tried again. Mrs. Chesnut recalled that Buck “saw me sending a nice pudding to the wounded man” and remarked, “I would not marry him if he had a thousand legs instead of just one.” Not long afterward, Hood visited the Chesnuts. Buck’s sister Mary called out, “Look here Mrs. C. They are lifting General Hood out of his carriage, here, at your door. Neither Mrs. Chesnut, nor Buck, had been to visit Hood since his wounding, so he came to them, but Buck was either ill or feigning illness and would not come downstairs. The conversation was amicable enough until other people began to arrive, and Hood became uncomfortable. “This is the first house I had myself dragged to,” he groaned. “I mean to be as happy as a fool, well, as a one-legged man can be. Send me off now. So many strangers scare me always. I can’t run now, as I did before.” Whether this was real self-pity or jesting, Mrs. Chesnut does not tell, but it was clear that he was back on the track of Buck Preston. The next day he went to see her again, and this time she received him with tears in her eyes.