By this time, Forrest had appeared on the scene, as well as the exiled Tennessee governor Isham Harris, and with his characteristic bluntness Forrest put the case to Hood this way: “If we are unable to hold the state, we should at once evacuate it.” Harris concurred, and Hood agreed and immediately told Forrest to take charge of the rear-guard operation, placing Walthall’s division under Forrest’s command, and the Army of Tennessee began to move southward again.
About this time, William Tecumseh Sherman and his sixty thousand men emerged from the wilds of Georgia, appearing at the sea outside Savannah. In the course of his operations from Atlanta, Sherman had left a trail of blackened chimneys and rubble and ruined fields and factories along a path of destruction sixty miles wide and three hundred miles long. Now he was scouring newspapers for news of what had happened between Thomas and Hood. Sherman had only “piecemeal rumors” until two days after Thomas’s victory at Nashville, when a full report finally reached him. He immediately sent Thomas a congratulatory message, but within days he too had joined the column of carpers to complain about Thomas’s “slowness.” Sherman did not spend much time on the matter, however, having other business to attend, such as the destruction of South Carolina, now that Georgia was disposed of. On Christmas eve, he resumed his relished practice of handing out Jupiter-sized threats against the South. Writing to Halleck about his contemplated move to Charleston, Sherman said, “The truth is, the whole army is burning with an insatiable desire to wreak vengeance upon South Carolina. I almost tremble at her fate, but feel that she deserves all that is in store for her.” Almost as an afterthought he added, “I look upon Columbia as quite as bad as Charleston, and I doubt if we shall spare the public buildings there as we did at Milledgeville.”
One of Thomas’s problems in the pursuit of Hood was that a pontoon train needed to cross the federals over the Duck River had taken the wrong road and gone astray. It was not Thomas’s fault—except under the concept that as commander in chief, everything was his fault—but he got blamed for it anyway. Nevertheless, on December 24 he received a message from Washington that he was being promoted to the permanent rank of major general in the regular army.
Jefferson Davis had correctly predicted back in September that there was to be a Moscow-style retreat in the west, but now it was being undertaken by his army, not the federals. For more than one hundred miles, through ice and snow and bitter cold that lasted up to Christmas day, the Army of Tennessee trudged toward Alabama and the Tennessee River. Most of the fighting was between Forrest’s and Wilson’s cavalries as Wilson pressed hard to harass and cut off Hood’s men in flank and rear. It was the only such pursuit of such distance by either side during the war. For ten days the two groups of horsemen fought a series of running battles that left both practically used up. Wilson reported losing five thousand horses to disablement or death. “Hundreds lost their hoofs entirely. I have never seen so much suffering,” he said. Forrest’s plight was even worse. In order to save the army, he reported shortly afterward, “I was almost compelled to sacrifice my command.”
It was so unlike the gaiety and lightheartedness of the march up into Tennessee the month before, when pretty girls and children gathered along roadsides to cheer them and wave handkerchiefs. This time, according to Private Sam Watkins, “The citizens seemed to shrink and hide from us as we approached them.” Just south of Pulaski, Hood and his staff were riding along the pike, and were about to crowd an old soldier off the road, when the man began to sing this song, to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas”:
So now I’m going Southward,
My heart is full of woe.
I’m going down to Georgia
To see my Uncle Joe.
You can talk about your Clementine
And sing of Rosalie
But the Gallant Hood of Texas
Played hell in Tennessee
How Hood reacted to this is not recorded, and if he caught the old soldier’s reference to Joe Johnston, he apparently didn’t let on.
Colonel Gale wrote to his wife: “When we left the pike at Pulaski we had an awful road, strewn with dead horses and mules, broken wagons and, worse, broken pontoons.” As the army neared the Tennessee River, Gale said, “Every man was haunted by the apprehension that we did not have boats enough to make a bridge.”
But this time the Army of Tennessee was in luck. Without pontoons and with their backs to the river, they would have been sitting ducks for Thomas’s army, which would have surely bagged the bunch and shipped them off to northern prison camps. But General Phillip D. Roddy, a thirty-nine-year-old Alabamian who was serving under Forrest, but whose brigade had been kept south of the Tennessee on other duties, saved the day. Seeing the problem, Roddy and his men captured the federal pontoon bridge at Decatur and floated it some miles downstream, where it was reassembled for Hood’s men to use. Captain James Cooper described the crossing:
Christmas day dawned bright and beautiful but upon what a scene did that morning’s sun arise. A poor half starved, half clad band of ragamuffins fleeing in disgrace from their last chance for freedom and independence. We thought the Yankees would catch us at last. The gunboats—they had several little ones—came up in our rear and threw a few shells over, but did no harm. After waiting here until some of us were almost frightened to death, our brigade was sent across the river.
The gunboats of the Union navy had indeed presented Thomas with his final opportunity to bring Hood’s army to bay. The boats had been ordered several days earlier to steam upriver and destroy the Confederate pontoon bridge by cannon fire, but, according to Wilson, they “let it slip by.” Wilson complained that even though the navy got within a mile of the bridge, they did not reach it because the commander had no bar pilot he could trust. “This was indubitably our last and best chance,” Wilson wrote, “but the independence of the navy and the natural timidity of a deep-water sailor in a shoal-water draft river defeated it.”
At this point Thomas gave up the chase. When Hood’s men began to cross the river, the three infantry corps of the Army of the Tennessee were spread out between Columbia and Pulaski, and Wilson’s cavalry corps was still nipping at Hood’s heels. But here Thomas finally put his army into winter quarters. It was his opinion that the difficulties of supply and the terrible weather were simply too much for his men. This, of course, brought another outcry from Washington, and Grant finally took action. Writing to Sherman that Thomas, “in his pursuit of Hood indicated a sluggishness that satisfied me he would never do to conduct one of your campaigns,” Grant delivered the coup de grâce by breaking up Thomas’s command. He ordered Schofield and the Twenty-third Corps cavalry east to fight Robert E. Lee and sent A. J. Smith’s corps down to the gulf to take Mobile. Thus it was with this stain against him that Thomas ended his significant role in the war.
Through the ever present rain and knee-deep mud what was left of the Confederate army trudged across Alabama to Corinth, Mississippi. The day after the rout at Nashville, Hood sent a short telegram to Richmond in which—after describing his success for nearly two days in fending off Thomas’s assaults—he admitted his army had been routed and was “retreating rapidly down the Franklin Pike.” Doubtless it was hard for Hood to swallow making such an announcement. After correctly stating, “Our loss in killed and wounded is very small,” he went on to tell the secretary of war, “Our loss in prisoners is not yet fully ascertained, but I think it is comparatively small,” which—if Hood had any inkling what it really was—was not the truth at all, since nearly 20 percent of his army was now behind Union stockades. When six months earlier he had taken over the Army of Tennessee at Atlanta, he commanded a formidable army of fifty thousand. After Atlanta was lost, the strength was close to forty thousand of all arms. When he entered Tennessee in November, it was estimated he had—including Forrest’s cavalry—more than thirty thousand. But recrossing the river on that cold Christmas day were barely eighteen thousand men, beaten and despairing—the remnants of the mi
ghty Army of Tennessee.
That the campaign was a disaster there was no denying, and the last two days at Nashville had been catastrophic. Soon the criticisms began pouring in: Hood’s decision to send Forrest to Murfreesboro was branded as “foolish,” a “colossal blunder,” even “suicidal.” There is some truth in this—certainly Forrest was an extraordinary cavalry commander who, with his whole corps of horsemen on hand, might have kept Wilson at bay for a while. But to what purpose? Thomas’s army was simply too strong for Hood to have won a clear victory, and sooner or later the three-to-one odds would have been too much, even for Hood, who was said to have once bet $2,000 in a card game on a bluff. Hood’s decision to send Forrest and Bate to Murfreesboro was not without reason. After all, what kind of commander would leave a force of enemy nearly a third his size in his rear where they could have easily been ordered to come up and attack him from behind? Perhaps he should have retreated after the first day at Nashville—or even after his experience at Franklin. But he was determined to give the Union one more fight, and that he did.
When word of Hood’s loss of Tennessee reached the Southern public back east, it caused an extraordinary uproar. Jefferson Davis, increasingly unpopular with the Richmond press, came under blame for a “disgraceful panic” in Hood’s lines. Some Confederate brigades were accused of fleeing “before the skirmish line of the enemy” and retreating “almost without firing a gun.” Hood and Davis were denounced together, and there was a hue and cry to reinstate Joe Johnston to command the army. The Charleston Mercury even republished, “with bitter comments,” Davis’s Macon speech containing his “Moscow retreat” prediction.
Mary Chesnut, now living at her South Carolina plantation, got the first whiff of Hood’s defeat through reports in Northern newspapers a few days after the battle, but merely sniffed, “Yankees claim another victory for Thomas. Hope it may prove like most of their victories—brag and bluster.” Soon, however, the true magnitude of Hood’s loss became known. Confederate senator Louis Wigfall, Hood’s old friend from Texas days, but now one of his bitterest critics, stopped by the Chesnut home to heap abuse on his former associate. “Hood is dead,” Wigfall proclaimed, “smashed, gone up, finished.” It was a sentiment that grew as the days went by, and it was not lost on Hood’s lovely young fiancée, Buck Preston, who was living near the Chesnuts. Wedding plans were still in the making as far as she was concerned, but her parents, armed now with a growing condemnation of the general, were well situated to present a strong intervention.
On Friday the 13th, a little short of a month after the debacle at Nashville, Hood resigned command of the Army of Tennessee. Two days later the resignation was accepted, and he headed east again, his last trip. The army was not yet finished with John Bell Hood, nor he with it. But, he had an important stop to make in South Carolina and, he believed, a date at the altar.
If the Tennessee campaign of 1864 had taken its toll on both armies, it had brought no less grief to the citizens of that beleaguered state. Thousands of homes were in mourning for their dead sons, and a good many more had been reduced to ashes or abject poverty by the fighting.
One of these belonged to seventy-three-year-old Nimrod Porter, who was born during the presidency of George Washington, and who, purportedly, had killed the last bear in Maury County. Over the years his plantation near Columbia had suffered greatly at the hands of both armies but never more than during the recent campaign. Porter kept a diary in which he wrote that the Confederate army on its way to Nashville “stole hogs, food, and burned [his] fence rails for firewood. But the Federals stole worse.” During Hood’s retreat, Porter complained:
Croxton’s Yankees came through and stole everything. They cooked the last old gobbler and all the chickens, over a fire. They even took the boots off the blacks. Last night they took all of black Sukey’s money, all my corn and what little oats I have left. Tomorrow is Christmas day, a bitter one for us, black or white. A gray fox ran under the kitchen walk. I shot it for dinner. We have a little parched corn.
And then, in a final entry dated “Christmas Eve,” Porter, who had actually tried to remain neutral over the war, penned this dark sentiment, which probably said it for a lot of them:
I wish there were a river of fire a mile wide between the North and South, that would burn with unquenchable fury forevermore and that it could never be passable to the endless ages of eternity by any living creature.
19
Black Care Was the Outrider
By late winter it was apparent that the Confederacy was on its last legs. Robert E. Lee was hopelessly bottled up by Grant near Richmond, and Sherman was conducting a slash-and-burn operation through the Carolinas toward Virginia, where his sixty-thousand-man army would combine with Grant’s to finish off Lee for good. As one of its last-ditch measures, the Richmond government finally named Lee as commander in chief of all Confederate armies, and Lee ordered Beauregard to hurry east to see what could be done to keep Sherman from tearing the country apart. It was decided to bring most of what was left of the Army of Tennessee eastward, too, and by the end of January the army was cooking rations and packing its belongings for the long and circuitous journey by rail, steamboat, and foot march. But by then Sherman, reinforced by Schofield, was wielding an eighty-five-thousand-man steamroller across the Carolinas, which the naked little force assembled under Beauregard—and later old Joe Johnston, who replaced Hood—could do little else but annoy.
Hood’s dream of marching north to the Ohio River and then on to Richmond to defeat Grant—or, for that matter, taking and holding the state of Tennessee—was, of course, a blurred reverie, a ghostly figment. The soldiers of the army knew it, and many of them—especially the Tennessee troops—deserted to their homes instead of going east. It didn’t matter; even the bitter-enders saw the futility in the fight. On the 9th of April, 1865, Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House, after being driven from his defenses at Petersburg. Eighteen days later, on the 27th of April, Special Order Number 18—the last order—was issued to the Army of Tennessee, announcing its surrender to Sherman at Greensboro, North Carolina. Thus ended, for all intents and purposes, the bloodiest war Americans have ever fought: ten thousand military engagements, a million casualties, more than six hundred thousand of them dead. In return, three and a half million slaves were free, and the Union was preserved.
Could Hood have done anything to change the result? Probably not, even if he had defeated Thomas and gone north to attack Grant at Petersburg. By then the numerical odds favored the Union by ten to one, and by far more than that in equipment and manufacturing capacity. And yet there was the possibility, as Grant and the Washington government certainly realized. The United States Treasury was virtually broke. The relatively new income tax had nowhere near paid for the war, and the government’s proclivity then for borrowing was not so great as it would become in future years. In the end, Washington was reduced to raising revenues by selling bales of Southern cotton that were taken by the various Union armies, among other measures. The nation was sick of war—sick to death—and the prospect of a prolongation, even with Lincoln returned to the helm, was something that frightened everyone. While a military solution for the South had faded rapidly in the last year of the war, a political victory might conceivably have been achieved if the Confederacy could have given the impression that there was no end in sight. Hood was meant to be a part of that strategy, though, in retrospect, it seems the South might have achieved better results by leaving Joe Johnston to doggedly contest Sherman’s activities in Georgia and the Carolinas, instead of launching Hood in an all-out, lastditch offensive effort.
Over the years the question of where Hood went wrong has been rolled around and shaped by countless ex-soldiers, politicians, and historians: He should not have launched the costly attacks around Atlanta. He should have turned and faced Sherman’s divided army just across the Alabama line. He should have crossed the Tennessee River earlier, before Thomas had a chance to combine his
forces. He should have destroyed Schofield at Spring Hill. He should not have attacked Schofield at Franklin. He should not even have gone to Nashville, but once there, he should have retreated his army after the first day’s battle . . .
All these contentions have their merit. But not only Hood saw himself as the instrument of an aggressive military policy fighting for a just cause; he was in fact nominated by the Richmond government especially for that purpose. “It was more judicious,” Hood said, “that the men should face a decisive issue, rather than retreat—in other words, rather than renounce the honor of their cause, without having made a last and manful effort to lift up the sinking fortunes of the Confederacy.” It is almost a forgone fact of personality and human nature that John Bell Hood could no more have pursued the Fabian policy of Joe Johnston than Johnston could have played Scipio to Sherman’s host. In the end, said one veteran, “There was nothing left, save honor.”
After the surrender, the old soldiers of both sides went home—most of them, anyway—either to glory and reward or to pick up the pieces of their shattered dreams and fortunes. But the Civil War did not end there, of course. The last shot of consequence was fired at Abraham Lincoln by the assassin John Wilkes Booth, but there were other shots as well, fired on paper—tons of it—a virtual war of words that began soon after the military conflict ended and did not cease until the last veteran died, well into the next century. Privates, generals, and politicians blamed and condemned each other for whatever failures had occurred, prompting one old widow to call it “another Hundred Years’ War.”
Schofield, after the battle of Nashville, wrote Grant asking that he be allowed to come east to join him and get away from Thomas, which he in fact did, being present at the final surrender between Sherman and Johnston. Afterward, Schofield was handed an interesting job. While the Americans had been occupied with four years of civil war, the French emperor Napoleon III had taken the opportunity to seize Mexico and set up rule there, and it was now determined by Washington that the French would have to be kicked out. Schofield was given the assignment of organizing an army for this purpose, but before that happened, it was learned that the French wanted to negotiate, and he was shipped off to Paris, where he effectively suggested to Napoleon that his intentions in Mexico were inadvisable. Next, Schofield was made secretary of war, and in a prescient mood he managed to procure Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands as a U.S. naval base. After serving as the superintendent of West Point, he became commanding general of the army in 1888.