During some of this time, however, Schofield was preoccupied with removing from his name the stain of accusations not only that he had betrayed Thomas at Nashville, but also that his performance there had been below par. In 1870, an anonymous newspaper article—widely believed to have been authored by Schofield—appeared in the New York Tribune, arguing among other things that actually Schofield had won the battle of Nashville at Franklin and criticizing and belittling Thomas’s role. This set off a years-long firestorm in Thomas’s defense, culminating in 1881 with an article in the New York Times by General James Steedman, accusing Schofield of “intriguing” against Thomas at Nashville to get his command. Finally, Schofield published his autobiography, using the occasion to deny everything yet still blame Thomas for slighting his role in the Nashville campaign. At age sixty-four, Schofield retired from the army and went to St. Augustine, Florida, where he died in 1906.
George (“Pap”) Thomas after the war remained as administrator of a new department, the Military Division of Tennessee, where he contended with the problems of reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan, and other tribulations. In 1866 the federal-installed Tennessee legislature commissioned a full-length oil portrait of Thomas to hang in the state library. In 1869 he was assigned by Grant to command the Military District of the Pacific, headquartered in San Francisco, where he received news that a new, southern-sympathizing legislature in Tennessee proposed to get rid of the portrait of him. Later explaining, “Self respect required that I should relieve the members of the legislature of seeing a disagreeable picture every time they went into the state library,” Thomas offered to buy the painting himself for $1,000, but nothing came of it, and the portrait hangs today in the Civil War exhibit of the Tennessee State Museum in Nashville.
On March 28, 1870, Thomas received a copy of Schofield’s article against him in the Tribune and was in the actual act of rebutting it on paper when he collapsed of a stroke and died. He was fifty-four years old and at the time of his death had bulked up to more than three hundred pounds. Congress declared a national bereavement. Flags on military posts were flown at half mast throughout the country, and a mile-long funeral parade in New York was attended by a host of dignitaries, including the president of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant. Eight Union generals served as pallbearers, including John Schofield. The funeral cortege did not, however, include any member of Thomas’s family in Virginia. To their dying days they never forgave him for siding with the North and never spoke his name.
Of the other Union generals who fought the last Tennessee campaign, perhaps the most colorful career was enjoyed by the cavalryman James H. Wilson. For twenty-five years after the war, he engaged in the railroad business and other enterprises, but when, in 1898, the Spanish American War broke out, he volunteered for duty at the youthful age of sixty-one. Recommissioned as a major general of volunteers, he took part in the American capture and occupation of Cuba and Puerto Rico. Not content with this, at the outbreak of the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900, he volunteered again and led U.S. and British troops against the gates of the Forbidden City.
In the years following the war, Wilson became a great defender of Thomas and a detractor of Schofield, Secretary of War Stanton, and Halleck. In 1912 he published an autobiography in which he made his likes and prejudices known. His last official duty for the United States government came in 1901, when he was the U.S. representative at the coronation of King Edward VII of England, but he lived on until 1925, when he died in Wilmington, Delaware, at the age of eighty-eight.
David Stanley, who commanded the Fourth Corps until he was wounded at Franklin, went on to fight the Indians out west and ultimately was put in charge of the Department of Texas. He also penned an autobiography full of venom for his fellow generals at Franklin and Nashville. In particular he objected to Cox’s saying in his own book on Franklin that he (Cox) “commanded the line,” which Stanley blasted as a “false pretension.” Stanley also took harsh exception to the actions of General Thomas J. Wood, who succeeded to the command of the Fourth Corps when Stanley was wounded. Wood, he charged, “was a very selfish and mean man, deceitful and unreliable.” Stanley’s argument with Wood was that after the battle of Franklin it fell on Wood to prepare the after-action report, and, Stanley fumed, “My name was never mentioned in it. . . .I had always treated him with much consideration and he paid me off with the basest ingratitude in this report.” Next on Stanley’s Queeglike list was Emerson Opdycke, who, according to him, “proved an ingrate and turned against me. . . . I never saw a more daring man, but he had an ugly disposition that repelled all friendship and he was full of envy and utterly untruthful.” But Stanley saved his last blast for Schofield, whom he characterized this way: “Whilst Schofield is a pretty fair man, his fear of politics has made him play a very low, mean part in many things.” Having gotten all that off his chest, Stanley lived on until 1902, when, at the age of seventy-four, he died in Washington, D.C., and was buried there at the Soldier’s Home.
General Jacob Cox found himself elected to the governorship of Ohio in 1866, even before leaving the army. Next, Grant named him interior secretary, but the corruption of the Grant regime so disenchanted him that he resigned. Returning to Cincinnati, he was elected to Congress and later served as a law professor and a university president. He died at the turn of the century, at the age of seventy-two.
As for Colonel Emerson Opdycke, whom Stanley had branded as “utterly untruthful,” he was promoted to major general after saving the federal line at Franklin. After the war, he operated a dry goods store in New York until 1884, when he either committed suicide or accidentally shot himself while cleaning his pistol.
Of the two conspicuous cavalry commanders under Wilson, General Edward Hatch went west to fight Indians after the war, while General J. T. Croxton became U. S. ambassador to Bolivia. General Thomas H. Ruger, who commanded part of the Union line at Franklin, became superintendent of West Point, while General T. J. Wood became embroiled in some kind of scandal involving the Atlantic-Pacific Telegraph Company. General John McArthur, who had impatiently attacked the Confederate lines at Nashville without orders, was later involved in a federal bank-fraud scheme while serving as postmaster of Chicago. General James Steedman went on to become a tax collector for the Internal Revenue office and later police chief of Toledo, Ohio, where he also edited a newspaper.
William Tecumseh Sherman succeeded to commander in chief of the U.S. Army when Grant became president. For many years, he was reviled in the South for his pyrotechnical brand of warfare, but he always professed a love of the Southern people. In the North he was, of course, a hero and was solicited to run for president, but, having a deepseated distrust of politics, he declined. Ten years after the war, he published his memoirs, which quickly became a best seller and made him a wealthy man. In a nation filled with heroes, Sherman was among the most revered until his death in New York City, February 14, 1891.
Jefferson Davis, only months before the war’s end, finally embraced Pat Cleburne’s despised theory of freeing slaves and enlisting them in the Confederate army. This created a new starburst of vituperation in Richmond. The bombastic old General Howell Cobb roared, “If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong.” Davis rebuked him this way: “If the Confederacy falls, there should be written on its tombstone, ‘Died of a Theory.’” In the end, four months after Cleburne’s death, and less than a month before Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, the Confederate Congress approved a bill providing for the partial emancipation and enlistment of slaves in the Confederate armies.
As Grant closed in around Richmond, Davis fled on a train south with his cabinet and, presumably, whatever gold was left in the Confederate treasury. His flight carried him through Virginia, the Carolinas, and finally to Georgia, where he was captured. He was confined in prison at Fort Monroe, Virginia, for two years. After he was released from jail, he spent the remainder of his years in farming and business enterprises. Toward the end of
his life, which came in his eighty-first year, he published a two-volume work called The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government.
Joe Johnston, after surrendering the remnants of his beloved Army of Tennessee to Sherman, went on to become a U.S. congressman from Virginia and later the United States commissioner of railroads. He also wrote his memoirs of the war, in which he severely criticized Hood for what he called the “useless sacrifice” of his army in the Nashville campaign—touching off an acrimonious dispute between the two men. Johnston further alienated Jefferson Davis and his supporters by letting himself get reported in the newspapers as wondering where the more than $ 2 million in gold from the Confederate treasury had gone after it was loaded on Davis’s escape train out of Richmond. On a cold and rainy February day in 1891, Johnston took the train to New York City, where he attended the funeral of his old friend William Tecumseh Sherman. As he stood bareheaded in the freezing rain, someone told him he should put on his hat, lest he catch pneumonia. Johnston respectfully refused, saying that Sherman would have done the same for him. A few weeks afterward, he was dead, of pneumonia, at the age of eighty-four.
Nathan Bedford Forrest was finally brought to bay by Wilson’s men in southern Alabama, one of the last commands to surrender. Afterward, he made a speech to his men. “You have been good soldiers, you can be good citizens.” Some years later Jefferson Davis wrote that he regretted not being aware of just how great a general Forrest was until near the end of the war. The “wizard of the saddle” went home to Memphis and rejuvenated his farming and timber operations along the Mississippi. In 1866 he went into partnership with half a dozen former Union and Confederate officers and became the very model of national reconciliation. But he was still so fearsome a figure in the North that rumors began to circulate that he had gone to Mexico to reorganize and continue the fight against the Union.
Forrest had been home only a year when the government indicted him for treason for his participation in the war, but two years later, before a trial could be held, he received a presidential pardon. Mean-time, his farming and business enterprises had failed, and he declared bankruptcy. He joined the newly organized Ku Klux Klan in 1866, rising to its leadership until the Klan’s activities became so distasteful to him that in 1869 he issued an order for the society to disband itself. That same year Forrest led an adventure to build a railroad from Montgomery to Memphis, but that failed, too. In the last years of his life he returned to planting on an island in the Mississippi, using leased convict labor. He also turned to the church, becoming a Presbyterian. By the mid 1870s his health began to fail, and in 1877, at the age of fifty-six, he died peacefully in bed, in Memphis. His last words were, “Call my wife.”
Of the Confederate infantry corps commanders under Hood, Frank Cheatham returned to Tennessee, where at the age of forty-seven he married a woman in her twenties and began operating a livestock farm near Nashville. It was said he delighted in raising fine hogs. He ran unsuccessfully for Congress but in the late 1870s was appointed by the state governor—who was, incidentally, his old chief of staff, James D. Porter—as superintendent of the prison system. Cheatham instituted considerable prison reform but later returned to farming. In 1885 he was nominated by President Grover Cleveland as postmaster of Nashville, but soon afterward he was struck ill with a hardening of the arteries. He died peacefully at home, September 4, 1886, his last words reportedly: “There go the troops. Bring me my horse. I am going to the front.” He was buried wrapped in a Confederate battle flag, at the age of sixty-six.
A. P. Stewart—“Old Straight”—went back to teaching mathematics but later got into the cotton brokerage business along the Mississippi River. In 1874 he became chancellor of the University of Mississippi, a post he held for twelve years. He died in 1908, at the age of eighty-seven. Stephen Dill Lee, a native of Charleston, moved to Mississippi after the war, where he served as a state senator, as well as president of what is now Mississippi State University. He died in 1908, three months before Stewart, at the age of seventy-five.
Generals Edward Johnson, Sam French, and Henry Clayton, whose efforts saved Hood’s retreat at Nashville, all became planters after the war. W. H. (“Red”) Jackson, who commanded a division of Forrest’s cavalry, married Selene Harding, the mistress of Belle Meade mansion who tried to rally the troops during the first day at Nashville. He went on to become a famous breeder of thoroughbred horses. General Daniel Govan became an Indian agent in Washington state. General James Chalmers, who led Forrest’s beleaguered cavalry on Hood’s left at Nashville, returned to Tennessee and threw in his lot with the Reconstruction Republicans, becoming a three-term U.S. congressman.
Bate and Brown, the two lawyer-generals who figured so prominently in the infamous Spring Hill affair, were both elected governor of Tennessee, following the Reconstruction era, and both later ran for the U.S. Senate. Brown was defeated by former president Andrew Johnson and successively became president of two large corporations, but Bate was elected and served in Washington nearly twenty years. Bate died in office, at the age of seventy-nine, while Brown passed away at sixty-two in 1889. At the time of his death, Brown had written some sort of personal memorandum on his role in the Spring Hill affair, but his family never permitted it to be made public, possibly because by then his wife had become the head of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and did not want any hint of stain on her dead husband’s record.
As for the Spring Hill affair itself, the controversy has never been fully resolved. For decades after the war there were charges and countercharges. After exonerating Cheatham shortly after the battle, Hood, in his posthumous memoirs published fifteen years later, again laid the blame on him for failing to capture Schofield’s army, a charge that Cheatham bitterly denied till the end of his days. What actually occurred there became the subject of many a treatise, scholarly and otherwise, until finally—some fifty years after the fact—a man named Remington appeared in 1913 claiming to have solved the mystery.
Remington, a former Union soldier then living in Florida, asserted it was he who was responsible for the Confederate disaster at Spring Hill. In a letter published in the Confederate Veteran magazine, he maintained that while he was nominally a lowly cook-baker in the brigade of Emerson Opdycke, he was actually a Union spy who dressed up as a Confederate captain and went behind Confederate lines to mislead the enemy. Remington alleged that late in the day as Hood’s army was moving on Spring Hill, he rode into a group of Confederate officers—including General Pat Cleburne—and represented himself as an aide to General Hood. Hood, Remington told these people, wished Cleburne to get no closer than four hundred yards from the Columbia-Franklin Pike at Spring Hill and “under no circumstances to fire at anyone unless attacked.”
If Remington’s story was true, it could in some ways explain why no one in the Confederate force blocked the pike below Spring Hill as Schofield’s army marched by unmolested on their way to the killing ground at Franklin. However, publication of his letter produced such a hailstorm of malediction from former Confederates—who by that time had dissected the Spring Hill business from top to bottom—that he was branded a fraud and a charlatan. He even offered to serve up character references and documents from the by then deceased Opdycke proving his case, but the debunking continued, and in the end Remington was dismissed as a crank.
As for John Bell Hood, upon his resignation as commander of the Army of Tennessee, he wired Jefferson Davis that he thought he could still be useful to the Confederacy. His plan was to go to the trans-Mississippi—where Kirby Smith had so ungraciously failed to provide him with reinforcements for his late Tennessee campaign—and personally bring back those twenty-five thousand troops for service in the east. First, however, he planned to go to Richmond to make his official report of the Army of Tennessee. On the way, of course, he stopped off in South Carolina to see Buck Preston.
In December, before the disaster at Nashville, two letters from Hood had arrived for Buck saying he was coming
in January to get married. “Buck is happy,” Mary Chesnut told her diary, “and says, ‘fancy my raptures.”’ Now that Hood had finally arrived, Mrs. Chesnut noted the frame of mind of her old friend “Sam,” who she said seemed to talk only of defeat and sadness. “He says he only has himself to blame.”
Hood was staying with Buck and her family, and soon after he arrived the Chesnuts were invited over for dinner. Hood was going on about his losses when someone quipped, “Maybe you attempted the impossible,” then launched into a funny story. “Sam did not listen,” Mary Chesnut said. “He did not hear a word she was saying. He had forgotten us all.” Jack Preston tugged at Mary Chesnut’s sleeve, and they slipped unobserved outside into the courtyard, leaving Hood to stare into the fire with “huge drops of perspiration that stood out on his forehead.”
“He is going over some bitter hour,” Mary Chesnut said. “He sees Willie Preston with his head shot away. He feels the panic at Nashville and its shame.”
“And the dead on the battlefield at Franklin,” Jack Preston added. “And that agony in his face comes again and again. I can’t keep him out of those absent fits. When he looks in the fire and forgets me and seems going through in his own mind the torture of the damned—I get up and come out, as I did just now.”