Next day somebody’s carriage was put at Hood’s disposal, and he took Mary Chesnut for a ride, telling her he wanted to marry Buck, but, she said, “dreads opposition.” That opposition was formidable, in the form of Buck’s mother and others in her family, who were still staunchly opposed to him. “He blushes like a girl,” Mary Chesnut said. “Sam, the simplest, most transparent soul I have ever met in this great revolution.”
Hood’s wedding clothes had been left in a trunk at the Chesnuts for six months. Young Captain John Chesnut, Mary’s son, had these observations: “Then why don’t he put them on his back and go and be married? There will be no wedding, you see. He lost his chance last winter. He made his siege too long. He grows tedious.”
In this, Johnny Chesnut was correct. There was to be no wedding.
Meantime, Hood continued on up to Richmond, where army business awaited. A few days earlier, en route to his visit with Buck, he had stopped over at Augusta, Georgia, where he met with his relative, Confederate General Gustavus Woodson Smith, and a few days later an article was published in the Augusta newspaper that sharply criticized Joe Johnston’s handling of the Army of Tennessee and praised Hood’s performance during the Nashville campaign. The author of the article was identified only as “G. W. S.”
The article, which also dealt harshly with General William J. Hardee, who was fired by Hood as a corps commander after the fall of Atlanta, was reprinted in Richmond a few days after Hood got there. Hardee responded by challenging Hood to what essentially would have been a duel, but nothing ever came of it. Hood then made his report, which was remarkably similar to the newspaper article, and this caused another explosion. He blamed Johnston for the condition of the Army of Tennessee—for, among other things, continually retreating and letting the men fight behind breastworks for so long that they were not of a mind to attack. When the report was published, Johnston announced he was pressing charges against Hood, but nothing ever came of that, either. Many people thought Hood had been duped into denouncing Johnston by Jefferson Davis, who hated Johnston and was afraid public clamor would force him to restore him to the army. In any case, publication of the document caused such an outcry from all quarters that Hood was glad to get out of Richmond and be on his way to the trans-Mississippi and Texas.
Naturally, he stopped over in Carolina again to settle things with Buck, but in this, he was bitterly disappointed. By this time, the fat was in the fire, and everybody knew it. Buck’s parents apparently laid down the law, and Hood, who had faced everything a dozen bloody battlefields could offer, for once in his life backed away.
“If he had just been more persistent,” Buck wailed to Mary Chesnut, sounding very much like a character out of a melodrama. “If he had just not given way under Mamie’s violent refusal to listen to us, if he had asked me. When you refuse to let anybody be married in your house—well, I would have gone down on the sidewalk. I would have married him on the pavement, if the parson could be found to do it. I was ready to leave all the world for him, to tie my clothes in a bundle and, like a soldier’s wife, trudge after him to the ends of the earth.”
In any event, she did not, and by the middle of April Hood was on his way west, having held his hat in his hand until he was out of sight of the Preston house. Seeing this, someone remarked, “Black care was Hood’s outrider this morning.”
A month later, after the surrender, Mary Chesnut reversed her silent opposition to the idea of Buck marrying Hood, saying Buck’s parents had done the girl a “cruel wrong.” She described Hood as a “poor wounded hero and patriot” and called him “the only true man I have seen in your train yet.” By the time another month had passed, Mrs. Chesnut was able to record in her diary that Buck was happily flirting with a twenty-five-year-old captain of the late Confederate army, but a few weeks later the Preston family, Buck included, were on a steamer headed for Paris, where they spent the next two years waiting to see what was going to happen politically back home.
Hood made his way westward across the South, dodging Wilson’s cavalrymen, who by now had pretty much a free run of things. While he was still in South Carolina, he had “received the painful intelligence of Lee’s surrender,” but he continued with his staff and escort to Natchez on the Mississippi. Actually, he wasn’t in Natchez, but in the thick woods and canebreaks outside it, waiting for the river to drop and dodging federal patrols night and day. It was well into June before he learned of Kirby Smith’s surrender in Texas, and, with little else to do, he calmly rode in to the headquarters of Major General John W. Davidson, chief of cavalry for the Union Department of West Mississippi, and handed over his sword. Davidson told him to keep it and wrote out a parole for Hood and all his men. At last it was over.
Hood wound up settling in New Orleans, where he became a cotton merchant and head of an insurance company. A year after the war, he went to Louisville on business and learned that George Thomas was also in town. Hood arranged for a meeting with his old friend from the Second Cavalry and foe in the Atlanta and Nashville campaigns. As Hood hobbled on his crutches down the hotel corridor, Thomas threw open the door to his room and embraced the former Confederate commander warmly, helping him inside, where they spoke for more than an hour. Afterward, Hood would say of the Virginia Unionist, “Thomas is a grand man. He should have remained with us, where he would have been appreciated and loved.”
In 1867 Sally Buck Preston returned from Europe and married Rollins Lowndes, who had been a young colonel in the late Confederate army. Lowndes’s wealthy Charleston family had put their money in England at the beginning of the war and thus were not bankrupted like so many Southerners were. Whether Hood learned of the marriage is not known; he apparently did not speak of Buck after he last saw her. And the following year, 1868, he fell in love again and married the daughter of a prominent family of Louisiana lawyers. The Hoods settled down to a reasonably comfortable life, having children and dividing their time between their home in the fashionable Garden District of New Orleans and their plantation manor outside town. All the while, Hood was determined to write the memoirs of his career—especially when he learned that Johnston was publishing his, which were decidedly uncomplimentary of Hood. He began them around 1875 and by 1879 had finished the book that would be known as Advance and Retreat.
In the summer of that same year, a yellow fever epidemic broke out in New Orleans, and, because of a quarantine, many businesses went under, including Hood’s. In August, his wife was taken with yellow fever and died in two days. Two days after her funeral, their oldest child was stricken and died the same day. The following morning, Hood himself contracted the illness. He lasted two days, in and out of delirium. Once he rose up with the old blue light of battle again in his eyes and asked that his remaining children be taken care of by his old outfit, the Texas brigade. He died early next morning, a week after his wife, and was buried that same afternoon from Trinity Episcopal Church, with only a small contingent of mourners to lead him to the grave. He was forty-eight years old, vanquished, as it were, by a mosquito.
As the war came to a close, the United States Treasury was not only broke but so deep in debt many wondered if it could ever be recouped. The human toll, of course, could not be measured in dollars and cents but was pitifully reflected in the homes of more than a million dead and maimed men on both sides. Lincoln had favored a policy of reconciliation, but following his assassination there was much serious talk in the federal Congress of hanging and imprisoning Confederate leaders—military and political—confiscating their property, and other dire retributions. But in fact, Jefferson Davis was the longest held Confederate official; a handful of governors and cabinet members were arrested, and a few others, like Forrest, were indicted, but they, like virtually all the military men, were granted clemency by Lincoln’s successor, President Andrew Johnson, a policy that became a factor in impeachment proceedings against him in 1868. Only one Confederate was tried and convicted, Captain Henry Wirtz, commandant of the infamous Andersonville
prison camp; a drumhead court sentenced him to be hanged, which he was on November 10, 1865. Nevertheless, some Confederates, especially officers, fled to Mexico, South America, or Europe, but most of those returned to America when the scare was over. A few settled for good in foreign lands and took permanent jobs abroad. One such was William Wing (“Old Blizzards”) Loring, who had sat on his horse at Franklin facing the federal firestorm and roared, “Great God! Do I command cowards?” After the war he accepted an offer to command a division in the army of the khedive of Egypt, which he did for ten years.
The years immediately after the war produced an uncertainty for both sections of the country, but the North recovered far more quickly than the South, spawning the great westward expansion, as well as a riotous binge of unrestrained capitalism that culminated with the age of the robber barons. Eventually, the mutual animosities began to break down. The Reconstruction measures imposed on the South disenfranchised many ex-Confederates well into the 1870s and—if this legislation did not call for their hanging—at best it put them under stern military rule, which led to unfortunate abuses. But by the Spanish American War and the turn of the century, the great conflict of the mid 1800s was for most only a dimming memory. A friend likes to tell the story of the time when as a small boy he was walking over one of the battlefields with his great aunts and grandmother, whose father had fought in the war. Standing at the edge of a huge cemetery with white marble tombstones stretching as far as the eye could see, the boy asked one of the women, “But why did they do it? Why did they die?” to which the old lady replied wearily, “Oh, I don’t know, son. I guess they’d all be dead by now anyhow.”
Grant, Sherman, Thomas, Lee, Johnston, Jackson, Hood, and all the rest gradually vanished like the dinosaurs, but for a while they were giants that ruled the earth. In their prime, probably no armies as yet assembled could have matched them. Some lived on to see the age of airplanes, radios, skyscrapers, moving pictures, and world wars on an unimaginable scale, and when they were gone, their dust enriched the national trust. For the footsoldiers, black and white, Confederate Private Sam Watkins probably summed it up about as well as any man on either side when he said, “The tale is told. The sun shines as brightly as before, the sky sparkles with the trembling stars that make night beautiful, and the scene melts and gradually disappears forever.”
Bibliographical Note on Sources
In the writing of this book I am earnestly and deeply indebted to those dogged historians who have gone before. In focusing on a microcosm of the Civil War—those last six months of 1864 in the west between the battle of Atlanta and the battle of Nashville—much information had to be located and sifted. No writer on the Civil War can do his work in a void, and to that end I cut my teeth early on Bruce Catton’s fine books The Coming Fury, Never Call Retreat, A Stillness at Appomattox, Terrible Swift Sword, and This Hallowed Ground as general literature. I am equally indebted to Shelby Foote’s monumental three-volume narrative, The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville, Fredericksburg to Meridian, and Red River to Appomattox. The epic works of these two authors give shape, dimension, and perspective to what is arguably the most complex subject in American history. I would have been lost without them.
As an outline for the overall Atlanta-to-Nashville campaign, one must inevitably begin as I did with the greatest single source for anyone seriously interested in the Civil War, which is War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. This huge undertaking, gathered, organized, and published by the U.S. government between 1880 and 1902, is composed of 128 volumes containing over 100,000 pages of official battle and campaign reports, correspondence, telegraphic messages, orders, letters, tables of organization, statistics—every scrap of paper generated by the Union and Confederate armies that could be located. It provides the blueprint for any historical study of the various aspects of the war.
Also immensely useful as a guide through the hundreds of battles and major skirmishes is the four-volume series Battles and Leaders of the Civil War. In this 1887 collection, published by the Century Company, are the voices of the men, mostly officers, recounting firsthand experiences of the great battles of the war.
On the particular subject of the 1864 Tennessee campaign, there are a number of fine works published over a hundred-year span that deal with the subject in greater or lesser depth, and I have learned much, and appreciate much, from these. Among them are T. B. Van Horne’s Army of the Cumberland; Thomas Hay’s Hood’s Tennessee Campaign; Stanley Horne’s The Decisive Battle of Nashville and The Army of Tennessee; James McDonough and Thomas Connelly’s Five Tragic Hours, as well as Connelly’s Autumn of Glory; General J. D. Cox’s The Battle of Franklin; Richard McMurry’s Two Great Rebel Armies; Sims Crownover’s The Battle of Franklin; Page Smith’s Trial by Fire; James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom; Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones’s How the North Won:A Military History of the Civil War; Allen Nevins’s The War for the Union: The Organized War; Francis Miller’s (ed.) The Photographic History of the Civil War; J. T. Headley’s The Great Rebellion; and Clifford Dowdey’s The Land They Fought For.
Of the lives and backgrounds of the major players there are some excellent accounts, and I owe them deeply for their insights and information: Lloyd Lewis’s Sherman; John F. Marzalek’s biography Sherman: A Passion for Order; Richard McMurry’s John Bell Hood and the War for Southern Independence; Richard Dyer’s The Gallant Hood; Irving Buck’s Cleburne and His Command; Howell and Elizabeth Purdue’s Pat Cleburne, Confederate General; T. B. Van Horne’s The Life of Major-General George H. Thomas; Freeman Cleaves’s The Rock of Chickamauga; Christopher Losson’s Tennessee’s Forgotten Warrior: Frank Cheatham and His Confederate Division; Brian S. Will’s A Battle from the Start: The Life of Nathan Bedford Forrest; and Horace Porter’s Campaigning with Grant.
For political overview and specifics about the government officials and the various doings in Washington and Richmond, there was Carl Sandburg’s two-volume opus Abraham Lincoln; Stephen Oates’s With Malice Toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln; Steven Woodsworth’s Jefferson Davis and His Generals: The Failure of Confederate Command in the West; William C. Davis’s Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour; as well as my old college professor Hudson Strode’s Jefferson Davis: Tragic Hero.
And then there are the autobiographies by the players themselves. For the personal recollections and documentation of Sherman’s movements before, during, and after Atlanta, as well as his biographical history, The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman is a prime source of information, as is the Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant. John Bell Hood’s Advance and Retreat contains a wealth of similar material. Likewise, General John Schofield’s Forty-six Years in the Army, General James Wilson’s Under the Old Flag, General David Stanley’s Personal Memoirs of Major General D. S. Stanley, and Jefferson Davis’s The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government were extremely useful, although like most memoirs, they are self serving to a greater or lesser extent.
For biographical information on the various subordinate generals in this contest, Ezra Warner’s indispensable two-volume work Generals in Gray and Generals in Blue is one of the most commendable examples of historical research extant. Over a period of years, Warner researched, compiled for the record, and published the biographies and photographs of every Confederate and Union general officer who served in the Civil War, of which there were more than a thousand. These books represent nothing less than a historical labor of love.
Regarding the various accounts of this campaign by soldiers in the ranks, I have relied on an abundance of information from books, diaries, letters, newspaper stories, and other commentary published by the participants. A chief source of many firsthand accounts I found is The Confederate Veteran, a monthly magazine published in Nashville from 1893 to 1933, when the last of the old soldiers were dying away. The magazine was founded and edited by Sergeant-major S. A. Cunningham, one of the participants in the Tennessee campaign. Thi
s invaluable tool, now bound in forty volumes with an index, contains letters written not only by thousands of Confederate participants in the contest but by Union soldiers as well, making for some lively exchanges. Also contained therein are such gems as the accounts of the battle of Franklin by the schoolchildren Harding Figures and Frances McEwen, who, in their golden years, at last found a place to contribute their recollections. Likewise, the Southern Historical Society Papers, as well as the historical society papers of various states, especially Tennessee, provided good—if difficult to ferret out—firsthand accounts, such as the diary of Captain E. T. Eggleston, who recorded in the Tennessee Historical Society Quarterly the hardships of Hood’s march in the cold from the Tennessee River to Columbia.
There are also some very useful general books that include contemporary accounts of the campaign, most of them published about the turn of the century. Among them are William Murray’s History of the Twentieth Tennessee Regiment, Bromfield Ridley’s Battles and Sketches of the Army of Tennessee, and Stanley Horne’s Tennessee’s War, which appeared during the Civil War Centennial in 1965. Also, David Logsdon’s well-done Eyewitnesses at the Battle of Franklin and Larry Daniel’s fine book Soldiering in the Army of Tennessee were both very helpful.
The Reverend W. A. Keesy’s War as Viewed from the Ranks is a solid diary by a Union soldier who served during the entire campaign. Sam Watkins’s Company “Aytch”: A Sideshow of the Big Show is a similarly colorful account from the Confederate side. Captain Levi Scofield’s The Retreat from Pulaski to Nashville Tenn. is a remarkable document by a federal officer who served on the staff of General Jacob Cox. I was both astounded and elated to receive by interlibrary loan from North Carolina State University an original 1909 copy of this beautifully bound book, signed in ink by the author! The Reverend Charles T. Quintard’s Doctor Quintard, Being His Story of the War (1861—1865) is a lucid account, especially his exchanges with Hood at Columbia, Spring Hill, and Nashville. Confederate Captain Samuel T. Foster’s One of Cleburne’s Command contains a solid and spellbinding diary of his experiences during the campaign. Union Captain John K. Shellenberger’s writings in The Confederate Veteran and elsewhere contains his bitter 1916 recollection of being left out in the front with Wagner’s two brigades during the fight at Franklin. Wirt Cate’s Two Soldiers is also useful.