Abstract
The decision to replace Joseph E. Johnston with John Bell Hood before Atlanta in July 1864, and the catastrophe that followed in Tennessee that winter, together constitute the most consequential single command decision Jefferson Davis made in the Western theater. This paper examines the Davis–Hood relationship as the culmination of the patterns documented throughout this volume: the distrust of Johnston that made a change of command attractive, the reliance on a general’s perceived aggressiveness as a proxy for fitness, and the willingness to back a chosen commander through a campaign that destroyed his army. The central analytical task is the apportionment of responsibility. The paper argues that the disaster cannot be assigned wholly to either man. Davis’s choice of Hood was intelligible given what he sought, a general who would fight for Atlanta rather than yield it, but it elevated to army command an officer better suited to corps-level combat, and Davis then sustained Hood’s invasion of Tennessee past the point at which prudence counseled otherwise. Hood’s execution of the offensive was, in turn, marked by errors of his own. The paper traces the relationship from the relief of Johnston through the fall of Atlanta, the Tennessee invasion, and the ruin at Franklin and Nashville, and weighs how much of the outcome flowed from Davis’s decision and how much from Hood’s conduct of the command it gave him.
Introduction
The relief of Joseph Johnston outside Atlanta, examined at the close of the third paper in this volume as the terminus of the Davis–Johnston dysfunction, was also a beginning. In removing Johnston, Davis had to choose a successor, and the choice he made, John Bell Hood, set in motion a sequence of events that ended in the effective destruction of the Confederacy’s principal Western army. The two decisions, to relieve Johnston and to elevate Hood, are distinct, and this paper concerns the second. It is possible to hold that the relief of Johnston was defensible while the elevation of Hood was an error, or that both were errors, or that both flowed from the same flawed reasoning; disentangling these possibilities is the work of the chapters that follow.[^1]
The argument advanced here is that the Davis–Hood relationship represents the convergence of several tendencies the earlier studies have isolated, applied at the worst possible moment to the worst possible effect. Davis’s distrust of Johnston, documented in Paper 3, made him receptive to a change of command. His tendency, visible throughout his career, to value aggressiveness and offensive spirit, the very qualities Johnston seemed to lack, disposed him toward a general who promised to fight. And his pattern, documented in the Bragg study, of sustaining a chosen commander through mounting evidence of trouble, led him to back Hood’s invasion of Tennessee long after a cooler judgment would have halted it. The elevation of Hood was thus not an aberration but an expression of Davis’s settled instincts, which is precisely what makes it instructive: it shows those instincts producing, in a single campaign, the gravest military consequence of the Western war.[^2]
The paper’s central commitment is to a balanced apportionment of responsibility, resisting both the tradition that makes Hood a reckless butcher who destroyed a fine army through his own folly and the contrary view that makes him the victim of an impossible situation handed to him by a president who had already lost Atlanta in all but name. The truth, this study contends, lies in the interaction: a flawed decision by Davis placed a brave but limited commander in a role beyond his proven capacity, and that commander then made the role’s difficulties worse through errors of execution that Davis, having made the appointment, was disposed to support.
The Decision to Elevate Hood
When Davis determined to relieve Johnston in July 1864, the field of available successors was narrow, and the qualities Davis sought pointed toward Hood. Hood had risen rapidly during the war on a reputation for hard fighting; as a brigade and division commander in Lee’s army he had earned a name for aggressive combat, and he had been grievously wounded, losing the use of an arm at Gettysburg and a leg at Chickamauga, injuries that testified to his willingness to be in the thick of the fighting.[^3] By 1864 he was serving as a corps commander under Johnston in the Atlanta Campaign, and from that position he had communicated to Richmond his dissatisfaction with Johnston’s continual withdrawals, presenting himself, implicitly and at times explicitly, as the advocate of the offensive spirit Davis wished to see.[^4]
Davis’s reasoning in choosing Hood was coherent on its own terms. He had relieved Johnston precisely because Johnston would not fight for Atlanta; he therefore wanted a successor who would. Hood was the general who promised, by reputation and by his own representations, exactly that. The logic is unimpeachable as far as it goes: if the problem was a commander who would not give battle, the solution was a commander who would.[^5] The defect lay in what the logic omitted. Aggressiveness in a corps commander, executing the plans of others on a portion of the field, is a different thing from fitness for the independent command of an army, where the same aggressiveness, unchecked by a superior’s judgment and applied to the whole, can become recklessness. Hood’s record demonstrated his courage and his combative instinct; it did not demonstrate his capacity to command an army, and Davis, focused on the quality he sought, elevated a man whose proven excellence lay at a level below the one to which he was raised.[^6]
There is evidence that Davis was not wholly unaware of the risk. The president consulted Lee, under whom Hood had served, about the appointment, and Lee’s response was notably guarded, conveying respect for Hood’s fighting qualities while expressing reservation about whether those qualities sufficed for army command.[^7] Davis proceeded nonetheless. The episode shows the decision was not made in ignorance of the concern but in the conviction that the need for a fighting general outweighed it, a conviction that placed the desired trait above the fuller assessment of fitness, in the manner the favorites study identified as characteristic of Davis’s judgments of men.
The Fall of Atlanta
Hood assumed command in mid-July 1864 and immediately did what he had been appointed to do: he attacked. In a series of offensive battles around Atlanta over the following weeks, Hood threw his army against Sherman’s forces in the aggressive manner that had recommended him, and in doing so he suffered heavy casualties without breaking the Union grip on the city.[^8] The attacks expended the army’s strength against a stronger and well-handled foe, and they did not save Atlanta; after a campaign of maneuver that Hood could not counter, Sherman cut the last rail line into the city, and Hood evacuated Atlanta at the beginning of September 1864.[^9]
The fall of Atlanta carried consequences beyond the military. It came at a moment of acute political significance in the North, and the capture of the city materially strengthened the Union war effort’s standing and the prospects of the administration prosecuting the war, a dimension that lay outside Hood’s control but that magnified the cost of the campaign’s failure.[^10] Militarily, the result was that the change of command had not achieved its object. Johnston had been relieved to save Atlanta; under his aggressive successor the city had nonetheless fallen, and the army that was to have fought for it had been weakened by the very offensives that defined the new commander’s approach.
This outcome already complicates any simple verdict. If the purpose of elevating Hood was to hold Atlanta, the elevation failed, and it failed in a manner that cost the army dearly. A defender of Davis might respond that Atlanta was probably not holdable against Sherman by any commander, that Johnston would have lost it too, only more slowly and with the army intact. This is a serious argument, and it bears on the apportionment of fault: if Atlanta was lost in any case, then Hood’s offensives represented a needless expenditure of strength in pursuit of an unattainable object, which shifts weight toward the verdict that the aggressive command was the wrong instrument for the situation, whoever bore the larger blame for choosing it.[^11]
The Tennessee Invasion
The campaign that destroyed the Army of Tennessee followed the fall of Atlanta. Rather than continue to confront Sherman directly, Hood conceived, and Davis approved, a bold offensive northward into Tennessee, aimed at threatening Sherman’s communications, drawing him back from Georgia, and potentially recovering Nashville and the Confederate position in the state.[^12] The conception was audacious and not without strategic rationale; it sought to wrest the initiative from Sherman by striking at what he depended upon. But it also committed a depleted army, already worn by the Atlanta offensives, to an offensive campaign deep into territory the enemy held, against forces that could be concentrated against it.
Davis’s role in the Tennessee invasion is central to the apportionment of responsibility and is sometimes underweighted in accounts that focus on Hood’s execution. The president met with Hood and with the army in the autumn of 1864 and lent his approval to the offensive design; he did not restrain it, and his public remarks during this period encouraged expectations of an offensive recovery that the army’s condition could not support.[^13] This is the pattern documented in the Bragg study reasserting itself: having chosen Hood, Davis sustained him, backing an ambitious offensive by a weakened army rather than counseling the caution the situation demanded. The decision to invade Tennessee was Hood’s in conception, but it was Davis’s in approval, and a president less committed to his appointee, or less drawn to the offensive spirit, might have checked it.[^14]
Sherman, for his part, declined to be drawn back in full; he detached forces sufficient to deal with Hood and proceeded with his own march through Georgia, so that Hood’s offensive failed even in its strategic premise of recalling the enemy.[^15] The Army of Tennessee thus advanced into Tennessee on a campaign whose central object had already slipped from its grasp, against a foe with the means to destroy it.
Franklin and Nashville
The catastrophe came in two acts. At Franklin, on November 30, 1864, Hood ordered a frontal assault across open ground against a well-entrenched Union position, an attack of extraordinary cost that shattered his army’s offensive power and killed a appalling number of its officers, including several generals, in a few hours of fighting.[^16] The decision to attack at Franklin has been among the most criticized of any Confederate commander in the war; whatever the provocations of the preceding day’s maneuvers, the assault expended the army’s veteran strength against fortifications in a manner that even contemporaries recognized as ruinous.
The remnant pressed on to Nashville, where in mid-December 1864 the concentrated Union army under George Thomas attacked Hood’s weakened force and routed it, completing the destruction.[^17] The Army of Tennessee, the Confederacy’s principal Western army, effectively ceased after Nashville to exist as an offensive instrument; it was broken, scattered, and never reconstituted as the force it had been. Hood, his army ruined, asked to be relieved and was, the command passing on amid the wreckage of the campaign.[^18]
The destruction at Franklin and Nashville falls heavily on Hood’s side of the ledger. The frontal assault at Franklin was his decision and his error, an expenditure of irreplaceable men against a position that ought to have been turned or avoided rather than stormed; the persistence before Nashville with a force no longer capable of the offensive was likewise his. These were failures of generalship at the army level, the very level at which Hood’s fitness had been in doubt from the start, and they vindicate the reservations, Lee’s among them, that the elevation had overridden.[^19] An apportionment of responsibility that did not assign Hood substantial blame for Franklin would be dishonest; the assault was his to order or withhold, and he ordered it.
The Apportionment of Responsibility
The analytical heart of this paper is the division of fault between the president who made the appointment and the general who executed the command, and the conclusion is that both bear real and distinguishable shares.
Davis’s share lies in the decision and its sustaining. He elevated to army command a general whose proven excellence was at the corps level and whose fitness for the higher responsibility was doubted by those best placed to judge, and he did so because he prized the offensive spirit Hood embodied above the fuller assessment of capacity. He then approved and encouraged an offensive into Tennessee by an army already depleted, sustaining his appointee in an ambitious design rather than restraining it. These were errors of selection and of strategic judgment, and they were Davis’s, traceable to the same instincts, the valuation of aggressiveness, the backing of a chosen man, that this volume has documented across his command relations.[^20]
Hood’s share lies in the execution. Given an army and a difficult situation, he made the situation worse: he expended the army’s strength in costly offensives around Atlanta that did not save the city, and he then destroyed it at Franklin in an assault that even a sympathetic assessment must judge an error, and at Nashville in a persistence the army could not sustain. These were failures of the army command Hood had been doubted capable of exercising, and they confirmed the doubt.[^21]
The interaction is the proper subject. Davis’s decision placed Hood where Hood’s limitations would be exposed and would prove catastrophic; Hood’s conduct realized the catastrophe the decision risked. Neither man alone produced the destruction of the Army of Tennessee; the destruction was the joint product of a flawed appointment and a flawed exercise of the command it conferred. To assign the whole to Davis is to excuse Hood’s specific and grievous errors of execution; to assign the whole to Hood is to ignore that he was placed in a role beyond his demonstrated capacity by a president who had been warned and who then sustained the campaign that ruined the army. The volume’s interaction thesis finds in this dyad its most consequential illustration.[^22]
The Source Problem
The evidentiary discipline of this volume confronts, in the Davis–Hood relationship, a memoir of unusual defensiveness. Hood’s Advance and Retreat, published posthumously in 1880, was written in significant part to defend his conduct of the Atlanta and Tennessee campaigns and to shift responsibility for the disasters onto others, Johnston for the condition in which he allegedly left the army, subordinates for failures of execution, circumstance for the rest.[^23] It is among the most self-justifying of the Confederate memoirs, and it must be read as a brief for its author rather than as a reliable account, particularly where it concerns the controversies of Franklin and the apportionment of blame.
The method applied throughout these studies requires anchoring the assessment in the contemporary record, the orders and correspondence of the campaigns, the casualty returns, the reports gathered in the Official Records, and reading Hood’s memoir, like Johnston’s and Davis’s, as evidence of what its author wished believed.[^24] The modern scholarship has done the work of recovering a balanced picture: Richard McMurry’s biography presents Hood as a brave and capable subordinate genuinely overmatched by army command rather than as the simple villain of the older tradition, while Wiley Sword’s and other detailed studies of the Tennessee campaign document the specific errors of execution without reducing the man to them.[^25] This paper follows that scholarship in distinguishing Hood’s real courage and real limitations from both the hostile caricature and his own apologia, and in locating Davis’s responsibility in the decision and its sustaining rather than allowing the focus on Hood’s execution to obscure the president’s share.
Significance
The Davis–Hood dyad earns its place as the volume’s most consequential single case because it shows Davis’s command instincts producing, in one campaign, the destruction of an army. The tendencies the earlier studies isolated in less catastrophic settings, the distrust of Johnston, the valuation of aggressiveness, the sustaining of a chosen commander, here converged and compounded, and the result was the ruin of the Confederacy’s principal Western force at a stroke. If the Vicksburg and Missionary Ridge disasters showed command dysfunction losing campaigns, the Tennessee disaster showed it losing an army, and the Davis–Hood relationship is therefore the gravest exhibit in the volume’s case that the quality of command relations was a military variable of the first order.[^26]
The dyad also refines the volume’s thesis in an important way. It demonstrates that Davis’s instincts were not merely capable of denying support to the able or extending it to the unfit in matters of personnel; they were capable of governing the most important strategic decisions of a theater, and of doing so to ruinous effect. The elevation of Hood was a decision about a man, but it was also, inseparably, a decision about a strategy, an offensive strategy embodied in an offensive general, and its failure was at once a failure of personnel judgment and of strategic judgment, the two fused in a single fateful choice.[^27]
Conclusion
The elevation of John Bell Hood and the destruction of the Army of Tennessee that followed represent the convergence of Jefferson Davis’s command instincts at their most consequential and most damaging. Davis relieved a general he distrusted, chose a successor whose aggressiveness he prized above the doubts about his fitness that the best-placed judges expressed, and then sustained that successor’s ambitious invasion of Tennessee past the point at which the army’s condition counseled restraint. Hood, for his part, realized the risk the appointment carried, expending his army in costly offensives around Atlanta and destroying it at Franklin and Nashville through errors of execution at the level his capacity had always been doubted to reach. The disaster was neither Davis’s alone nor Hood’s alone but the joint product of a flawed appointment and the flawed command it conferred, and in that joint authorship the volume’s central thesis finds its gravest demonstration: that Confederate command effectiveness turned on the interaction between the president’s temperament and the particular general, and that when the interaction failed, as here it failed completely, it could cost the Confederacy not a battle or a city but an entire army.
Notes
[^1]: On the distinction between the relief of Johnston and the elevation of Hood as separable decisions, see Woodworth (1990) and McMurry (1982); the relief of Johnston is examined in Paper 3 of this volume.
[^2]: On the elevation of Hood as an expression of Davis’s settled instincts rather than an aberration, see Woodworth (1990); the relevant instincts are documented in Papers 3, 4, and 6 of this volume.
[^3]: On Hood’s rise, his reputation for hard fighting, and his wounds at Gettysburg and Chickamauga, see McMurry (1982) and Dyer (1950).
[^4]: On Hood’s dissatisfaction with Johnston’s withdrawals and his communications with Richmond, see McMurry (1982), Symonds (1992), and Woodworth (1990).
[^5]: On the coherence of Davis’s reasoning in seeking a fighting general, see Woodworth (1990) and McMurry (1982).
[^6]: On the distinction between corps-level aggressiveness and fitness for army command, see McMurry (1982) and Woodworth (1990).
[^7]: On Davis’s consultation of Lee and Lee’s guarded response, see Woodworth (1990, 1995) and McMurry (1982); the precise wording of Lee’s reply should be verified against the Official Records before publication.
[^8]: On Hood’s offensive battles around Atlanta and their cost, see McMurry (2000) and Castel (1992).
[^9]: On Sherman’s severing of the rail line and the evacuation of Atlanta in September 1864, see Castel (1992) and McMurry (2000).
[^10]: On the political consequences of the fall of Atlanta in the North, see McMurry (2000) and Cooper (2000).
[^11]: On the argument that Atlanta was probably not holdable and the implications for assessing Hood’s offensives, see Castel (1992) and Woodworth (1990).
[^12]: On the conception of the Tennessee invasion and its strategic rationale, see Sword (1992) and McMurry (1982).
[^13]: On Davis’s meeting with Hood and the army in the autumn of 1864 and his approval and encouragement of the offensive, see Woodworth (1990) and Cooper (2000).
[^14]: On Davis’s role in approving the Tennessee invasion as an instance of sustaining a chosen commander, see Woodworth (1990); the comparable pattern in the Bragg relationship is examined in Paper 4 of this volume.
[^15]: On Sherman’s decision not to be drawn back and the failure of the invasion’s strategic premise, see Sword (1992) and Castel (1992).
[^16]: On the assault at Franklin on November 30, 1864, and its catastrophic cost, see Sword (1992) and McDonough and Connelly (1983).
[^17]: On the battle of Nashville in December 1864 and the rout of Hood’s army, see Sword (1992) and McDonough (2004).
[^18]: On the disintegration of the Army of Tennessee and Hood’s relief at his own request, see McMurry (1982) and Sword (1992).
[^19]: On the assignment of substantial responsibility to Hood for Franklin and Nashville, see Sword (1992) and McMurry (1982).
[^20]: On Davis’s share of responsibility in the decision and its sustaining, see Woodworth (1990) and Cooper (2000).
[^21]: On Hood’s share of responsibility in execution, see McMurry (1982) and Sword (1992).
[^22]: On the interaction of the two men’s contributions as the proper analytical frame, see Woodworth (1990).
[^23]: On the defensive and self-justifying character of Hood’s memoir, see McMurry (1982) and the historiographical discussion in Paper 9 of this volume. See Hood (1880).
[^24]: On anchoring the assessment in the contemporary record, see the method established in Paper 1 of this volume.
[^25]: On the balanced modern assessment of Hood, see McMurry (1982), Dyer (1950), and Sword (1992).
[^26]: On the Davis–Hood dyad as the volume’s most consequential case, see Woodworth (1990).
[^27]: On the fusion of personnel and strategic judgment in the elevation of Hood, see Woodworth (1990) and McMurry (1982).
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McDonough, J. L., & Connelly, T. L. (1983). Five tragic hours: The battle of Franklin. University of Tennessee Press.
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