Nashville: The Western Confederacy's Final Gamble

Rating:
Summary: Gambling With Credibility
Review: The relentless attacks on the character of Confederate General John B. Hood is perpetuated by author James McDonough in this book on an important, yet often ignored battle. Like arch Hood-slanderer Wiley Sword, the author slyly conceals much historical evidence that justifies Hood's positions, or supports his decisions.

The most vivid example of factual illusion is the author's utterly unfounded assertion that Gen. Hood was under the influence of the opiate laudanum during the Nashville Campaign. Although this Hollywood-style hyperbole has been completely discounted by all responsible Civil War historians, McDonough nonetheless choses to include the rumor of a drug-impaired Hood. Curiously, the author offers a modern editor of Blue and Gray magazine as the only source of the slanderous accusation. Elsewhere McDonough states that Hood was most certainly under the influence of laudanum, since it was "widely known" that he used it. Although McDonough declares this without ambiguity, he offers no source or footnote whatsoever. No source is provided because nowhere in the vast universe of contemporary Civil War historical records is there a single mention of laudanum usage by John Bell Hood, either during or after the war, by anyone, friend or foe.

Students of Civil War history should demand objectivity and full evidenciary disclosure from Civil War academicians and authors. Historical writing should involve more than proper grammar and a large vocabulary. It should also be complete, objective, and accurate. "Nashville:The Western Confederacy's Final Gamble" gambles precariously with its own credibility.

Rating:
Summary: Traces the Last Gasp of a Forlorn Hope
Review:    In 1863, with the defeat of Gen. Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia at the Battle of Gettysburg and the fall of Vicksburg, the "Gibraltar of the Mississippi," the tide of the Civil War turned disastrously against the Confederacy

   Now, in the fall of 1864, Atlanta was captured by the bluecoats and the railroad hub of Petersburg, a crucial link in the lifeline supplying the Confederate capital at Richmond, was besieged by the Army of the Potomac, led by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant.

   Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman had his army poised to make their famous (or, to Southerners, infamous) march from Atlanta to the sea, cutting a sixty-mile-wide swath of destruction through the Rebel heartland, "making Georgia howl."

   The Confederate leader John Bell Hood believed that by attacking the railroad that stretched from Nashville through Chattanooga to Atlanta, he could destroy Sherman's supply line and force Sherman to withdraw from Atlanta and pursue his (Hood's) army.

   Hood's "grand vision," a dream that turned into a nightmare, was to invade Tennessee and recapture Nashville, which was occupied by Yankees under the command of Gen. George H. Thomas ("the Rock of Chickamauga"). Then, if all went well, he would continue on through Kentucky to the banks of the Ohio.

   This final gamble of the western Confederacy was a forlorn hope, an ill-fated mission that would virtually destroy Hood's army.

   Nashville tells how Hood's ill-equipped, ill-clothed, and ill-fed army stalled at the Duck River in Columbia and incredibly let Schofield's federals pass him during the night at Spring Hill, joining Thomas's regiments for the defense of "fortress Nashville."

   The heart of the book describes how the Confederate army was decimated in a horrendous bloodbath at the Battle of Franklin (Nov. 30, 1864) and was routed at the Battle of Nashville (Dec. 15-16, 1864).

   The book includes maps of the Battle of Nashville, showing where the fighting was the hottest, to a large extent along present-day Woodmont Boulevard where that thoroughfare intersects Franklin Pike, Granny White Pike, and Hillsboro Pike, and particularly at Peach Orchard Hill (Overton Hill), where the Confederate right flank was anchored, and at Shy's Hill (formerly Compton's Hill), where the Confederate left flank was anchored.

   The central player in this volume in Gen. John Bell Hood, a fierce, aggressive fighter who lost the use of his left arm at the Battle of Gettysburg and who sustained life-threatening wounds at the Battle of Chickamauga, resulting in the amputation of his right leg. During his subsequent military service, he had to be strapped in the saddle in order to function.

   McDonough asserts that Hood, a commander who was physically unfit and who (possibly) deadened his pain by the use of alcohol and/or pain-killing drugs such as laudanum (a tincture of opium), should not have been entrusted with decisions that meant life or death to his troops.

   John Bell Hood is a prime example of the Peter principle: he had been promoted to a level of incompetency. "It was Hood's tragedy," writes one of Hood's biographers, "that he was such an excellent soldier, but such a poor general."

   Hood blundered terribly at Spring Hill, Franklin, and Nashville, and his shattered army retreated southward along the Franklin Pike, back through Columbia, to the Tennessee River, where it crossed into Mississippi and finally collapsed in Tupelo.

   Civil war buffs with relish this spirited account of the western Confederacy's last gasp. And Nashvillians particularly will find many historical facts about Nashville, its founders and famous residents, such as James Robertson, John Donelson, and Andrew Jackson.

   The book is illustrated by numerous photos of the people and places involved in these battles, such as the William Harrison house, the Fountain B. Carter house, and the Carnton (John and Randall McGavock) House in Franklin and the Belle Meade mansion in Nashville.

   Roy E. Perry of Nolensville is an advertising copywriter at a Nashville publishing house. He may be reached at [e-mail]
 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: James Lee McDonough is a retired professor of history from Auburn University. He is the author of numerous books on the Civil War, including Shiloh--In Hell Before Night; War in Kentucky: From Shiloh to Perryville; Chattanooga--Death Grip on the Confederacy; and Stones River--Bloody Winter in Tennessee. He is also the co-author (with James Pickett Jones) of War So Terrible: Sherman and Atlanta and (with Thomas L. Connelly) of Five Tragic Hours: The Battle of Franklin.