John Bell Hood and the Fight for Civil War Memory
“Injustice has been done me,” John Bell Hood complained soon after the end of the Civil War. He was confident that he eventually “would get justice,” but he was prepared for “it to be tardy.” Tardy it has been indeed, but certainly recent biographies of Hood by Richard McMurry (1982) and David Coffey (1998) have finally presented a more sympathetic, and more strategically talented, figure than the hapless loser at Atlanta, Franklin and Nashville. This new biography by Brian Craig Miller aligns itself very much along that axis. It is, unhappily, a remarkably wearisome book and, like its subject, it suffers from an alarmingly aggressive degree of over-reach. Miller’s opening declaration — that John Bell Hood “is not only vital to our understanding of the Civil War, but also American history” — is the first stretch of our credulity. Hood may have his place in the Civil War, but certainly not alongside Franklin, Jefferson, Lincoln and FDR. The second stretch comes when Miller insists that Hood, as a Southern white male, can serve as a useful donkey on which to pin a variety of postmodern fixations — masculinity, memory, culture — whose chief purpose will be to establish the academic bona fides of a Civil War biography. In neither case is Miller anything but sporadic and unconvincing. Beyond these introductory stretches, we actually learn little that McMurry, Coffey, and even Hood himself (in his autobiography, Advance and Retreat, have not already told us: Hood rose to prominence in command of the Texas Brigade on the Peninsula and at Antietam, was promoted to division command and wounded at Gettysburg, went west with James Longstreet to Chickamauga in 1863, was given corps command in the Army of Tennessee in 1864, and finally assumed overall command of the Army of Tennessee and led it into a series of bloody defeats, culminating at Nashville. Hood was no more successful in strategies of romance. He had the ill fortune to become a fixture in Mary Chesnut’s diary as the incompetent suitor of Sally Preston, and that failure has seemed to complement all the others. What Miller misses is so shatteringly obvious that missing it becomes the principal incredulity of the book — that John Bell Hood was ambitious beyond his talents, that even as a shavetail lieutenant on the frontier he shamelessly brown-nosed his superiors, that he cultivated Jefferson Davis’ favor by disloyally undermining Joseph Johnston. And that once he had clothed himself in army command (he was the youngest of the Confederacy’s eight full generals), he displayed the usual sycophant’s inability to manage the affairs he had lusted to control. Whether this has much to do with masculinity, memory or culture is anyone’s guess, but it had a lot to do with the casualty lists at Franklin and Nashville. No one ever doubted that John Bell Hood was a brave man. But his life did not actually turn for the brighter until he was no longer a soldier. He married (and very happily, too), prospered in the insurance business in New Orleans, and became a patron of charities and a favorite at reunions of his old brigade. He stood up honorably to the bullying of his old commander, James Longstreet, by Jubal Early and the Southern Historical Society. But Miller drags these details out in the most routine manner, with frequent and unintended repetitions of himself, a certain clumsiness in dealing with military vocabulary, repeated slip-ups in geography, and that perennial old difficulty in understanding the meaning of the term “brevet.” Perhaps the best that can be said about Hood is that he was a bounder and a cad, but not (as Miller shows) a drunk or an addict; that his grand Tennessee campaign was an ill-conceived and ill-executed catastrophe, but that Joe Johnston would not have achieved much better by husbanding the Army of Tennessee’s resources as frugally as he did. Hood was a courageous man, but in war more things are required than courage. Reviewer: Allen C. Guelzo Dr. Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and director of Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College.
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Photographs, notes, bibliography, index, 344 pp., 2010, University of Tennessee Press,