John Bell Hood: Extracting Truth from History (ePub)

The year 2011 brings us the sesquicentennial celebration of the American
Civil War. Surprisingly, 150 years later, students continue to find themselves
asking many of the same questions about the great national tragedy faced during
the centennial in 1961. For example, did slavery cause the great conflict, or did
constitutional questions act as the catalyst? Does the Battle of Gettysburg represent
the turning point of the War, or did that occur elsewhere?
In connection with the last question, Lost Cause advocates, those great
pro-Confederacy propagandists, found convenient villains to blame for the Southern
defeat. One of these, Confederate General John Bell Hood, plays an important
role. This paper contends that in his case, the Lost Cause is wrong and that Hoods
historical treatment has been false.
Standard critical treatment of John Bell Hood over the years has tended to
characterize the general as rash, overaggressive, and lacking in strategic imagination.
For such critical historians, Hood appears as old-fashioned and someone limited
logistically to the frontal assault. These accounts mainly stress his negative aspects as
a soldier and tend to center around the Battle of Franklin. This thesis, by analyzing
every battle that Hood commanded as a leader of the Army of Tennessee, particularly
those fought around Atlanta, reveals him to have been a far more bold, imaginative,
and complex leader than has previously been portrayed.