John Bell Hood: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of a Confederate GeneralAn award-winning biography of one of the Confederacy's most successful—and most criticized—generals. Winner of the 2014 Albert Castel Book Award and the 2014 Walt Whitman Award John Bell Hood died at forty-eight after a brief illness in August 1879, leaving behind the first draft of his memoirs, Advance and Retreat: Personal Experiences in the United States and Confederate States Armies. Published posthumously the following year, the memoirs immediately became as controversial as their author. A careful and balanced examination of these controversies, however, coupled with the recent discovery of Hood's personal papers—which were long considered lost—finally sets the record straight in this book. Hood's published version of many of the major events and controversies of his Confederate military career were met with scorn and skepticism. Some described his memoirs as merely a polemic against his arch-rival Joseph E. Johnston. These opinions persisted through the decades and reached their nadir in 1992, when an influential author described Hood's memoirs as a bitter, misleading, and highly biased treatise replete with distortions, misrepresentations, and outright falsifications. Without any personal papers to contradict them, many writers portrayed Hood as an inept, dishonest opium addict and a conniving, vindictive cripple of a man. One went so far as to brand him a fool with a license to kill his own men. What most readers don't know is that nearly all of these authors misused sources, ignored contrary evidence, and/or suppressed facts sympathetic to Hood. Stephen M. Hood, a distant relative of the general, embarked on a meticulous forensic study of the common perceptions and controversies of his famous kinsman. His careful examination of the original sources utilized to create the broadly accepted facts about John Bell Hood uncovered startlingly poor scholarship by some of the most well-known and influential historians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These discoveries, coupled with his access to a large cache of recently discovered Hood papers, many penned by generals and other officers who served with Hood, confirm Hood's account that originally appeared in his memoir and resolve, for the first time, some of the most controversial aspects of Hood's long career. |
Contents
The Son and the Soldier | |
Jeff Davis Joe Johnston and John Bell Hood | |
The Cassville Controversy | |
Hood Fights | |
Frank Cheatham and the Spring Hill Affair | |
John Bell Hood and the Battle of Franklin | |
Destroyed in Tennessee? | |
John Bell Hood Accuse His Soldiers of Cowardice? | |
Did John Bell Hood Bleed His Boys? | |
John Bell Hood and Frontal Assaults | |
Boys It is All My Fault | |
John Bell Hood and Words of Reproach | |
Laudanum Legends and Lore | |
Excerpt from Advance and Retreat | |
Other editions - View all
John Bell Hood: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of a Confederate General Stephen M. Hood No preview available - 2013 |
John Bell Hood: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of a Confederate General Stephen Hood No preview available - 2016 |
Common terms and phrases
Advance and Retreat Alabama Army of Northern Army of Tennessee artillery assault Atlanta Atlanta Campaign authors Autumn of Glory Battle of Franklin Beauregard Bell Hood Personal blame Bragg Braxton Bragg Cassville casualties cavalry Cheatham cited Civil claimed Cleburne Cleburne's Confederacy's Last Hurrah Confederate Veteran corps commander critical Decatur December defeat division enemy entrenched Ezra Church failure at Spring Federal fighting flank force Forrest Georgia Hardee historians Hood Personal Papers Hood’s Hood's army Hood's Tennessee Campaign Ibid infantry Jacobson James Jefferson Davis John Bell Hood Jonesboro Joseph Johnston July Kentucky laudanum Lee's letter loss memoirs military Mississippi move movement Nashville Nathan Bedford Forrest Northern Virginia officers orders P. G. T. Beauregard position record Richmond River Robert Schofield Sherman soldiers Southern Spring Hill Stanley Horn Stewart Texas brigade Thomas Connelly troops victory West Point Wiley Sword William wounded writing wrote