Texas Brigadier to the Fall of Atlanta: John Bell Hood by Stephen Davis

Abstract

Reviewed by: Texas Brigadier to the Fall of Atlanta: John Bell Hood by Stephen Davis Brian Craig Miller Texas Brigadier to the Fall of Atlanta: John Bell Hood. By Stephen Davis. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2019. Pp. xii, 503. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-88146-720-8.) John Bell Hood, a prominent Confederate general during the American Civil War, has always seemed more suited for central casting than at the head of an army. Physically attractive, Hood gained fame for his meteoric rise through the ranks of the Army of Northern Virginia in 1862 and 1863 and the Army of Tennessee in 1864. Additionally, he gained notoriety among the social circles of Richmond, Virginia, during the fall of 1863, while he healed from an amputation that removed his leg only a few inches from the hip. He gained the trust of Confederate officials, from Robert E. Lee, who tasked Hood's Texans to take on numerous offensive maneuvers, to President Jefferson Davis, who gave Hood control of an army in the summer of 1864 to save the doomed city of Atlanta. In many ways, Hood seemed to be in the right place at the right time to secure his ascension through Confederate military command. Although Hood's biography has been explored on several previous occasions, author Stephen Davis, who has written extensively on the Atlanta campaign, believes a new two-volume biography of Hood is warranted because the officer deserves a fairer exploration as someone who did all he could to save the city of Atlanta. Volume 1, reviewed here, tackles Hood's childhood, his education at West Point, his service on the frontier in the 1850s, and his military command through the summer of 1864. This book's strengths are rooted in the author's exhaustive research in a cornucopia of primary sources and his strong grasp of the extensive secondary explorations of Hood's life and legacy. Additionally, Stephen Davis once again debunks wild rumors and myths about Hood, including his alleged drug and alcohol abuse that supposedly accompanied his war injuries and amputation. Unfortunately, the biography, like Hood, trips up on numerous accounts, which I will lay at the feet of both the author and his press. First, the book needs serious editing, as two chapters each run over a hundred pages in length, and the first chapter alone weighs in at 106 pages. Thus, while the biography is designed chronologically, beginning with Hood's birth in Kentucky, the unbearably lengthy chapters make it difficult to digest some new and pertinent details, from questions about where Hood had his leg amputated to questions [End Page 347] about how he ended up injured in the first place. Second, while the research is exhaustive, it is severely uneven, as some pages go by without a single citation or reference. Then, at other points, we get notes that cover several pages, with several paragraphs of information that either should be in the text itself or placed on a website for further exploration. The editors here have done a great disservice to other historians trying to glean the larger argument of the work, as many of the important elements of debate are dumped into the notes rather than made part of the text itself. When the author reaches a point of historiographical contention about Hood's career, he rarely makes his own conclusion and takes a kitchen-sink approach by laying out what every single author has said about Hood on a particular point. As the reader moves day by day and month by month through 1864, the high level of detail hides the overall significance of why Hood's failed military career matters. Finally, the author has failed to grasp the importance of the scholarship on Civil War memory, as so much of Hood's career was rooted in how he and the events surrounding him have been remembered and misremembered, and why that memory mattered so much to Hood (who took great pains to constantly correct the historical record, both during and after the war). Perhaps the author plans to take this approach in the second volume. More than likely, this review will appear after the publisher releases...