later: “Hood had apparently been completely bewildered by Sherman after August 25.” “It was August 30 before Hood…realized that Sherman was attacking, not retreating,” McDonough asserted in his biography of General Schofield. Dyer, Hood’s biographer, is even worse, claiming that it was not till the afternoon of Sept. 1 that Hood “at last comprehended Sherman’s plans.” “He had no idea that practically the entire Federal army was about to march on the Macon & Western,” Bailey remarkably claims in his TimeLife volume. Even McMurry is off-base in his biography, stating, “for several days Confederate headquarters in Atlanta simply lost contact with the Northern army.” More recently in their narrative on the war, Murray and Hsieh repeat the old saw that “Hood had no idea of what was transpiring other than the fact that much of the Union host had pulled back from their positions surrounding Atlanta.”23 They’re all wrong. Hood knew where Sherman’s forces were heading, at least generally. The question was thus not one of intelligence, but of manpower. Could the Confederate commander stretch his outnumbered army far enough to meet all possible threats? Just as General Lee had to keep men north of
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the James to guard the capital, so too did Hood have to keep several divisions, plus the Georgia militia, in the fortifications of Atlanta, against a possible strike by Slocum’s corps. Still, Hood threw most of his strength to the left. On the 30th, he had at least four infantry divisions from Hardee’s and Lt. Gen. Stephen D. Lee’s corps in a fortified line running parallel with the railroad to five miles below East Point. The leftmost flank was still another seven miles north of Jonesboro. In between were no Confederate infantry, only cavalrymen who were contesting the advance of three Federal corps (IV, XIV and XXIII) with some 35,000 men. At Jonesboro itself there were still two infantry brigades with cavalry. One might argue that this tactical situation was far dire than that faced by Lee and Beauregard at Petersburg. The Army of Tennessee on Aug. 20, without cavalry, numbered just under 38,000 officers and men, who were stretched from fortifications north of Atlanta to Jonesboro. Hood’s inability to both guard the city and stretch his army along the M. & W. was his weakness, not any failure to have figured out Sherman’s general goal. Hood did the best he could. On Aug. 29 General Shoup recorded, “the general commanding, in his opinion, has taken all
With Beauregard anxiously calling for reinforcements, Lee finally sent enough troops to help repel a big Union attack on Petersburg, June 18. This Civil War Trust map is titled, “Second Petersburg”; Beauregard had repelled an earlier Federal assault on June 15. Courtesy Civil War Trust www.CivilWar.org.
necessary precautions, and made such disposition of his forces as to prevent either of the abovenamed places [Rough and Ready and Jonesboro] from falling into enemy hands.”24 Note the “opinion” part, for the argument has traditionally been made that Hood did not mass troops quickly at Jonesboro, toward which Maj. Gen. Oliver O. Howard and 20,000 infantry were marching. It is worth pointing out, however, that in none of his orders for a week, Aug. 23–29, did Sherman specify where he wanted his columns to fall on the Macon railroad. On Aug. 30, when they got moving again after wrecking the Montgomery railroad around Fairburn, the six corps marched east on a broad, seven-or eight-mile front. They could strike the road at Jonesboro (Howard’s three corps), or just as easily north of it (Schofield’s XXIII and Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas’ IV and XIV). Sherman seems to have been content to set his troops in motion, and then see what developed. Somewhere— it didn’t really matter—Federal infantry would break Hood’s lifeline. Break it, they did. About 3 p.m. on Aug. 31 elements of Brig. Gen. Jacob Cox’s division of the XXIII Corps struck the Macon & Western at Quick Station, eight miles north of Jonesboro. By that time, Hood had sent Hardee’s and Lee’s infantry to Jonesboro, where the Yankees of Howard’s army also threatened. Hood ordered them to attack, which they did on the afternoon of Aug. 31. The Confederates were repulsed at Jonesboro, but without strategic consequence: the railroad had already been broken to the north. Cox had seen no infantry before him, so his men easily drove off the hovering Rebel cavalry, then started tearing up the track. Southern horsemen stopped two southbound trains as Hood was trying to get the army’s reserve ordnance stores out of the city. The troopers told the engineers that Yankees were up ahead. Chugging back to the city in reverse, they arrived around 5 p.m. News of the enemy on the Macon road was immediately sent to Hood’s headquarters. Even before he learned of Hardee’s/Lee’s repulse (the enemy had cut the telegraph as well as the railroad), Hood thus concluded that he would have to evacuate the city. Orders went out for the withdrawal of Stewart’s corps and the militia the next day, Sept. 1. In the end, there are at least two important distinctions to make between Lee and Hood’s respective situations in explaining why the Confederates succeeded in holding their rail base in Virginia, but failed to do so in Georgia. First, when Sherman
began his flanking march, Hood did not have a base of strength at Jonesboro. The place was an undefended railway station; what troops Hood eventually had there were pushed south Aug. 28-29. In Virginia before Grant set out, Beauregard, commander of his own department on the Southside, had a division of infantry at Bermuda Hundred, in addition to a few thousand local defense troops in Petersburg. Another division soon joined these forces June 15-16. Moreover, the Confederates at Petersburg had an earlier, well-constructed earthwork system, the Dimmock Line, which helped them repel Federal attacks that started on June 15. Second, Grant’s and Butler’s forces had only one target, made obvious by the convergence of three railroads at Petersburg and the contours of the James and Appomattox Rivers. Sherman’s infantry, in contrast, were spread out on a broad front during Aug. 30-31, aiming in two, if not three, directions, with their only objective to cut the Macon & Western somewhere south of East Point. Sherman’s wide frontage and open target made Hood’s task of deployment that much harder. Most students of the GrantLee campaign have accepted Dr. Freeman’s judgement that during Grant’s crossing of the James and attack on Petersburg, Lee “was not outgeneraled nor taken by surprise.” Rather, their generous conclusion is that Lee during June 13-16 was a temporary victim of the fog of war, the shroud of uncertainty which besets generals trying to deduce their enemy’s aims. If one accepts this for Lee, one may do the same for Hood, who was beset by the fog of war enshrouding Sherman’s movement in the last days of the Atlanta Campaign. Both generals responded to their respective crises with cautious deployments and wary troop movements. At the same time, Robert E. Lee may have been blindsided on the Southside, but I will argue that John B. Hood was not hoodwinked south of Atlanta. End Notes:
*In postwar letters to his wife Anna, Hood signed himself “Bell,” a fact which Stephen M. Hood learned when he found a priceless cache of Hood papers in a Philadelphia attic in 2012. See Stephen M. Hood, The Lost Papers of Confederate General John Bell Hood (El Dorado Hills CA 2015), p. 148 (“Anna’s pet name for him was ‘Bell’”). 1. Alfred H. Burne, Lee, Grant and Sherman: A Study in Leadership in the 1864-65 Campaign (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939), 53. 2. Official Records, vol. 36, pt. 3, 877-78. 3. OR, vol. 36, pt. 3, 878.
4. Douglas Southall Freeman, R. E. Lee: A Biography (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935), vol. 3, 397. 5. Alfred Roman, Military Operations of General Beauregard (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1884), vol. 2, 566. 6. OR, vol. 36, pt. 3, 885. 7. Clifford Dowdey and Louis H. Manarin, eds., The Wartime Papers of R. E. Lee (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1961), 777-78. 8. Burne, Lee, Grant and Sherman, 55. 9. Thomas J. Howe, The Petersburg Campaign: Wasted Valor, June 15-18, 1864 (Lynchburg Va.: H. E. Howard, 1988), 38. 10. Dowdey and Manarin, eds., Wartime Papers, 781. 11. OR, vol. 40, pt. 2, 659. 12. Howe, Wasted Valor, 58. 13. Burne, Lee, Grant and Sherman, 57. 14. Brian Holden Reid, “Another Look at Grant’s Crossing of the James, 1864,” Civil War History, vol. 39, no. 4 (December 1993), 309. 15. Burne, Lee, Grant and Sherman, 59. 16. J. F. C. Fuller, Grant and Lee: A Study in Personality and Generalship (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957 [London, 1933]), 227. 17. Freeman, R. E. Lee, vol. 3, 445. 18. OR, vol. 38, pt. 5, 408. 19. W. L. Trask war journal, May-September 1864, manuscript at Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park. 20. OR, vol. 38, pt. 3, 693. 21. OR, vol. 38, pt. 3, 694. 22. Hardee to “My own dear Mary,” Aug. 30, 1864, William J. Hardee Papers, Alabama Department of Archives and History; Shoup journal, entry of August 29, OR, vol. 38, pt. 3, 694. 23. Thomas Robson Hay, “The Atlanta Campaign” (Part Two), Georgia Historical Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 2 (June 1923), 113; Stanley F. Horn, The Army of Tennessee: A Military History (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1941), 367; James L. McDonough, Schofield: Union General in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Tallahassee: University Press of Florida, 1972), 95; John P. Dyer, The Gallant Hood (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1950), 270; Ronald H. Bailey, Battles for Atlanta: Sherman Moves East (Alexandria Va.: Time-Life Books, 1985), 143; Richard M. McMurry, John Bell Hood and the War for Southern Independence (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982), 147; Williamson Murray and Wayne Wei-Siang Hsieh, A Savage War: A Military History of the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 443. 24. Shoup journal, entry of August 29, OR, vol. 38, pt. 3, 694.