An account of the Confederate Army of Tennessee's final disastrous assault at Spring Hill, Franklin, and Nashville. Following the fall of Atlanta, this campaign led to the worst defeat of any army during the war.
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An account of the Confederate Army of Tennessee's final disastrous assault at Spring Hill, Franklin, and Nashville. Following the fall of Atlanta, this campaign led to the worst defeat of any army during the war.
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Most casual students of the Civil War will have knowledge of critical events of 1864-1865, including Sherman's capture of Atlanta and March to the Sea, and Grant's siege of Petersburg and the subsequent surrender of Lee at Appomattox. Many students without a detailed knowledge of the War will have less familiarity with the equally important and dramatic events which surround the Confederacy's disastrous invasion of Tennessee during the winter of 1864. This invasion began on November 21, 1864, and concluded with the essential destruction of the Army of Tennessee in the second day of the Battle of Nashville on December 16, 1864. Wiley Sword's sad and eloquent book, "The Confederacy's Last Hurrah: Spring Hill, Franklin, & Nashville", first published in 1993, tells the story.
There are many threads and themes developed in the book as befitting the complexity of the campaign. The story begins with Jefferson Davis' decision to relieve Joe Johnston from command of the Army of Tennessee and to replace him with J.B. "Sam" Hood, due to Johnston's lack of aggressiveness in the Atlanta campaign. Hood had a well-deserved reputation, earned at Antietam, Gettysburg, and Chickamauga, as a bold, aggressive fighter. He also suffered from grave deficiencies in judgment, intelligence, and character. Hood had been seriously wounded in earlier combat, making him subject to fatigue and possibly to over-dependence on painkillers. Whatever Johnston's merits or deficiencies, the decision to replace him with Hood was, Sword argues convincingly, unwise.
The Confederate high command, including Davis, Beauregard, and Hood, made the decision to allow Sherman's March to the Sea basically uncontested after the fall of Atlanta and instead to make a countermarch into Tennessee with the hope of recapturing the state and perhaps moving northward to invade Ohio. In leading the campaign, Hood promised he would commit to a general engagement only on favorable ground of his own choosing and with numerical superiority. Events were to prove otherwise.
Sword's book moves effectively between the Union and Confederate sides as he describes the three key engagements of the Tennessee campaign. The first critical engagement took place at Spring Hill, Tennessee. Hood had outmaneuvered a Union Army commanded by John Schofield which was headed to Nashville to join the forces of the commanding general, George Thomas. Hood had the Federal force cut off. During the night of November 29, 1864, Schofield's entire army slipped by the Army of the Tennessee encamped in the fields on the side of the road of Spring Hill. Hood was several miles away from the action and asleep. The Confederate command was badly uncoordinated. How the Confederate Army allowed Schofield's escape has always been a mystery, and it remains so after reading Sword's account. His discussion of Spring Hill is thorough and detailed and shows the mistakes of Hood and his subordinates. I was left confused about what happened.
Schofield marched to the town of Franklin, Tennessee and hastily constructed a line of strong entrenchments with his back to the Harpeth River. Hood's angry and puzzled Army followed. When Hood caught up to Schofield on the afternoon of November 30, he impulsively ordered an attack on the entrenchments against the advice of his subordinates. The attack resulted in perhaps the greatest slaughter of the Civil War.
The Battle of Franklin, the bravery of the Confederate attack, the resoluteness shown in defense, and the folly of the charge are at the center of Sword's account. His descriptions of the fighting, unlike the confused nature of the activities at Spring Hill, are moving, clear, and masterful. There is a poignant sense of loss at the waste of it all. Sword writes:
"Franklin in many respects had become a dramatic pinnacle of the Civil War. In that magnetic and intensely charged moment of Hood's grand frontal assault, the divergent forces of destiny and human spirit had fatally collided. Magnified by the electrifying emotion of a nation dying, it was for the South one last desperate hurrah. With everything risked on a single, fateful attack, disaster for one army or the other had been certain For a moment it became eternity in eclipse, the world asunder. No sight was more grand, spectacular, nor became more ghastly." (p. 270)
Schofield withdrew from Franklin rather than attempt to exploit his success, and Hood, for reasons that will remain unclear, followed him to Nashville and attempted to lay siege to the city. General Grant pressed Union General George Thomas to attack immediately, but Thomas refrained until his army was ready and until weather conditions permitted the movement. Thomas' restraint almost cost him his removal. But on December 15, 1864, his attack brought the Army of Tennessee close to destruction. The Army was saved because the Union attack had been delayed by a heavy morning fog. On the second day of the Battle, December 16, 1864, Thomas achieved a singular Union victory as the entire Confederate defense broke late in the afternoon. Sword describes the dramatic battle and the long, perilous retreat of Hood's survivors back to Mississippi. The Army of Tennessee was destroyed as a fighting force.
While some of the descriptions of troop movements, particularly at Spring Hill, are confusingly described, Sword takes the Civil War and the Tennessee campaign with great seriousness and a sense of tragedy rather than bravado. The book offers a portrait of the Tennessee campaign and of its protagonists that is difficult to forget. Sword offers a great deal of thought and analysis of the military situations he describes rather than only giving descriptions of combat. He tries to see the actions through the eyes of the combatants, including Hood, Cleburne, Schofield, and Thomas, as well as of the soldiers in the ranks. Some readers have taken issue with the portrayal of General Hood that Sword develops. It is difficult to argue with Sword's basic conclusion that Hood was out of his depths as a commander and that he suffered from flaws such as impulsiveness, lack of discretion, and a propensity to blame others that contributed heavily to the destruction of the Army of the Tennessee.
Readers who want to use the 150th anniversary of the Civil War to deepen their understanding of the conflict beyond general overviews or studies of more familiar battles will benefit from Sword's moving account of the 1864 Tennessee campaign.
