Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,718

This is the grave of John Bell Hood, Traitor in Defense of Slavery.

Born in 1831 in Owingsville, Kentucky, Hood grew up a rich kid. His father was a doctor, he was related to a lot of politicians, and of course their lifestyle was supported by slaves. His uncle Richard French was in Congress and he got his nephew into West Point. He was a terrible student there and was nearly kicked out as a senior for piling up so many demerits. But he got through and it was the 1850s and there wasn’t a whole lot to say about his early career. He was posted in California and then Texas and was wounded in 1857 in a fight with the Comanches, taking an arrow in the hand. He was promoted in 1858 to first lieutenant.

In 1861, the South committed treason in defense of slavery. Hood was from Kentucky. There was no bullshit states’ rights argument he could pull here. He just loved slavery and was happy to commit treason to defend it. He resigned his commission immediately after Fort Sumter. He more or less identified as a Texan by this point anyway and those people were real extremists on the issue.

It took Hood almost no time to rise in the Confederate Army and this was good because this guy was very bad at his job. He was commissioned as a captain for the traitors, promoted to major almost immediately, commanding calvary on the Virginia peninsula, and then to colonel after a raid on Union soldiers at Newport News. In February 1862, he was assigned to command the Texas Brigade and then was promoted to brigadier general in March. What Confederates loved about him was that he was aggressive. He loved to fight and had no problem sacrificing his men to do so. At first this worked out well for the Confederates. His aggression during the Peninsular Campaign was in stark contrast to anyone in the Union army. But there was a real cost to pay. He got a lot of accolades at Gaines Mills during the Seven Day Battles, which was a big success, but at the cost at almost his entire unit including nearly every officer except himself killed or wounded.

None of this stopped Hood’s rise. He had another big win at Second Manassas, but at the cost of over 1,000 men. The guy was a hell of a butcher. Of the 2,000 men he commanded at Antietam, 1,000 were dead or wounded, although this he blamed on Lee’s orders for a near suicidal mission. With support from Stonewall Jackson, Hood was promoted to brigadier general in October 1862. Against his will, Hood and his troops were sent into Little Round Top at Gettysburg; he knew what kind of casualties that would create and he tried to get Longstreet to not do it, but someone had to. He was also injured at Gettysburg, although not extremely seriously, though he had to recuperate in Richmond.

Upon recovery, Hood was sent to Chickamauga, which the Confederates were struggling to hold. A couple of days later, Hood took a shot to the leg and it was amputated. Longstreet made sure Hood was promoted to major general after that. He probably should have died, but unfortunately didn’t. Now without a leg and with a bum arm, he had to be strapped to his horse to stay on it, but he got an artificial limb imported on a ship that ran the Union blockade of southern ports. With Hood known for his aggression and Joseph Johnston not, they had internal battles in 1864 in the attempts to defend Atlanta. Hood completely played it up. Jefferson Davis was a complete idiot when it came to running the Army. He was president but wanted so bad to command troops in the field. So he constantly intervened and played favorites instead of letting the generals be the generals as Lincoln did. Lincoln’s big problem was finding capable generals. Davis had those but couldn’t get out of his own way. I mention this because Hood basically started a letter writing campaign to Davis about how he was great and Johnston sucked and whatever the merits of both of those things, this kind of politicking between rich military-crazed slavers is what Davis spent his time on. Davis finally dumped Johnston and Braxton Bragg lobbied for Hood to get his command instead of William Hardee because Bragg hated Hardee personally (again, this stuff is just a shitshow if you are trying to win a war).

Hood was now the youngest man in the war to command an entire army when he got the Army of Tennessee. He wanted to be aggressive against Sherman. But the better general knew that Hood was a gambling fool would who gladly kill his own men, so he used that against him and forced him into engagements that would lead to a lot of Confederate casualties with no major risks to the Union. In fact, Hood lost over 20,000 men in direct assaults on Union lines, exactly what Sherman wanted. In the end, all this forced Hood to abandon Atlanta to Sherman, then moving North to try and raise havoc in Union controlled lands to draw Sherman away from his March to the Sea. Didn’t work. Instead, the Union sent George Thomas, that great man who did not commit treason in defense of slavery, to fight Hood. Thomas kicked his ass. Hood did his usual “I don’t care whether my men live” bit at the Battle of Franklin, where he ordered them over two miles of open ground and Thomas’ men just massacred them.

Also, Hood was a whiny little shit. He wrote to Sherman during the latter’s campaign: “You came into our country with your Army, avowedly for the purpose of subjugating free white men, women, and children, and not only intend to rule over them, but you make negroes your allies, and desire to place over us an inferior race, which we have raised from barbarism to its present position, which is the highest ever attained by that race, in any country in all time.”

Shut up.

After the war, Hood went into the cotton business in New Orleans and then ran an insurance company. No longer having a place in the Army or human property, he actually had to work for a living. He married a woman and promptly they had three sets of twins and 11 children overall over 10 years. Yowza.

In 1878, yellow fever struck New Orleans. It killed him, his wife, and his oldest daughter. The other 10 kids were literally destitute and had to be farmed out to families throughout the South.

Because of our national obsession with romanticizing treason, Fort Hood is named after him. In 2021, Congress ordered it renamed. It is now Fort Cavazos, after the Army’s first Latino four star general.

John Bell Hood is buried in Metairie Cemetery, New Orleans, Louisiana.

If you would like this series to visit other traitors in defense of slavery, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. John King Jackson is in Augusta, Georgia and Nathan Bedford Forrest has been moved to Columbia, Tennessee, which actually wanted him. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.