Episode 3: The Western War

Transcript

John Heckman: We said right before we went live on the recording that I’m going to learn a lot from you because I’m an eastern theater kind of person. I grew up near Gettysburg. So, that kind of takes precedence when you grew up 25 miles from Gettysburg.

So, I’m really excited to learn more about three people who everyone’s going to know: [Joseph] Johnston, [John Bell] Hood, and [Jefferson] Davis. And I’ve always had an interesting soft spot for Johnston. How do you feel in general about these three men having done the research you’ve done? Did you go into your research thinking of Johnston in one way and coming out with a different perspective? Or Hood? Or Davis?

Steven Woodworth: Well, that’s an interesting question. In a way, my views of them changed as I researched them. I think when you research someone a lot and you live with them for years, like I did with Jefferson Davis through two books, it’s a lot like being around people.

In a way, you get to like them, you get to see things from their perspective and you feel some sympathy toward them. And sometimes also then their faults can really rub you the wrong way a lot. You know, he’s doing that again. Oh no, it’s just like him. And so, it was certainly that way with Davis and so intensely mixed feelings towards him.

Johnston, again, there’s another case where you find yourself sympathizing, for example, with what he was up against. Here you are and you’re supposed to hold Atlanta and you’re up against Sherman and his army and you’re really not going to hold Atlanta. And so, it’s almost, can you make a better show than you did?

Or, Johnston in Mississippi in the summer of ’63 against Grant. And knowing what you know about Grant and about his army, you know that Johnston really didn’t have much of a real chance to win that one. So, you feel sympathy for him. And then on the other hand, there’s frustration, but Johnston, why don’t you try to do something?

And then with Hood, again, there’s that intense mix of sympathy mixed with frustration. Like I say, sometimes, we feel that with other human beings that we know in our life, like our friends. We wish they wouldn’t do certain things.

And there’s Hood. Now, in Hood’s case, he’s going to try to do something. It may be stupid, but he’s going to try to do something. And another thing that you recognize in all three of them, sometimes, and this again, very human tendency, one might almost say one recognizes the temptation in oneself, to want to present events in the best light for oneself.

Johnston, Davis, and Hood, in all three cases, you read their stuff and you find yourself saying, yeah, you’re spinning that in your direction. It’s led me to say, and now this is not true of all Civil War characters, but I came up with an idea here, and this is almost tongue in cheek, but if you are a general on the losing side in a war, your reputation is probably going to be better off if you don’t write your memoirs. Look at Robert E. Lee. Now, of course, he had some other things helping his reputation, but he died before he could write his memoirs, which probably helped him. Now, if you’re on the winning side, go ahead and write your memoirs. That’ll make you look better. Maybe. With Davis, Hood, and Johnston—and I could name other Confederates—their memoirs came across as being self-serving.

I think when you’re on the losing side, there’s a lot of blame that you want to throw or you’re tempted to want to throw. It’s somebody else’s fault. And that never looks good on us. So, how my views of them changed, my views became more strongly conflicted.

John Heckman: That’s an interesting—I don’t want to call it a trap—but it’s an interesting thing to get involved with as a historian, where you get solidified in looking at a person a certain way, and then you read something that they wrote and you start to second-guess some opinions you had previously about this person’s fighting style or what they think about the enemy or whatever the case may be.

It’s a beautiful trap to be in. And we love those kinds of things because it makes us think twice about what we think. But it’s an amazing thing that we have to get across to students sometimes that, hey, enjoy the traps because they’re going to happen.

Steven Woodworth: Right. Well, I think, dealing with students, dealing with really anybody, including maybe ourselves, there’s always that tendency to want to think that characters A, B, and C were good and did everything right. And characters D, E, and F were bad and did everything wrong. And it’s not that simple. Now, there are still characters I feel more or less sympathetic to, and characters I think did a better or worse job. But you realize that it’s not a simple story either way.

John Heckman: Speaking of a sympathetic character, to me when I was growing up talking about the eastern theater I often felt sympathetic towards Joe Johnston because he’s kind of pushed aside. You have Robert E. Lee come in and then everyone just forgets about Joe Johnston in general, at least in the east. But yet it seemed like he was so beloved by the men who served under him.

It’s almost like a McClellan type where the men love him, but you’re like, Joe, why don’t you move? Do you think there’s some similarity between their fighting? Or even Sherman going against him before Atlanta? Sherman’s not engaging in these grandiose battles.

He’s doing a lot of different maneuvering and Johnston’s trying to parry. Do you think that’s an overlooked part of the equation? That they’re trying to outmaneuver each other a little bit more than we realize?

Steven Woodworth: It’s certainly true. And maybe it’s been overlooked to a degree. Sherman definitely is a general who does maneuver well. And I look at Sherman and he has some definite weaknesses. In his repertoire of skills as a general, there’s some areas where he’s less strong. He’s not great, this is Sherman now, not great at the tactical offensive and maybe especially weak there.

Although nobody in the Civil War is really overwhelmingly strong in the tactical offensive. That, just, nobody does that that great. Nobody has really solved the problem and the technology is not there. But the thing with Sherman was that he always usually managed to keep the contest going in the terms of what he did well. And he maneuvered well.

And so, he would use that maneuver and Sherman gets in a contest with Johnston and it winds up being this maneuvering match and that’s Sherman’s strong point. And I have to give Sherman kudos for being able to keep the contest going in terms of maneuver. Johnston also is a maneuver-oriented guy. And not too much of a risk taker.

And, of course, you can say it wouldn’t have been good to take risks. Hood took risks. So, there’s two ways you can look at it. But yes, they were absolutely maneuvering sort of guys. You mentioned Johnston getting sidelined in Virginia and it makes me think of the starting quarterback who goes down with an injury in the first game of the season, the opening game of the season, and they bring in the backup who absolutely lights the place up. And never looks back. And, actually, TCU had that happen a couple of years ago, the backup winds up starting the rest of the season and by game three or four, the starter’s ready to go again, but he’s not going to see the field except in garbage time the rest of the season, because the backup has got it now.

I don’t think there are too many military historians who would say, you should sit Robert E. Lee back down again and put Johnston in there. But yeah, he was a maneuvering type of general and not a risk taker.

Sherman was also a maneuverer. And probably outdid Johnston.

John Heckman: What’s Johnston’s army look like in those early engagements before Atlanta? Is it a large army? Is morale low? Is morale high? What is the environment like in that army at the time?

Steven Woodworth: So, the Confederate Army of Tennessee—from Dalton down to the outskirts of Atlanta, July 16, when Johnston gets removed—it’s a fair-sized army. It’s about 60,000 men, give or take. So almost the size of the Army of Northern Virginia. It’s up against a Union army—or technically an army group, but effectively one army under Sherman—that is also about the size of the Army of the Potomac. So, the proportion of strength is similar in Georgia to what it was simultaneously in Virginia, more or less. And so, it’s a fair-sized army and morale is decent in the Army of Tennessee. They liked Johnston. So, he’s good for morale. They were not as hostile to Bragg as is sometimes represented.

But Bragg was not a great favorite. Johnston was much better liked by the men of the Army of Tennessee. So that helps the morale. And we have a tendency, when we go out, we enter the 1864 campaign, and we know that the demise of the Confederacy is about a year away. And they’re going to lose. So, they must’ve been discouraged. They must have known the Confederacy was on its last legs. They knew nothing of the sort. As far as Confederates were concerned, they entered the 1864 campaign, both in Virginia and in Georgia, and on the home front too, with pretty high morale and quite a bit of confidence.

We tend to forget about a lot of the small fights that took place during kind of the off season between 1863 and ’64, but the Confederacy had done well in those. The Battle of the Olustee in Florida, the defense of Fort Sumter and the defense of Charleston, South Carolina, the capture of Fort Pillow in Tennessee.

All wins for the Confederacy. So, as they saw it, Gettysburg was a little bit of a setback, not too much. And the loss of Chattanooga wasn’t great, but they had been doing fine since then. And morale was high, confidence was high, and yeah, they thought they were going to win this thing.

John Heckman: So, you’re saying they’re probably seeing that they are holding the interior of the Confederacy together and they’re losing just the outlying areas or battles in the outlying areas or sieges in the outlying areas, but they’re still holding the heart of the Confederacy?

Steven Woodworth: Well, the heart of the Confederacy east of the Mississippi, if you think about it.

Say it’s late April of 1864. What has the Confederacy lost so far? A couple of port cities on the east coast. Norfolk. It’s lost a little strip of northern Virginia between the Potomac and the Rappahannock. Kentucky. Yeah, if they ever had Kentucky. Most of Tennessee. Most of Mississippi. Mississippi River Valley, they lost. So yeah, they’ve lost a lot. They’ve lost the state of Tennessee. Almost the whole thing. They don’t have control there anymore. But if you think of the eastern Confederacy from, say, Alabama through Georgia, Florida and on up to Virginia, that part of the Confederacy is pretty much intact. So, if you forget about Texas and of course, Texas is still holding out, but it’s isolated. Likewise, Louisiana.

There’s another place where the Confederacy has once scored some victories during the off season, with the Red River Campaign, a complete fiasco from a Union point of view, and the Battle of Mansfield. So anyway, yeah, the Confederacy, they’re holding Georgia, they’re holding Virginia, they’ve got North and South Carolina intact, except for coastal enclaves. Alabama intact. Florida intact.

And so, from that point of view, the Confederacy is holding its own.

John Heckman: What do you think are some of the key moments where Davis finally gets fed up with Johnston?

Steven Woodworth: Well, the question is, did he ever fully give up on Johnston?

We can argue that when Johnston was brought back in early 1865 that that was mostly on Lee’s impetus. Lee gets the top general job and Davis lets him bring Johnston back aboard. Davis, prior to that, keeps getting frustrated with Johnston. And he’ll, for example, in Virginia, spring of ’62, outskirts of Richmond, Davis is, at least according to some reports, on the verge of firing Johnston and then Johnston gets wounded.

In Mississippi, Davis is very frustrated with Johnston, sends him, but he sends him to command the army of Tennessee after Bragg has to go. So, does Davis finally get fed up with Johnston? Well, the only time Davis really finally pulls the trigger, figuratively speaking, and fires Johnston is, of course, July 16, 1864, there on the outskirts of Atlanta. And there it appears to me that what is driving Davis’ frustration is that he wants Johnston to fight rather than give up Atlanta. He is afraid that Johnston will give up Atlanta without a fight. And, of course, we don’t know. I mean, maybe Johnston would’ve and maybe he wouldn’t have, because he wasn’t given a chance.

And from Davis’ point of view, he felt he couldn’t give Johnston a chance. He didn’t want to see Atlanta fall without a fight. If Davis was going to fire Johnston, it needed to happen a lot earlier or not at all. Firing Johnston and putting Hood in the command, literally on the doorstep of Atlanta, where Hood has no more room to move backward at all without giving up Atlanta.

And Hood maybe takes some blame. And some of it, he really deserves. But some of it, maybe not so much. The Tennessee Campaign for Hood, blame him all you want. That was a sad outing. But outside Atlanta, I have some sympathy for Hood.

Yeah, he lost three battles, but he was in a situation where he didn’t have a lot of good choices. He lost actually four battles, if we add Jonesboro to that. He didn’t have a lot of choices. Sherman’s going to keep doing these turning maneuvers. Hood can’t back up, so he’s got to fight every time Sherman tries a turning maneuver. And yeah, he loses the battles.

He somehow manages to hang on to Atlanta. And, his sortie that led to the July 22 Battle of Atlanta—and I know I’m off Johnston, now I’m on Hood—but this is sort of in blame for Davis of waiting that late to fire Johnston. If you wait that late, you’ve probably chosen your racehorse and you need to stay on that horse and not try to change horses in the middle of the stream.

Hood was in a very bad situation, but still on the July 22 sortie in which mistakes were made and in which you can certainly see the problem of Hood’s lack of personal mobility. Yet after the battle was over, Sherman told his troops, the Army of the Tennessee, the only unmilitary thing you did was not surrender.

I think if that had been the 1863 version of the XI Corps a la Chancellorsville in Virginia that Hood hit outside Atlanta on July 22, I think he wins. At least that battle. I don’t think the Confederacy wins the war, but he scores a victory. So yeah, I think Davis got fed up with Johnston outside Atlanta because he thought Johnston was going to give up Atlanta without a fight. It was a tough situation all the way around.

John Heckman: Do you think that’s because of that previous experience? Davis saw Johnston outside Richmond, like you say, and saw things were collapsing slowly, and now we’re seeing it again. It’s like deja vu all over again, where now you’re outside a major city, and you’re just sitting there and waiting for almost the inevitable.

And I never thought about the fact that maybe Davis pulled the trigger a little too late and now Hood has nowhere to go basically.

Steven Woodworth: Yeah, I think so. Davis was frustrated with Johnston after the Richmond campaign. But Johnston did attack at Seven Pines and he got wounded. And I guess the amazing thing to me is how much through all of this Davis continues to hold a high opinion of Johnston. He gave Johnston the western job in the fall of ’62.

Now Johnston didn’t want it. He wanted the Army of Northern Virginia. He wasn’t going to get it, but Davis gives him the western job. And he writes, Johnston’s a skillful general who could do a lot of good for us. And I tend to have my doubts about that. Either you have confidence in the man or you don’t.

And then I think what impressed Davis more negatively than Johnston’s retreat to Richmond in the spring of ’62 was Johnston’s failure to attempt to relieve Vicksburg in the summer of ’63. Vicksburg falls and someone says to Davis a few weeks after that, well, I guess Vicksburg fell from a lack of food supplies.

And Davis says, yes, from a lack of food supplies. And from a general outside who wouldn’t fight. And he met Johnston. And Johnston and Davis go through this epistolary argument back and forth, this argument in letters in late ’63, where Johnston says, you didn’t send me enough men to relieve Vicksburg.

And Davis said, I sent you 30,000 men. And Johnston said, no, you didn’t. You only sent me 23,000 men. And so, Davis has the War Department clerks trot out the files: Bring me the copies of the letters with all the notations and the orders as far as which troops were ordered to go to Johnston and what their numbers were so I can prove to Johnston I sent him 30,000 men. And I’m thinking as I’m reading this, Davis, what does it matter? Vicksburg is gone. And again, you either have confidence in Johnston or you don’t. And there’s that issue of Davis expects you to put up a fight rather than give up.

And as far as Davis was concerned, Johnston had given up Vicksburg without a fight. Now, did Johnston have a realistic chance to relieve Vicksburg by attacking? Probably not. Especially if he waits very far at all into the siege, and if he attacks towards Vicksburg, really the only viable route is between the Yazoo and the Big Black, that sort of land corridor there.

He’s going to come down from the northwest. He’s going to be biting directly into Sherman’s heavily entrenched position. I don’t see him breaking through that. Grant’s been heavily reinforced. Maybe the only chance for Johnston would have been there in mid to late May when Grant is still moving, really in the interior of Mississippi.

That’s when the Confederates had to win that campaign. So again, there aren’t any good or easy solutions like, oh, Johnston could easily have, no, nobody could easily have anything there. But Davis was angry at Johnston for not trying. And again, he gives Johnston the Army of Tennessee command in November-December of ’63. Leaves him in command to face Sherman in the Atlanta Campaign.

Doesn’t sack him after Resaca early in the campaign. Yeah, I find Davis’ persistence in getting frustrated with Johnston, but still keeping him in command, to be strange. Either keep the guy and back him to the hilt or get rid of him.

John Heckman: What is the main difference in the style of leadership—and how that’s consumed by the men in this army—from Johnston to Hood? What are those major differences, or small differences even, that really impact the men and how they fight?

Steven Woodworth: Johnston is more skillful. Johnston is better at maneuver. It’s not to say that Hood is terrible at those things, but Johnston is quite good at that. Grant is impressed with Johnston’s maneuver skills. Sherman’s impressed with Johnston’s maneuver skills. Johnston is cautious. Hood’s not cautious. Johnston’s very cautious. And caution can be a left-handed compliment. Is it good or bad for a general to be confident? Yeah, it is. It’s good or bad. Sometimes it is really good and sometimes not so much. Johnson may have been a little too cautious, but he was often cautious when he needed to be. So, Hood is not cautious.

And of course, Hood is very aggressive. At Cassville, on the way down during the Atlanta Campaign, Johnston issues orders to his troops: We’re going to counterattack Sherman right now. Here it is. We’re counterattacking. And he’s getting around to launch his big counterattack. And somebody sights a disconnected column of Union troops, I think a brigade of the Army of the Ohio, showing up on a road at an angle from a direction that Johnston didn’t expect. It wasn’t all Johnston’s fault. Polk, I think, was wanting to retreat and maybe Hood too, but Johnston winds up calling off the attack and retreating.

Whereas Hood, he attacks at Peachtree Creek, which may or may not have been a good idea. He attacks at Atlanta, at Bald Hill. And then, he attacks again at Ezra Church, which definitely was not a good idea. Although that’s complicated too.

At Ezra Church, what you’re seeing there is Hood has only one leg—and I don’t mean to be disrespectful to persons with disabilities—but we see Civil War generals who are effective after the loss of an arm. I don’t think we see Civil War generals who are very effective over the long term after the loss of a leg. Richard Ewell? The early stages of the Gettysburg Campaign, yeah, he looked good. But after that, not so much. He could do some things well, but the lack of that leg set him back.

So, he’s giving these orders, but he can’t ride out there and see the situation and look at what’s going on. And this is still an age when generals like to see things with their own eyes. Lee does. Grant definitely likes to get far enough forward that he can see the battlefield. Hood is not so able to do that.

And so that makes Hood’s aggressiveness look more reckless—and certainly less effective—than it actually was. So yeah, Johnston was more cautious. And Hood was more aggressive, sometimes reckless.

John Heckman: How does that play in to the memory of the war amongst these men? Either through memoirs or through what’s put in papers later on? Because most of these guys are trying to clean things up in a way and say, well, this wasn’t my fault, or I tried my best. Johnston saying, I couldn’t go to Vicksburg, etc.

How does this timeframe of the summer of ’64, and especially around Atlanta, impact the postwar memory of that effort? I know growing up during the 125th anniversaries and the 130th anniversaries of the war in the 1990s we had our own kind of ideas of what transpired there, but obviously we have 30 more years of research now. And perhaps that has changed some of our memory. What were they trying to do to impact even our memory of their efforts at that time?

Steven Woodworth: They were definitely trying to shape the way they would be remembered. I think of Winston Churchill during World War II saying history will be kind to me for I shall write it.

And of course, he does write his multi-volume memoirs of the war. And these guys are all trying to make history be kind to them by writing it themselves. And Johnston’s memoirs and Hood’s memoirs are both among the more feisty, self-justifying memoirs of the war.

And they both do quite a number on each other. Hood, of course, is, saying Johnston totally failed. And Johnston is saying, well, no, I didn’t, and Hood was undercutting me, Hood was sending letters to Davis behind my back, and so on. So yeah, they were rather embittered against each other, were Hood and Johnston. Davis can also write a little bit of a self-justifying memoir. And he wrote his rather later than the other guys.

And he can be a little more even-handed between these two because they were both his appointees and he wound up being kind of negative to Johnston and a little more defensive with Hood. But yeah, they got into it with each other. Again, if anybody ever has you lead an army in a big war, when you write your memoirs be nice to everyone and don’t try to settle scores with people because it doesn’t look good in memoirs.

John Heckman: You’ve done countless talks at round tables and in front of classes. What do you see as some of the things that people get wrong about this era in Civil War history, like this 1864 time period? What are some of the things that we need to keep in mind when we’re talking about this period?

Steven Woodworth: I think there’s a tendency to remember these generals or think of these generals in terms of caricatures. So, heroes and villains. This was a great general and he never made any mistakes. And this was a terrible general who never did anything right. I’ll admit that I have generals that I think more highly of and generals that I think much less highly of.

I think much more highly of Grant, for example, than I do of John A. McClernand. But we have to remember that even the generals that we tend to despise had some good days and had some abilities and good traits and things that they can do. It was a lot more complicated and nuanced than we tend to think.

Similarly, the generals we tend to like. Grant, he made mistakes. He was a good general. I think a very good general. Maybe the best of the war. But he made mistakes and had misperceptions and misunderstood some things. Same with Lee. So, a way that people see the war in terms of characters is especially with the generals that they do like, who they tend to make into Supermen, like Lee. Or, as you go around with different Civil War groups as I’ve had the privilege and the pleasure of doing at different times, usually I’m the guy that does the evening lectures and somebody else actually does the guiding and I just get to go along in these tours, so it’s been fun. But you’ll be someplace and the guide is describing how the Confederates lost here. And someone will speak up and say, if Forrest would have been here, they would have won. Or if Jackson had been here, they would have won. The if-so-and-so-had-been-here line of thinking. And that leads to another misconception: the if onlys.

The Civil War has all kinds of if onlys. And it’s a lot of fun to make all sorts of events in the Civil War seem very dramatic. You know, everybody wants to describe it in terms of that poem. For want of a nail, the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe, the horse was lost. So, everybody wants to make their favorite little action—Chamberlain at Little Round Top, or whatever—the horseshoe/nail that lost the war. And that, of course, is a little exaggerated, not really the way we want to be thinking so much. So, yeah, I think a tendency to oversimplify, it’s hard not to do that when you’re less familiar with it. As you just keep reading it, reading about it year after year and dealing with it year after year, you see more of the complexity of it. You see that, yeah, even the generals they didn’t like had some good traits. Even the generals I do like had some bad traits. And that there were a lot of things in the Civil War that were important. You know, a professor of mine many years ago said when you say, hey, if somebody would have done this different than all of history would have been different. He said, it’s a little bit like saying at the end of a two-hour chess game, if I would have moved my King’s pawn differently on the second move of the game, then I would have won.

All you can really say is, well, it probably would have been a different game.

John Heckman: One last question. For someone like me, who grew up in the eastern theater of this conflict and was surrounded by it all the time and never had a chance to go to the area around Atlanta or other parts of Georgia where these activities happened. Where would you say is somewhere someone like me needs to go to truly understand either Johnston’s style of leadership, or maybe even Hood’s style of leadership, or that jockeying of position between Sherman and either one of them?

Steven Woodworth: Well, for the Atlanta Campaign there’s which sites were important. And then there’s what sites were preserved. And then how do they overlap? Kennesaw Mountain is a good place to go because there’s the National Park there and the battlefield’s preserved. If I were saying one place to go to understand the Atlanta campaign would be Kennesaw Mountain. And it puts you right there in the middle of all of it and it’s preserved.

The battlefield sites in Atlanta itself are shockingly not preserved. And I think my favorite horror story of that is that, the key terrain feature of the key battle that did more than any other one battle to determine the fate of Atlanta, the Battle of Atlanta on July 22, was Bald Hill. And that was literally removed in the 1950s, I believe, in order to run Interstate 20 right through there.

That’s now an interstate interchange there and the hill doesn’t exist. So, you can go out in the middle of the overpass over the interstate and say, well, the top of Bald Hill is about 20 feet over my head. So, you can’t go back and visit that too well, but Kennesaw Mountain is a good place for the Atlanta Campaign.

For other western battlefields that are very worthwhile to visit, obviously Chickamauga—one of my favorite battlefields, beautiful and preserved well enough that you can really understand the battle there. Chattanooga, the battlefields of Chattanooga, now badly overrun by the city, but yet from the top of Missionary Ridge and from the Point Park on Lookout Mountain, nothing actually happened there, but you can see where it did. It’s pretty good place to visit.

I like to visit Bridgeport, Alabama, where they’ve got a footbridge across the Tennessee. And you can see the Tennessee River and the mountains there, and that’s where one of Rosecrans’ columns crossed during the Chattanooga Campaign. I like that one. And finally, Shiloh and Vicksburg are very important places and also preserved. But for the Atlanta Campaign, Kennesaw.

About the Guest

Steven E. Woodworth is professor of history at Texas Christian University and author of a number of books about the Civil War, including Six Armies in Tennessee: The Chickamauga and Chattanooga Campaigns and Manifest Destinies: Westward Expansion and the Civil War.

Additional Resources

Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park
Chickamauga & Chattanooga National Military Park
Explore Bridgeport, Alabama
Shiloh National Military Park
Vicksburg National Military Park
For more on our host, John Heckman, visit him on Linktree