Wonderful visual, seeing the desperate strategy of marching on Nashville in order to distract the Sherman March to the sea was fascinating. Just a flare that quickly disappeared on the map. That flare meant the utter destruction of the CSA's second largest army and meant there was nothing left of the CSA in the areas between the Mississippi River and Georgia.

Sherman indeed did split the CSA, but by the time he completed his march his cohorts were able to utterly destroy the enemy to the West. There was nothing left to do in Alabama, Mississippi, and other Western states but start oppressing the slaves.

The bad guys probably should have marched on Sherman instead of Nashville. Sherman was precariously over extended with his risky plan and would never have been able to take on an assault. Of course, there was the problem of catching his fast moving army.

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The music is... not good... to put it mildly. Too slow and straight out of Ken Burns. But the presentation of the information itself is really nicely done. It really makes it clear just how important Tennessee was during the war and how much action we saw.

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Moost, that is one of the strangest moments in the war (in my opinion)--realizing that both the Union and Confederate armies are leaving Atlanta at the same time, headed off in two different directions.

Yes, Sherman was fast moving, but Hood was right there! Even if all they'd done is chase Sherman's army and shoot at them, it would have slowed them down considerably.

I feel like I have a good handle on what went wrong for the Confederates on the north end of Hood's decision to leave Atlanta, but I'm not sure why he (or someone) thought that leaving Atlanta and not chasing Sherman was a good idea in the first place.

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4 minutes, eh?

That works out to one minute for each year of the war.

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Ha, no. It wouldn't have been a good thing, but it's just something I don't understand.

The whole thing is somehow very familiar and yet really strange. My grandma's grandpa and his brother were in Chattanooga and their dad came to visit them. At war. Who's all "I wonder how the boys are fairing? I'll just go see."? But everyone made it through the war in one piece so I guess war-time visiting wasn't that bad an idea.

Still, it's weird.

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Actually, under some circumstances it made sense to threaten Sherman's supply lines. A major problem with the Union armies in the West after the quick victories of the first year was the difficulty they faced in protecting their supply lines, on which they were critically dependent, seeing as they were operating in hostile territory. The Confederates in the West had been successful at restraining Union maneuverability, and Hood had every reason to think that threatening Sherman's rear communications would work. Except Sherman decided that he didn't need his communications; that his troops could do very well by living off Georgia until they reached the Sea. But by the time Sherman began his March, Hood was in North Alabama, already out of position to pursue; the nearest available Union army for him to attack was the force commanded by Schofield and Thomas in Middle Tennessee. And indeed Hood's appearance before Nashville caused political panic in the North, even though the city's defense were virtually impregnable and Thomas had much the superior army. When Lincoln ordered Thomas to attack, Hood's troops were sitting ducks.

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David is right. Personalities also had something to do with it. Joe Johnson was a brilliant general who presided over the strategic retreats to Atlanta, managing to do the best anyone could under the circumstances. But Jefferson Davis came to lose trust in him and wanted someone who would take the fight to the Union, who would attack boldly, and he found his man in Hood.

Hood executed a brilliant maneuver on the Duck River but was thwarted by bad luck. And then he outmaneuvered and surrounded the Union forces at Spring Hill, only to find that they slipped through his fingers because of communications errors. So he was determined to assault them frontally, and suicidally, when he finally caught up with them at Franklin, despite the pleas of his commanders to wait for their artillery, or for more time so Forrest could swing his cavalry behind the Union positions. Some people will tell you that Nashville was the decisive battle, but Franklin was where Hood wrecked the Army of Tennessee. Nashville was an aftershock, and the real clamor in Washington involved Thomas' claim that he had to wait for the effects of an ice storm to dissipate before he could dispatch his units out to roll up what remained of Hood's forces.

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Bubbadog (and David Carlton), do you put a lot of stock in Hood being too drunk or stoned to respond to the Union walking by the Confederate troops at Spring Hill or do you think some of it was just the strange ballsy-ness of one army passing another army in the night that make the Confederates unable to respond?

I know, when I first moved down here, the guy who ran the Carter House would not even speak Hood's name, his grudge against him was so deep and the list of Hood's sins so long, and that's always stuck with me.

But I can't really tell if Hood really fucked up that dishonorably or if he messed up but people were willing to chalk it up to war until after the war when people felt he was blaming his men for his defeats. It seems like his dishonorable behavior after the war caused some historians to go back and recast his behavior during the war as dishonorable as well (for instance, I've read that he couldn't be found at Spring Hill to give the command to attack because he was in a drug-addled pile of hookers).

Do we have a good sense of how much of that is myth and how much of it is actual?

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Betsy, I don't pretend to be an expert, but from what I have read the debacle at Spring Hill had more to do with typical battlefield confusion and the garbling of orders than with some particular failure on Hood's part.

I've never read anything about Hood and hookers (that title, ironically, came from the camp followers who followed the Army of the Potomac under Joe Hooker). Hood had lost an arm in one battle (Gettysburg, I think) and had a leg so badly mangled in another (Chickamauga?) that he had to be strapped into his saddle. He was wracked with pain every day and may or may not have been hooked on laudanum as a painkiller.

I've read Shelby Foote's account of Spring Hill and Franklin several times, and I don't think he attributes the Franklin disaster to Hood being chemically altered. But I have read that Hood was livid over the Union army's escape at Spring Hill and insisted that a frontal assault would teach his men discipline — almost as if he wanted to punish them. Maybe it was the drugs that made him crazy, or maybe it the lack of drugs to ease his pain. At any rate, he should have known full well from Gettysburg what would happen with a frontal charge across open ground against a fortified position. Lee at least had the excuse (though not a terribly good one) that he thought the middle of the Union line at Gettysburg would be its weakest point, since the Confederates had spent the two previous days trying to roll up the Union's left flank.

You don't have to believe the claims about the drugs to understand why someone at the Carter House (or anyone whose ancestor fought for the Army of Tennessee) would spit at the sound of Hood's name. The attack at Franklin never stood a chance and was a predictable slaughter that Hood's subordinates had foreseen and tried to avert.

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Ah Virgil, it was a time you remember oh so well.

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