This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [223]
This did not sit well in Richmond. Jefferson Davis was a man under unendurable pressure. He had to save a country that was dissolving under his eyes, he could not take the long view because the government he headed was dying of steady constriction, and he felt — as he was bound to feel — that his General Johnston should have been able to keep Sherman’s army away from the gates of Atlanta. By telegraph he asked Johnston what he proposed to do next. Johnston not only disliked Davis personally; he distrusted him as well — early in the war, when he was commanding Confederate troops in Virginia, little General Joe had expounded his plans to the President and Cabinet and had seen a faithful résumé of them in the Richmond newspapers next day. Now he answered with icy reserve, saying in substance that he would fight Sherman whenever he saw a chance to do so with advantage.
Mr. Davis had had enough. He had nine more months — no more than that, although the future was hidden from him — in which he could exercise the functions of President of a free nation, and while this time lasted he would live up to his role. He sent Johnston a curt message, telling him that since he had not been able to stop Sherman, and since he expressed no especial confidence that he could ever stop him, he was removed from command of his army, which would now go under the control of General John B. Hood.
Johnston replied with equal acidity. He remarked that after all General Sherman had not come any closer to Atlanta during the spring campaign than Grant had come to Richmond — the distances covered, as he pointed out, were just about equal — and he added a final kicker that did him no good but served to discharge a little venom: “Confident language by a military commander is not usually regarded as evidence of competency.”
This was true enough, but it did not help. On July 17 Johnston went into retirement, and the General Hood who had fought so hard on so many fields, getting a crippled arm at Gettysburg and an amputated leg at Chickamauga, took his place; and Sherman’s officers learned of the change and believed that it might work to their advantage.
Sherman talked to General Schofield, who commanded the Army of the Ohio. Schofield had been a fellow cadet of Hood at West Point, and he remembered the Confederate commander as a man whose intellectual gifts were limited. Schofield recalled that Hood came near flunking out of the Academy because of his difficulty in mathematics; Schofield had coached him, and once, in despair, Hood had blurted out: “Which would you rather be, an officer of the army or a farmer in Kentucky?” — implying unmistakably that he himself would prefer to be a farmer. Schofield managed to get Hood through his difficult mathematics class, and he thought of it now and remarked ruefully that he “came very near thinking once or twice that perhaps I had made a mistake.”
At any rate, Schofield gave Sherman warning. Hood was not too smart, but he was combative as anyone who ever lived: “He’ll hit you like hell, now, before you know it.” It was reported in the Federal army that a Kentucky colonel, hearing of the change in Confederate command, went to Sherman and told him of an old-army poker game he had once witnessed: “I seed Hood bet twenty-five hundred dollars with nary a pair in his hand.” However the news came to him, Sherman had fair warning that if he had had trouble in compelling Joe Johnston to meet him in knockdown combat he would have no such trouble with Hood.7
This was demonstrated before he was very much older. He got his troops across the Chattahoochee, sent them straight in at Atlanta, and immediately ran into the furious pugnacity of General Hood.
Thomas had the direct approach, and he got his Army of the Cumberland across Peachtree Creek, no more than five miles from the center of Atlanta, while McPherson was taking his Army of the Tennessee off to the east on another