Embrace an Angry Wind

Embrace an Angry Wind: The Confederacy’s Last Hurrah: Spring Hill, Franklin, & Nashville. By Wiley Sword. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992. 499pp.

The importance and critical impact of the Western Theater during the American Civil War has garnered considerable attention from historians over the last several decades. Narrative accounts and detailed examinations of the various battles and campaigns west of the Appalachians abound, highlighted by the works of Peter Cozzens and James McDonough. Add to the list of adept Western Theater analysts Wiley Sword. In his thoroughly engaging book, Embrace an Angry Wind: The Confederacy’s Last Hurrah: Spring Hill, Franklin, & Nashville, Wiley Sword firmly places himself at the forefront of Civil War historians interested in bringing renewed attention to the military engagements and endeavors in the West. The author provides a thoroughly researched, engrossing narrative of the Confederate Army of Tennessee and its earnest, but unsuccessful, attempt to forge a final push into the heart of Tennessee in order to defeat the Union forces occupying the territory. By sifting through a multitude of archives, official records, newspapers, personal diaries, and soldiers’ memoirs, Sword paints vivid portraits of the battles of Spring Hill, Franklin, and Nashville, during the final months of 1864.

Sword spends the initial chapters of the book offering a succinct examination of the military exploits of General Sherman and General Joe Johnston in and around Atlanta. More importantly, Sword focuses the historical analysis on the ascension to overall command of the Army of Tennessee by Confederate General John Bell Hood. The officious behavior of Hood toward Jefferson Davis, as well as the machinations of Hood against Joe Johnston, explains the elevation of the brazen, but less than strategically astute, “Sam” Hood. In fact, Hood, and his military blundering, stands at the center of this account of the Tennessee Campaign. Sword carefully illustrates the brash and disastrous decisions of Hood that result in continual mishap all through the Confederate march to, and subsequent retreat from, Nashville.

The Battle of Spring Hill occupies a substantial portion of the text and is utilized by the author to exemplify the shortcomings of many of Hood’s subordinate officers, such as Benjamin Cheatham, and John C. Brown, as well as the inordinate good fortune of the Union forces under General John Schofield to quietly and successfully move themselves past the Confederates under the cover of darkness. Furthermore, Hood’s failure to accurately explain to his officers the army’s strategy of cutting off the retreat of the Union forces accounts for the confusion and lack of Confederate coordination.

Finding that the Union had escaped Confederate grasp, Hood orders his army to pursue the enemy and ready themselves for battle along the outskirts of Franklin. Though General Schofield’s men quickly construct ramparts and barriers along a perimeter south of Franklin and along the property of F.B. Carter, Schofield’s over-arching goal is to move north to Nashville where General George H. Thomas has dispatched a formidable Union force among the fortified city. Hood, in part to discipline those officers who acted poorly at Spring Hill, orders a full frontal assault, with no artillery support, against the bulwarks of the Union forces. This massive, sweeping charge by the Confederates results in brutal fighting, much of it hand to hand combat, and enormous casualties for both sides. Were it not for a heroic, if unintended, rallying charge by Union regiments under Colonel Emerson Opdycke, the Confederates would have routed the Union forces and potentially destroyed the entire army. Again, Hood’s inclination for bold action rather than strategic deliberation engendered a devastating loss of Confederate manpower, particularly ranking officers. Meanwhile, Schofield and his men successfully cross the Harpeth River and soon enter the fortifications at Nashville.

Nashville posed an insurmountable obstacle to Hood’s now considerably depleted Army of Tennessee, and the Confederate actions there occupy the last third of the book. Hood places his army south of the city and waits for Thomas to attack. Thomas, due to a more deliberative style, as well as inclement weather, puts off any attack for several days, much to the frustration of U.S. Grant and others in Washington. Finally, on the fifteenth of December, Thomas orders a massive attack against the heavily outnumbered Confederates outside the city. Though taking two full days, the Union devastates the Confederate forces and scatters them south into Alabama and Mississippi. The result was the effective disintegration of Hood’s Army of Tennessee. Soon after the defeat at Nashville, Hood resigns his command.

Wiley Sword’s detailed and exciting narrative of the Tennessee Campaign, along with his convincing analysis of the generals involved, demonstrate the integral role of the Western Theater to Union victory in the war. Though at times the Confederate effort and participants are viewed by the author through a romantic prism, the author succeeds in delivering a fresh account of a bold, but devastating military campaign.

Bryan A. Cupp

Embrace an Angry Wind: The Confederacy's Last Hurrah--Spring Hill, Franklin, and Nashville. By Wiley Sword. 1994.

In the fall of 1864 the Confederacy appeared all but doomed. With the reelection of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency of the United States and the fall of such key centers as Atlanta, the fledgling nation appeared to be on the verge of collapse. The situation looked even bleaker for the Confederate Army of Tennessee under General John Bell Hood. Hood, who had replaced Joseph Johnston as commander of the army at the gates of Atlanta, had failed to arrest Sherman’s advance. After the fall of Atlanta, Hood’s aggressive nature, encouraged by Jefferson Davis, compelled him to launch a campaign to regain the Confederate heartland of Tennessee and Kentucky.

Sword does a wonderful job of setting the backdrop for the 1864 Tennessee Campaign. Beginning with Hood, Davis and Patrick Cleburne, he deftly weaves together the personal stories of the men who would cooperate and clash in the campaign. Going into their past, and at times into their psychology, he presents the background for a narrative of the Confederacy’s last chance, their last hurrah, that has become the seminal work on the subject.

Moving west and then north in late 1864 the Army of Tennessee crossed the Tennessee River near Bridgeport, Alabama in the third week of November. The delays that Hood had encountered while waiting for supplies and reinforcements had arguably doomed his campaign from the start, but he was blind to such realities. Sword relates the entire campaign to Hood’s personality and troubled past, and in so doing, has given students of history perhaps the first complete picture of this last great campaign in the West. After crossing the Tennessee, the Confederates moved toward Columbia Tennessee where Federal commander John Schofield was massing his columns.

Hood and his men arrived at Columbia on November 26, 1864 and, reminiscent of the great turning maneuvers of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, Hood planned a bold flanking maneuver to trap and destroy Schofield. On November 29 Hood moved the bulk of his infantry across the Duck River upstream of Columbia and started them toward the small crossroads village of Spring Hill, between Columbia and Franklin. Hood hoped that if he could block the Franklin-Columbia Turnpike, he could cut off Schofield’s only line of retreat and destroy him.

However, in a stunning comedy of errors on the part of the Confederates, Hood’s brilliant flanking maneuver came to naught. As most of the Confederate infantry slept within yards of the pike, the entire Federal army slipped by in the night. The Spring Hill fiasco deeply disturbed Hood, who determined to eradicate the fear in his army of attacking breastworks.

The men of the Army of Tennessee proved Hood wrong the next day as they launched charge after charge against the almost impregnable Federal breastworks south of Franklin, Tennessee. In five hours of fighting, a third of the Confederate army was slain in the Confederacy’s last great charge toward independence. Patrick Cleburne and several other Confederate generals were killed in the attacks, and Schofield eventually left the Confederates in charge of the battlefield as his command moved north to Nashville.

With his shattered command, Hood had two options, either advance or retreat. Despite the horrendous condition of his army after Franklin, Hood chose the former course of action, “laying siege” to the much larger and better-equipped Federal army in Nashville under General George Thomas. At this point the campaign had become sheer misery to the Confederate soldiers, who shivered, half frozen and starving, in their trenches south of Nashville.

George Thomas hesitated for two weeks before breaking the Siege of Nashville. On December 15 and 16 the Union army moved out of their fortifications around the city and dealt the Army of Tennessee a series of crushing blows that ended with the full route of the Rebels. Leaving all encumbrances aside, they raced south, back through Franklin and Spring Hill, to relative safety in northern Mississippi. Shortly after the New Year Hood was relieved from command, and left the army for good. Thomas did not bother to follow the Confederate retreat south of the Tennessee River, and this ended the 1864 Tennessee Campaign.

This campaign was truly the Confederacy’s Last Hurrah. For the last time a Confederate army took the offensive, and analogous to the war effort as a whole, fought bravely only to be overwhelmed by missed opportunities and superior Federal numbers. Wiley Sword does a tremendous job of bringing this campaign to light with meticulous research and lively writing. Not only is Embrace An Angry Wind a good read, it is also the most in-depth and scholarly work to ever be written on this august campaign.