Symbol of Southern Courage

THE GALLANT HOOD (383 pp.) -- John P. Dyer--Bobbs-Merrill ($3.50).

By dusk on June 26, 1862, General Robert E. Lee knew that his first major attack had ended in failure. Before him on the fields near Mechanicsville, Va. lay nearly 1,500 Confederate dead and wounded. McClellan's Army of the Potomac (casualties: 256) still stood intact, a menace to Richmond.

It was much the same story next day. The Federals, who had fallen back and dug in near Gaines's Mill, cut down every Confederate attack. Lee pondered the situation, finally went in search of a tall, rawboned, 31-year-old Kentuckian named John Bell Hood. Demanded Lee: Could General Hood and his Texas brigade do the job of breaking the Federal lines? Said Hood: "I will try."

The Grand Manner. What happened next, as Biographer Dyer records it in his careful, compassionate reconstruction of Hood's life, was the beginning of a legend. "Down into the creek ravine wallowed [Hood's brigade] under the deadly spittle of the belching artillery on the hill. Up on the other side they came and with a terrific shout gave the first line the bayonet. It fell back on the second line and it broke. As the blue mass retreated up the hill the fire of the Texans was poured into it with terrible effect." Hood had broken through.

Bearded, intrepid West Pointer Hood led his troops in the grand manner--and suffered the consequences. At Gettysburg he was wounded in the arm; at Chickamauga he lost his right leg. In the heat of battle, "he was transformed from a shy, awkward young general perplexed by the minutiae of paper work, tactical details and camp routine into a fearless and almost terrible leader who inspired his men, to heroic feats." Unfortunately for the Southern cause, Confederate President Jefferson Davis mistook bravery for generalship, put the crippled Hood in command of the Army of Tennessee in the midst of the Atlanta campaign.

Bad breaks and poor judgment made the impulsive Hood the scapegoat of a lost cause. After his outnumbered troops had been decimated by Sherman's army, he turned northward in desperation to strike at Sherman's communications. Below Nashville he bottled up a Union army --then slept soundly while the Federals slipped away in the night on an unguarded turnpike, only 100 yards from the Confederate lines. His next move was even more disastrous: he followed the Federals a few miles north, and "without adequate artillery and over the protests of his officers," bled his army in a foolhardy frontal assault. His blind courage led straight to his rout at Nashville 16 days later, and his resignation.

Reasons for Neglect. Until last year, no biographer had bothered to give Hood a whole book to himself, although Douglas Southall Freeman's Lee's Lieutenants (TIME, Oct. 26, 1942) sums up his career on the battlefield. The reasons for such neglect are made clear in The Gallant Hood. On the battlefield "he " never was, as an independent commander, able to think . . . . . . except in terms of long lines of men charging to glory across an open field . . . . . . "Off the battlefield he was reserved and reticent." After the war, as president of a New Orleans insurance company, he prospered for a while only to be ruined in 1878 when a yellow-fever epidemic closed the cotton exchange. A year later, Hood died of yellow fever himself. If Biographer Dyer's hero remains as smoky and distant as a battlefield legend, part of the fault probably lies with the subject himself. Intellectual insight never sharpened Hood's blunt emotional approach to people and problems. Yet, with all his distance and reticence, he became, for others, a symbol of Southern courage. A former chaplain of the Army of Tennessee describing Hood after his death, framed his greatest quality: "I never looked into the face of General "Hood, but felt an inspiration coming from him upon me always to act out the true, the brave, the right thing."

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