American Civil War Game Club (ACWGC)

We also must remember

1. South was in desperate straights at this time
2. Hood was brave and Davis appointed him to attack.
3. As for Davis, who else could he appoint. The marble man refused to leave the Army of Va.
4. The Lost Cause proponents always look for the what if-Trust me, the Union winning the war was actually a good thing.

I am not a big Hood fan, but to my way of thinking, the West was lost by Bragg.

BG Elkin
3rd Div/(2nd Cav)/XVIth Corps AotT

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I have come to you from the West, where we have always seen the backs of our enemies. . . . Let us look before us, and not behind

Davis always had Hardee, Beauregard, Longstreet, Early or even S.D. Lee or AP Stewart (who commanded what little was left of the Army after Hood).

After the fall of Atlanta though the war was over. No matter who Davis appointed after that it was inconsequential. That makes Hood's actions in Tennessee a little more painful because all of the deaths were needless. Wasn't it Sherman who said that if Hood invaded Tennessee he'd happily give him rations because he knew it was a horrible waste of manpower and time?

But Hood was stuck. His force could not catch nor fight Sherman on equal terms. They couldnt be stationary. They couldnt harass Sherman's supply lines, besides he had none. All he could do was invade Tennessee and hope for a miracle.

Maybe if Hood had taken his Army directly to North Carolina and/or Virginia it could have relieved Petersburg? But Virginia didnt have the supplies to support two armies. An interesting "what if" though.

The South did have a problem with capable leaders at the Army level although there were some Corps level leaders that could have handled the AoT but had been tainted by the problems in the Western command. The South's best solution would have been to order Lee to Atlanta since Longstreet probably could have handled a defensive fight against Grant.

An agressive defense against Sherman could have starved his army but it would have taken a commitment that Georgia wasn't politically capable of. This is scorched earth. If the AoT had disputed its advance eastward while Forest was turned loose on its foraging Sherman's army would have probably died in Georgia.

An interesting side observation to this is that the South seemed to have started with it's best set of leaders and they slowly lost them while the North started with its worse set and slowly replaced them with compentent ones.

But the trouble with what-if's is it requires Jefferson Davis to not be Jefferson Davis.

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General Kennon Whitehead
Chatham Grays
AoT II/1/3 (CSA)

This also assumes that Hood could have gotten "in front" of Sherman and not been caught. He would have had to fight, retreat, burn, and destory through Georgia in front of Sherman's advance. Impossible to say the least. At any point Sherman could have broken off from his march to Savannah and aimed for a secondary city on the coast such as Brunswick or St. Augustine. Or turned south for Mobile or Pensacola. That would have forced Hood to follow Sherman in the wake of his scorched earth. Either way the situation was bad for the South.

The governors of the Southern states did not help the situation at all either. I often think Jefferson Davis did what he could because he had little political support....

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General Scott Ludwig
4/II/ANV