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  • John Bell Hood and the Fight for Civil War Memory
  • Lorien Foote (bio)
John Bell Hood and the Fight for Civil War Memory. By Brian Craig Miller. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2010. Pp. 317. Cloth, $37.95.)

It has been decades since a scholar has attempted a biography of John Bell Hood, and in the meantime historians have recycled long-standing portrayals of the general as a failure who destroyed the Army of Tennessee and contributed to the final destruction of the Confederacy. Brian Craig Miller's cultural biography of Hood challenges historians to examine the source of their assumptions, to rethink their methods of producing biography, and to understand Hood's life in the context of the culture in which he lived. This thought-provoking book melds Hood's life into a study of manhood, honor, and the production of memory.

Miller's study of Hood contributes to the growing scholarly literature that explores the conflicts and nuances in southern ideals of manhood. One lens through which Miller interprets Hood's life is the general's need to establish honor when young and then resurrect it later in life in the wake of amputation, failure, and criticism. Honor influenced Hood's choice of a military career, his leadership of the Texas Brigade, his decision to return to the field of battle after two debilitating wounds, and his postwar involvement in veterans' charities and memoir writing. Miller's [End Page 293] analysis of honor and southern manhood is not simplistic, however, and he argues that southern definitions of honor were both contested and constantly fluctuating. In Hood's native Kentucky, for example, controversy over abolition, violence, and temperance challenged traditional methods of asserting honor and manhood. The Civil War blasted antebellum ideals of manhood through the loss of slaves—who were central to demonstrating manhood through mastery of dependents—and the physical scars of battle. One of the best chapters in the book is Miller's exploration of Hood's amputation and the ways that southerners reconfigured their definition of manhood to accommodate wounded and physically dependent men.

Hood, of course, returned from the war with his honor shattered. He had physical disabilities, he had presided over the fall of Atlanta, and his invasion of Tennessee had been a spectacular failure. As Hood sought to reestablish his honor, other former Confederates sought to reestablish their own through the mechanism of the Lost Cause. Because Hood became a scapegoat in that particular construction, Miller uses his life as a window through which to examine how both individual and social memory was forged. Miller focuses particularly on the efforts of the Southern Historical Association to become the definitive voice interpreting the war and to offer a "truthful" account. This truth was difficult to discern among the conflicting memories that emerged in the years after the war. As former Confederates debated the responsibility for Confederate defeat, Hood became a clear target. A memoir by General Joseph Johnston was one of the first to attack Hood, and Hood's own memoir was an attempt to secure his manhood and to construct his memory of the war. Indeed, the need to resurrect honor often took precedence over factual accuracy. Miller reminds historians that we must understand postwar accounts in the context of the need to construct a memory that established honor and assigned blame.

Although criticism of Hood was soon entrenched in the Lost Cause repertoire, the death of the general and his wife during the 1879 Yellow Fever epidemic in New Orleans opened another avenue for securing his memory. A nationwide drive to provide for Hood's ten orphaned children served both as a memorial to Hood and as an opportunity for the articulation of alternative memories. Ultimately, former Confederates expressed a range of attitudes toward Hood, from laudatory to indifferent to critical. Miller effectively argues that each voice participated, sometimes quite self-consciously, in the shaping of community, regional, and national collective memories of John Bell Hood and the Civil War.

Miller builds on the recent body of scholarship that has undertaken the work of unraveling how collective memory was constructed, but he calls historians to account for not applying...

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