The Chessboard of War: Sherman and Hood and the Autumn Campaigns of 1864 (review)

The Chessboard of War: Sherman and Hood and the Autumn Campaigns of 1864. By Anne J. Bailey. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Pp. xx, 225. $32.00.)

The late fall of 1864 produced one of the strangest strategic situations of the American Civil War. Two hostile armies that had been opposing each other for months on the battlefields of North Georgia broke off contact and marched away in opposite directions--the Northern army going south; the Southern army going north. William T. Sherman's Yankees struck out southeastward across Georgia on a march that would take them to Savannah on the coast. Meanwhile, John Bell Hood's Confederates swung westward to the florence-Tuscumbia area in northwestern Alabama, and then they marched north into Middle Tennessee.

Sherman's March to the Sea ended in the capture of Savannah in December 1864 and set the stage for his early 1865 advance northward into the Carolinas. The campaign did not involve any serious fighting, but it constituted a great strategic triumph for the Union. As Sherman boasted, it demonstrated to the world that a Federal army could march at will through the Confederacy. In so doing, it demoralized Southern soldiers and civilians and led to increased desertions from Confederate forces in all areas.

Hood's march northward, by contrast, took the Rebels deeper into disaster and defeat. The Confederate general led his army into northwestern Alabama, where logistical difficulties and high water in the Tennessee River combined to delay the secessionists for several weeks. Once across the river, Hood's troops marched for middle Tennessee. On November 29 they (or, more accurately, their generals) bungled an effort to cut off a Federal force at Spring Hill. The next day Hood threw his troops into a suicidal attack at Franklin, and in mid-December the army was routed at Nashville and fled south into Mississippi.

These two campaigns, "two halves of a whole" (xv), constitute the subject of Anne Bailey's Chessboard of War. The work is a volume in the "Great Campaigns of the Civil War" series, of which Bailey serves (with Brooks Simpson) as coeditor. Volumes in the series are not intended to present the mind-numbing tactical detail that burdens so much Civil War military history. Rather they give readers an overall general narrative of the military operations and some account of the way the military campaigns affected and were affected by political, social, economic, and/or racial factors. They are, in fact, something of an updating and expansion of the Scribner's "Campaigns of the Civil War" series of the 1880s.

Bailey's Chessboard of War neatly meets the criteria of the series as she deftly switches back and forth from one of the fall 1864 campaigns to the other. She gives readers enough of a narrative of the military events that they can easily follow the movements of the armies and understand the intentions and actions of the commanders and the many administrative, logistical, and other problems they faced. She also includes sufficient details on the problems the military operations caused for civilians, especially those living in the path of Sherman's force as it swept through Georgia. Nor does she neglect the impact of the military operations on blacks in Georgia (thousands of runaway slaves followed Sherman's troops) and Tennessee (where units of the United States Colored Troops participated in the Battle of Nashville as well as in several other actions of the campaign).

This book, all in all, is a most worthy addition to the series.

Richard M. McMurry
Roanoke, Virginia

...