The Confederacy's Last Hurrah by Wiley Sword

The excessive quotations are further problematized by the book’s inconsistent citations. In the book’s second half, it is not uncommon for entire pages to lack any of Hood’s own words quotes often appear without context or introduction. Unfortunately, the book is marred by excessive block quotations-a liability that grows as the book progresses.

While at times prone to hyperbole, the author frequently tells a riveting and compelling story. Often providing a novelist’s dramatic and poetic flourishes, Hood, when relying on his own prose, can be a gifted storyteller. He recognizes the climactic nature of Thomas’s victory and the deleterious effect it had on Confederate morale, although he likely overstates his case when he implies a rebel victory in Tennessee could have changed the course of the war. The author adequately situates the Franklin-Nashville Campaign within the broader context of the war and provides readers with a comprehensible narrative of the rearguard’s actions. Hood’s book one of the most sustained discussions of this chapter of the war. Although book-length narratives of the retreat exist, it is often relegated to the final chapters of larger works, making O. Due to the tenacity of the rebel rearguard, remnants of the army escaped capture to be transferred to other forces throughout the dying Confederacy. The broken remnants of the Confederacy’s primary western theater field army retreated south into Alabama, protected by a rearguard under talented commanders such as Nathan Bedford Forrest and Edward C.

Confederate general John Bell Hood’s Army of Tennessee, already weakened and demoralized by its defeat at Franklin in November, was shattered by Thomas in two days at the Battle of Nashville. On December 16, 1864, Union General George Thomas accomplished a goal that Civil War field commanders found to be virtually unobtainable: the climactic destruction of an enemy army. The Army of Tennessee In Retreat: From Defeat at Nashville through “the Sternest Trials of the War” by O.

The Confederacy's Last Hurrah by Wiley Sword