John Bell Hood's "Addictions" In Civil War Literature
-- An Opinion Piece by Steve Davis --

(This article originally appeared in Blue & Gray magazine, October 1998.)

I don't know who started it...

Percy Hamlin, maybe. In his introduction to Old Bald Head: General R. S. Ewell (1940), he states that "Sherman captured Atlanta and Lincoln was reelected because "a competent, cautious man was replaced by one who, brave and loyal though he was, had been so crippled by wounds as to make him dependent upon the use of opium" (pp.ix-x).

Note that we're not naming names, so Hamlin is able to dodge a charge of libel. But the implication is clear: in July 1864, Confederate President Jefferson Davis replaced General Joseph E. Johnston, the "competent, cautious man," with General John Bell Hood, the opium-eater.

What was Hamlin's source for this outrageous allegation? He doesn't offer one -- not in his text, not in a footnote. It doesn't matter. The charge has stuck to Hood.

One sees these allegations elsewhere, but curiously they're almost always speculative. In his booklet for the National Park Service, The Road Past Kennesaw: The Atlanta Campaign of 1864 (1972), Richard M. McMurry guesses that Hood "may have been taking a derivative of laudanum to ease his pain" from wounds (p. 42; italics added). The former newspaper columnist Webb Garrison, in his Atlanta and the War (1995), also entertains the possibility that Hood's judgment may have suffered "perhaps from use of laudanum to dull his constant pain" (p. 138) -- but note that again we see the unsupported, key word perhaps.

Hood's accusers often focus their attention on the notoriously missed opportunity at Spring Hill, Tennessee, the night of November 29-30, 1864, when the inert Confederate army allowed Schofield's Federal forces to slip out of a trap. Hood, having been up since 3 a.m. that day, was by all accounts exhausted. As James Lee McDonough and Thomas L. Connelly say in Five Tragic Hours: The Battle of Franklin (1983), Hood was therefore sound asleep while the Yankees slinked away, "especially if he took any liquor or a drug to relax" (p. 50; italics added).

Wiley Sword is just as equivocal in Embrace an Angry Wind: The Confederacy's Last Hurrah: Spring Hill, Franklin, and Nashville (1992). After dinner at his headquarters on the night of November 29, Hood retired and "perhaps swallowed some laudanum (a tincture of opium)" (p. 136). Sword's only source for this charge, we see in the endnotes, is a History of Maury County, Tennessee, not any primary, eyewitness source.

Indeed, local legend seems to be about the only basis of belief in Hood's insobriety at Spring Hill. Stanley Horn called attention to it in his The Army of Tennessee (1941): "Old soldiers and old residents around Spring Hill explain all that night's fumbling in blunt terms: "Hood was drunk." That is a grave charge. It cannot now be proved or disproved. It is mentioned because the local tradition is so strong" (p. 392). The local legend of Spring Hill even made its way into Hood's first biography, as Richard O'Conner acknowledges, "it was a legend of the countryside for many years after that Hood was drunk that night" (Hood: Cavalier General, 1949, p. 232).

The legend is so strong that we've had to deal with it in our magazine. Editor Dave Roth, in his "General's Tour" of Spring Hill (Blue & Gray, November 1984), does not accept the legend of Hood's drinking, based at least partly on his reputation for abstemiousness.* Unfortunately, though, Dave does not rule out his possible use of laudanum, as he speculates that Hood "probably had a supply" of the drug; he "may well have turned to its use"; and if he did, the cause "may lie in his poor health" (italics added).

Dave's onsite research at Spring Hill included a visit with the Maury County historian in Columbia. Her "treasure trove" of material had accounts by local residents, including members of the Thompson family (Hood stayed at the Absalom Thompson house that fateful night) and neighbors. Among them is even a hint that Hood had taken a painful spill from his horse along the rocky back road to Spring Hill. Based on these accounts and discussions with authorities in Civil War medicine, Dave concluded, "Laboring under intense pain, his [Hood's] mind was often clouded by pain-killing drugs" (p. 21) -- a statement he admits may have been too strong, lacking reliable eyewitnesses from the Army of Tennessee. (If you tweak him too much on this, he points out with a sly grin how Hood managed to wipe out many of those witnesses at Franklin the next day.)

The legend of Hood's drug use lives on. "Legend" though is a woefully weak basis for historical writing, especially as it allows hypothesis to leap to reality. Thus while Sword in his text wonders if "perhaps Hood swallowed some laudanum," his editors (in a caption for Hood's photograph in the book) assert flatly that Hood "often resorted to the use of laudanum," (Embrace an Angry Wind, f.p. 244).

Ronald H. Bailey, in his volume for the Time-Life series, The Battles for Atlanta (1985), also makes the self-assured leap in claiming, "By the accounts of some contemporaries, Hood suffered such intense pain that he was taking laudanum, an opiate that could impair mental judgment" (p. 91). Of course, Bailey doesn't name any of those accusing contemporaries, so we don't know his sources. The usually careful scholar, Steven E. Woodworth, in his essay for Savas and Woodbury's The Campaign for Atlanta (1994) also states that General Hood "at times resorted to alcohol and laudanum, a derivative of opium" (p. 18). Professor Woodworth does name his source; but it is nothing more than McMurry's booklet. As we have seen, although McMurry only guessed that Hood may have been taking laudanum, Woodworth jumps to the conclusion that he did.

Such is the leap from imaginative possibility to historical fact. In the literature of John Bell Hood, it seems a small step indeed.

Well, let's try to use some logic here, and approach the issue another way: if no contemporary ever saw Hood self-dosing with an opiate or if no one ever wrote about it, and if no such documentation has ever come to light, why are historians so eager to accept what must only be an unsupported speculation about a very important Confederate general?

The answer lies at least partly in Hood's wounds. As every Civil Warrior knows, the General suffered two severe injuries during the war. At Gettysburg, as he was leading his division into action on the second day, Hood took shell fragments in the left biceps, elbow, forearm and hand. The damage required no amputation, but thereafter Hood's left arm rested limp and useless in a sling. A few months later, at Chickamauga, September 20, 1863, Hood was shot in the right leg high in the thigh. Medical officers amputated that night; the procedure went well, without complication. Still, by all odds, Hood's chances of recovery were iffy.

Medical statistics for amputation in the upper third of the femur show death resulted in slightly more than 50% of all cases. According to The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion (1875-85), of the 268 Union and Confederate soldiers who died from Hood's type of amputation, more than a third perished within five days of the operation, doubtless from hemorrhage or shock. No cause of death is given for more than 180 of the reported fatalities. Not surprisingly, given the grossly unsanitary conditions of all Civil War surgery, the second most prominent cause of death was pyaemia, a "surgical fever" similar to gangrene.

Post-operative infection was the chief cause of surgical mortality in the Civil War and, as the name implies, "hospital gangrene" commonly occurred in the crowded wards where soldiers' unclean wounds festered. The main reason General Hood escaped infection of his leg stump was that he never entered a hospital. As was the custom of general officers of both sides, Hood received personal care, and commanded the attention of the army's best medical officers.

On September 21, the day after the operation, Hood was borne fifteen miles to the home of a staff member's parents, where he was tended by Dr. John Darby. Convalescence proceeded well. October 8, the General talked about returning to duty. The 17^th, he sat up; Dr. Darby expected him soon to be on crutches. In late October, Hood was able to travel to Dalton, Georgia; a few days later he took the train to Atlanta. There he spent a week in the residence of John S. Thrasher. From there, probably on November 10, he went on to Richmond. "His stump healed promptly, but remained painful," observes Paul E. Steiner, M.D., in Medical-Military Portraits of Union and Confederate Generals (1968), "and because it was so short an artificial limb was hard to fit."

But in time, with crutches and a prosthetic leg, he was able to move about. By mid-January 1864 he was riding horseback. Clearly, with his left arm paralyzed in a sling, and his right leg gone, simply mounting his horse was a chore for Hood. As Confederate staff officer Joseph B. Cumming records, it took three aides to raise the General onto his horse, fix his wooden leg in the stirrup, and strap both Hood and his crutches to the saddle. But the General rode well and often after he returned to Georgia in February '64 as new corps commander in the Army of Tennessee. To quiet concerns about his comfort and mobility, Hood allowed an Atlanta newspaper to publish a letter written to a friend: "Since I came here I have been riding all over this country with Gen. Johnston, and have been in the saddle every day enough to have fought two or three battles, without feeling any inconvenience whatever from it. I ride with perfect comfort to myself, and expect to walk with a cane before long" (Atlanta [Memphis] Appeal, March 14, 1864).

Please note that in all this there is no mention of such discomfort as to require the use of any painkiller. During his three winter months in Richmond, frequently in the company of that alert observer Mary Chesnut, Hood talked of his crippled status (a "one legged man" who "cannot walk without help"), but in her famous diary she recorded no sense of self-pity. Nor does Mrs. Chesnut once mention Hood's resort to liquor or any other drug. Moreover, Dr. Steiner astutely assumes that in the winter of 1863-64, when Hood spent considerable time with President Davis, "Davis would almost certainly have known of any narcotic addiction" and not approved Hood for promotion to lieutenant general (Medical-Military Portraits, p. 229). Jefferson Davis may reasonably be accused of making some misguided decisions during the war, but appointing an opium-eater to high army command should not be listed among them.

Still, many writers can't help but imagine the pain Hood might have felt in his leg-stump. "His old leg wound may have been irritated by the long, damp ride over rough roads," Connelly muses in Autumn of Glory (p. 500 -- note may). "Maybe other things reinforced it [Hood's attitude]?physical and mental pain over his frightful wound (Five Tragic Hours, p. 67 -- note maybe). Even if untrained in medicine or unread in its literature, historians assume a learnedness in the etiology of pain, as does Winston Groom in Shrouds of Glory (1995), referring to Hood's "throbbing stump of a leg" (p. 159), or Wiley Sword commenting on "the pain in his leg stump" that Hood must have felt at Spring Hill (Embrace an Angry Wind, p. 69).

Worst, by far, is James Street, Jr.'s speculation in an article in Civil War Times Illustrated, May 1988. Though he technically hedges on the General's opium use ("if Hood was dependent on painkillers" (my italics), Street certainly feels Hood's wounds. "The pain from the stump of his right leg must have been horrendous when he rode strapped to his saddle. The bouncing and jolting, the abrasive rubbing of the stump against the rough cloth of a dressing or pad could not have been endured without some sort of pain-reliever. An opiate was the standard prescription. The drug would have made Hood sleep at Spring Hill while the Federals escaped his trap."

This is too much! Somewhere along the way, hasn't anyone thought of how other amputees handled themselves in active service? Take Dan Sickles, whose right leg was shattered by a solid shot at Gettysburg. After amputation at the thigh, General Sickles experienced pain for a while in his stump, but eventually returned to duty, and got about on crutches till his death in 1914. Where's the talk about his laudanum use?

Even better comparison is made with Dick Ewell, whose post-amputation ordeal was much worse than Hood's. After he was shot in the left knee at Groveton, August 28, 1862, Ewell underwent an amputation in the lower third of the thigh. Days later, carried by litter-bearers beyond threat of capture, Ewell was so jostled that the bone protruded from its stump. The wound "sloughed," and eventually an inch of necrotic bone fell away from the femur. Bedridden for weeks, Ewell finally mastered the use of crutches -- only to fall on the icy pavement of Richmond in December '62, knocking off another inch of bone, tearing his sutures and reopening the wound.

Added to these complications were the odd shape of Ewell's stump and ill-fitting wooden leg which together led, as Jack D. Welsh, M.D., writes in Medical Histories of Confederate Generals (1995), to Ewell's frequently being "bothered by abrasions of the skin and by small abscesses" (p. 64). Still, the General returned to active service in June 1863, and stayed in the field until his capture at Sayler's Creek in 1865. Every now and then Ewell would fall off his horse and also reopen his wound, as once, while talking to another officer, he forgot about his loss, got up, started to walk and promptly fell, striking the stump and causing much bleeding.

In November 1863, Ewell took sick leave, partly due to pain in his stump from probable osteomyelitis. During all this time none of Ewell's biographers -- including Donald C. Pfanz in the most current biography of Ewell -- has even contemplated the possibility of his drug use. How odd that General Ewell's first chronicler, Hamlin, would assume the need for pain medicine in one amputee, Hood, when his own subject suffered more frequent and painful complications of surgery without opium use.

To be sure, we must acknowledge the widespread dispensing of opiates by Civil War surgeons, and acknowledge too that a number of Yanks and Rebs became addicted to opium or its derivatives. But as David Courtwright suggests in his thoughtful study of the subject ("Opium Addiction as a Consequence of the Civil War," Civil War History, June 1978), such dispensing and addiction came about as much through surgeons' prescription of opium for chronic diarrhea and dysentery as for post-operative pain, a subject that seldom arises in the war's medical literature. The common understanding about Union and Confederate amputees seems to be that (assuming the soldiers got out of the hospitals alive), stumps healed and the men moved on.

At least partly for this reason, none of Hood's biographers even mentions laudanum in their books, though they ponder the effects of his wounds. O'Conner quotes Sam Watkins' pathetic description of Hood on horseback: "how feeble and decrepit he looked, with an arm in a sling and a crutch in the other hand, trying to guide and control his horse" (p. 243). During the Atlanta Campaign, according to John P. Dyer in The Gallant Hood (1950), Hood had access to two artificial legs brought back from Europe by Dr. Darby. One he kept strapped to his spare mount's saddle, the other he tried to wear, albeit with discomfort. Hood used it to help maintain his balance on horseback, but apparently found it of little help in walking.

Then there is Richard M. McMurry. A decade after his supposition, advanced in the NPS booklet, that Hood "may have been taking a derivative of laudanum," Dr. McMurry quietly recanted. In John Bell Hood and the War for Southern Independence (1982), McMurry explores the psychological effects of Hood's maiming, and its effect on the General's mobility, but there is no reference to drug use. Richard has reaffirmed to me personally that this non-mention is in effect an admission that in researching his book he found no evidence to support his earlier conjecture.

That should put an end to all the nonsense masquerading as fact. But Civil War writing being what it is, of course the blather continues. Take, for instance, Craig L. Symonds' new book on General Patrick R. Cleburne, Stonewall of the West. The night before Cleburne lost his life at Franklin, says Symonds, at the Thompson house in Spring Hill, General John Bell Hood took "an early dinner and a laudanum-induced sleep" (p. 254).

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