Thoughts on the Army of Tennessee and Memory

On April 26, 1865, the Army of Tennessee formally surrendered at Durham, North Carolina. Richard Taylor, commanding the Department of Alabama, Mississippi, and East Louisiana, followed in May, surrendering the last survivors of John Bell Hood’s Tennessee invasion. The veterans of Belmont, Shiloh, Chickamauga, Ezra Church, Bentonville, Spanish Fort, and countless other engagements could at last go home.

The war for the nation was over, but not the war for memory. And in many ways, that war for memory was lost by the Army of Tennessee. Fewer books were written about the army and its battles than those about Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia. It does not mean the Army of Tennessee was wholly neglected. Particularly since the 1970s, military historians have chronicled its battles, with works by Peter Cozzens, David Powell, and Larry J. Daniel, to name but a few. Yet, it is telling that in Ken Burns’s The Civil War, the army’s actions between the fall of Corinth and the capture of Tullahoma are barely even discussed. Stones River, one of the top five bloodiest battles of the war, is not even mentioned.

The Army of Tennessee sat uncomfortably among the national myths. For a long time, the American narrative was one of triumph, but this army won few battles. The Lost Cause, enamored with victories in Virginia, had little affection for it beyond its soldiers and a few token commanders such as Albert Sidney Johnston in the 19th century and Patrick Cleburne in the 20th century. Certainly its tales were told in the pages of Confederate Veteran, which was published in Nashville and founded by Sumner Archibald Cunningham, a veteran of Fort Donelson and Nashville. However, as the last soldiers died off, Douglas Southall Freeman was the popular author of the Confederate experience.

The army had few heroes who could compare to the Virginia pantheon. Cleburne has remained a favorite, bolstered by his unconventional views on slavery. Johnston, once a Lost Cause icon due to his untimely death at Shiloh, faded over time. Nathan Bedford Forrest offered a more complex hero. He is to some a daring combat commander. His role in the Flu Klux Klan has earned him nearly unqualified condemnation in many circles. Beyond that, his violent temper and rough manners made him ill-suited to those in the Freeman mold, who preferred the cavalier dash of Jeb Stuart. Forrest, by contrast, almost killed a tailor after the war for making a mistake.

The army’s top commanders are all controversial, with Braxton Bragg and Joseph E. Johnston offered as the usual suspects in explaining the South’s defeat. They were defeated in multiple battles by the North’s holy command trinity: Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and George Thomas. To the proponents of the Just Cause, the memory of a triumphant and moral North, the Army of Tennessee is the perfect fall guy, a punching bag that punches back but never hard enough.

It was only after the shocks of 1968 that the Army of Tennessee received more attention from scholars. American culture took an interest in losers in the 1970s, with films such as Chinatown and McCabe and Ms. Miller, featuring doomed but plucky heroes. Just as scholarship expanded on Loyalists, slavery, and the working class, so too did work on the Army of Tennessee and its battles. The conclusions historians came to were varied, but one point of consensus was that the army lost due to command failures. From Jefferson Davis down to the army and corps commanders, the Army of Tennessee suffered from bickering. There was also poor staff work and a lack of consistent material support. It does not mean that Bragg, Davis, Johnston, and the rest were always to blame for everything. Each man had talents and moments of success. Yet, taken together, the army commanders could not overcome their shortcomings. They also faced most of the North’s best commanders. These Union generals led regiments that over time picked up what Napoleon called “the habit of victory” and yet knew just enough of defeat, or at least near disaster, to avoid the arrogance that leads to actual disaster.

Few blame the men for defeat. The veteran soldiers earned their battlefield honors. They marched and fought in the very pits of hell. Cowards could not suffer as they did at Stones River, and the valor shown at Franklin is overshadowed only by its horror. They did so in spite of defeat, and when desertion did occur, who could blame them? Certainly not after Shiloh or Stones River, where victory seemed within reach. Nor after the bungling at Chattanooga and Atlanta, nor after Johnston’s retreats or Hood’s doomed attacks.

These battered men are the real legacy of the Army of Tennessee. Few Americans knew defeat quite like them, both on the battlefield and in the halls of memory. They are the part of an American story ignored until our debacle in Vietnam showed that we are not a chosen people destined to triumph. However, many Americans cannot accept this, even after the experiences of the Confederacy or the disasters in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The South, rather than admitting defeat, celebrated its victories in Virginia and basked in the glow of later triumphs as if victory over Spain, Germany, and Japan could make up for Vicksburg and Atlanta. Yet that story of defeat has always been there. And in that way we are cursed by the ghosts of the Army of Tennessee, who show that courage, faith, and luck are not always enough and the causes Americans fight for are not easily put into neat moral boxes.