General John Bell Hood at the Battle of Gettysburg
excerpt taken from "The Generals of Gettysburg: The Leaders of America's Greatest Battle"
by Larry Tagg

On July 1, while the men of Hill's and Ewell's corps were fighting the battle on the first day, Hood was with his division (minus Law's brigade, which was detached) in Greenwood, about 17 miles west of Gettysburg, on the west slope of South Mountain. After waiting all day for Ewell's wagons to pass on the lone road toward Gettysburg, Hood's men finally got moving from Greenwood around 4:00 P.M. and trod 13 miles over the mountain, halting at midnight at Marsh Creek, about 3_ miles west of Gettysburg.

Early the next morning, July 2, Hood's division led McLaws's as both approached Gettysburg. They fell out in the fields west of Seminary Ridge near the Chambersburg Pike while Hood went a short distance forward to Lee's headquarters to confer with Lee and others. Lee's plan was for Hood to follow behind McLaws's men in an attack up the Emmitsburg Road toward Gettysburg, driving in the Union left after a two-mile march to the south to get astride the Union flank--a reprise of Chancellorsville. (This was a curious aspect of the plan, placing Hood's hard-driving division behind McLaws's, who were not noted for the potency of their attacks.) Hood's men spent the rest of the morning filing back toward Herr Ridge, then indulging the dawdling Longstreet in a three-hour wait while he fretted and waited for Law's brigade.

At noon Law arrived, and Longstreet's two divisions began what was to be a hidden march toward their jump-off positions. They moved south, along the west side of Herr Ridge, with Hood at the rear of the column with Lee and Longstreet. Shortly after the march started, the column stopped. Evidently the head of the column had come to a place at the Black Horse Tavern where the road was visible to enemy scouts on Little Round Top. McLaws suggested starting over and using a new route, and insisted on keeping his place at the head of the procession. So Hood and his men waited while McLaws's men filed back along the column.

The march began again using the new route, south down Willoughby Run. As he neared the end of the march, Hood sent some of his Texan scouts ahead to locate the enemy flank. It soon became clear that the Union left was not where Lee had said it would be--the Yankee line extended much further south than expected. To adjust to the new situation, Longstreet sent Hood and his men further south, into Biesecker's Woods, and changed the attack plan. Hood's division would now attack first up the Emmitsburg Road, drive in the Yankee left, and assist McLaws's men when they attacked later.

Hood deployed his division in Biesecker's Woods in two lines of two brigades each, one line behind the other. In the front, Law's brigade was on the right, Robertson's Texans on the left. Behind them, Benning's brigade was on the right, with "Tige" Anderson's brigade on the left. Hood's scouts had returned with news that the enemy line ended just north of Little Round Top. With this news, Hood requested a change in the attack order for the first time in his life. He asked Longstreet to be allowed to skirt the enemy left and come in behind the Union defenders. Longstreet refused--Lee's plan would be adhered to. Hood thought the Union position so strong that he asked a second time to be allowed to improvise a move around the enemy left. Again Longstreet refused. A third time Hood asked, and Longstreet's reply was a peremptory demand to attack immediately as ordered. (Afterward, Hood's proposed flank attack would remain one of the great "what ifs" of the battle of Gettysburg.)

Hood rode to his accustomed place in front of the Texas Brigade and gave a short speech, then stood in his stirrups and boomed, "Fix bayonets, my brave Texans; forward and take those heights!" Law's and Robertson's Brigades boiled out of the woods--not north along the Emmitsburg Road as Lee intended, but east toward the Round Tops, on their own initiative. Hood rode forward with Robertson for a short distance and stopped in a peach orchard to watch the progress of his brigades. There, a shell from the Union batteries about 1300 yards to the north exploded above his head, and fragments shredded the entire length of his left arm. Hood reeled in the saddle from the shock, and was lowered to the ground by his aides. He was taken to an ambulance in the Rebel rear and his arm wrapped in bandages. While there, he was so insensible from shock that he did not even notice another shell which exploded almost in his face. The blond giant was out of the battle. Lee would later refer to Hood's wounding as the moment the battle was lost.

Though he lost the use of his arm, Hood's legend was magnified by his Gettysburg wound. In September, when Hood's division passed through Richmond on their way to reinforce Bragg's Amy of Tennessee in the West, Hood joined his troops at the urging of his brigadiers, with his arm in a sling. In the following Battle of Chickamauga, he lost his right leg to a bullet in the thigh. With his mangled body thus hewn by combat, his aura of unbowed ferocity burned at its brightest, as Mary Chesnut attested breathlessly in her diary. Placed at the head of the Army of Tennessee in front of Atlanta in 1864, he finished the war a victim of the Peter Principle. He led that proud army into disaster after disaster, until it was left with only a cadre. Heartbroken after the Battle of Nashville in December 1864, he resigned his commission the next month.

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