Book details local involvement in Civil War

By Staff
Staff reports
A new book by Decatur native Noel Carpenter (1918-2000) argues that Confederate General John B. Hood’s detour to Decatur in 1864 at the beginning of the Tennessee Campaign “was a defining event that re-shaped the entire campaign.”
This engagement set the stage for the disastrous battles at Franklin and Nashville that followed, according to the author.
Of the 40,000 hardened veterans who started out from Alabama in October, “barely 15,000 men crossed the river to safety . . . leaving a 90-mile path of bloody footprints in the icy, rutted roads from Nashville,” when the campaign was over in December.
In this meticulously detailed and documented account — the first book-length study of the four-day clash at Decatur — the author examines the circumstances surrounding the events at Decatur and how they overwhelmed the controversial young commander. “As Hood
developed his plan for invading Tennessee,” he observes, “… there is not a hint that he envisioned an approach to Nashville by a long, slow march across Alabama.”
After the loss of Atlanta that August, General Hood had set out in the fall leading the ragged, nearly starved and shoeless Army of Tennessee toward their remaining ray of hope to defeat General Thomas at Nashville and force General Sherman to follow them into
Tennessee and Kentucky. But on the way, while weighing his options for crossing the Tennessee River, Hood abruptly abandoned a crossing near Stevenson and diverted to the town of Decatur, undermining his own plan for a rapid move to Nashville.
Yet in his only mention of the Decatur affair, Hood described it in one sentence: “While the Army turned Decatur, I ordered a slight demonstration to be made against the town till our forces passed safely beyond.” In fact, according to Carpenter, most of the grounds for the commander’s harsh treatment by his critics “came together in the few days at and before the engagement at Decatur.”
In A Slight Demonstration, the author suggests that the Decatur engagement “deserved more attention than it has received in the War’s history.”
He said “the interaction of Hood’s and Sherman’s strategies on two fronts in this classic setting where the river, the railroads and the telegraph lines played such a large part, makes this affair a case study for students of strategy.”
Professor Daniel E. Sutherland, co-editor of “The Civil War in the West,” a series from The University of Arkansas Press, said: “I found Carpenter’s account and analysis of events at Decatur thoroughly readable and quite convincing,” and “I came away from his narrative believing that historians may, indeed, not have given events at Decatur their due.”
The book will be available in November at Robert Parham’s Civil War Relics shop at 723 Bank Street NW in Decatur, or by mail from Legacy Books &Letters, 8308 Elander Drive, Austin, TX 78750, carolpowell@austin.rr.com.