Then on the seventeenth of July came a change of commanders on the Confederate side which did more than anything else that happened or could have happened during the campaign, to help forward Sherman's success. Angrily and with insulting comment, the Confederate authorities removed Johnston from command and ordered him to turn over his authority to General John B. Hood.
In a subordinate position Hood had demonstrated a vigorous fighting capacity. He had not before commanded an army, and in the opinion of those who had directed his operations, he was a man peculiarly unfit to command an army. General Longstreet once said of him, "Hood is one of the best division commanders I ever knew. He would fight anybody anywhere, at any time. But he has no more discretion than any pugnacious schoolboy might be expected to manifest."
Hood's proceedings at and after Atlanta certainly justified this judgment of a great general who had had full opportunity to observe his conduct and estimate his capacities. For surely at no point in the war was a situation more blunderingly or more bravely handled than was that at Atlanta under Hood. If that general had had any discretion at all he must have seen that it was the one function of his army to delay, embarrass and prevent Sherman's march through Georgia to the sea. Yet no sooner was that march undertaken than Hood abandoned all effort to check it, left Sherman free to do as he might, and himself marched northward upon a wild-goose chase of campaigning in pursuit of the pot of gold at the farther end of the rainbow. With all that we shall deal hereafter.
Hood's reckless impetuosity promptly manifested itself. Abandoning all of Johnston's precautions, and quitting his defenses, Hood hurled column after column upon the enemy on the twentieth of July and succeeding days, only to have them broken to pieces in a mad endeavor to accomplish the impossible. He inflicted heavy losses upon Sherman's army, to be sure, but his madness entailed upon his own force losses which it could far less well afford. There is no doubt whatever that his impetuosity, which some critics have characterized as foolhardiness, greatly aided Sherman in his purpose of capturing Atlanta.
Beaten in these insane ventures Hood was slowly forced back upon the inner defenses of the town, but he had not yet learned his lesson. As late as the twenty-second of the month he again moved out of his fortifications and assailed Sherman with a vigor which would have been praiseworthy had he possessed a force adequate to his undertaking. Seven times he pushed his men forward to the assault, and seven times he was bloodily repulsed. It was gallant fighting that he did, but fighting ill directed and foolishly undertaken. To paraphrase the familiar quotation, it was magnificent, but it was not war. So far as the facts are ascertainable, it appears that Hood's losses greatly exceeded those which he inflicted upon his enemy, a very serious circumstance in view of the fact of his greatly inferior numbers.
On the twenty-seventh of July Sherman again moved by his right flank in the attempt to cut the railroad lines south of Atlanta. On the twenty-eighth Hood assailed him violently, and a severe action occurred involving heavy losses on both sides. Thus far in the campaign, according to the official reports, the Confederates had lost 8,841 men, and the Federals 9,917.
The campaign had been accompanied by various and extensive cavalry raids, chiefly on the part of the Federal troops. On one of these raids the Federal General Stoneman was captured with 700 of his men, while General McCook, who was to have met and coöoperated with him, lost the greater part of his force as prisoners.
Continuing his southward movements by the right flank Sherman at last succeeded in placing his army south of Atlanta, where a deal of hard fighting occurred.
The position thus taken up by the Federals rendered it imperative that Hood should either assail and crush his foe or make such escape as he could from Atlanta. His efforts to crush his foe had failed too conspicuously for even so venturesome a commander to renew them, and accordingly on the night of September first Hood destroyed all that he could of government property, and withdrew to a strong position eastward of the town. Sherman immediately occupied Atlanta, and quickly made an impregnable fortress of it.
His army now lay fortified almost in the center of what remained of the Confederacy. A pause for reorganization, recuperation and the bringing in of supplies was all that remained to him before he should undertake that march to the sea by which Grant had ordered him again to cut the Confederacy in twain. He expected to make that march in daily and hourly conflict with Hood's forces. But as we shall see hereafter, when the story of that matter is told, he made the march in fact, with no opposition at all, beyond that of some handfuls of cavalry, for the reason that Hood, after the surrender of Atlanta, had gone rainbow chasing northward into Tennessee.