While controversy dogged his hard-charging military career during and after the Civil War, no one has ever accused Gen. John Bell Hood of dodging harm's way while leading his troops.
An 1853 graduate of West Point, where he was a classmate of Philip Sheridan, who later became a Union general and Civil War adversary, Hood suffered an arrow wound in his hand while fighting Cherokees in Texas as a junior officer in the U.S. Army. After joining the Confederacy in 1861, Hood remained no stranger to combat, suffering a shrapnel wound that rendered his left arm useless during the Battle of Gettysburg. A few months later, while leading a charge that broke the Union line at the Battle of Chickamauga, Hood was shot in the right thigh, resulting in the amputation of a leg.
He returned to the battlefield after three months of convalescence and a promotion to lieutenant general, commanding a corps of troops in the ill-fated defense of Atlanta, then moving west to Tennessee, where he met disastrous defeats at Franklin and Nashville.
At 7 p.m. today in the Dunbar Public Library, Stephen "Sam" Hood, a distant descendant of the general, will give a free public lecture on John Bell Hood's military career, based on his book, "The Lost Papers of Confederate General John Bell Hood." The book is based on a cache of the general's papers that had been stored, and until recently, forgotten in the closet of another descendant.
Sam Hood is a Huntington resident, a Marshall University graduate, a Marine Corps veteran and a former men's soccer coach at MU. He has served on the board of the Confederate Memorial Hall in New Orleans and the Blue and Gray Educational Society and is the author of an earlier book about Hood, "The Rise, Fall and Resurrection of a Confederate General."
Hood's appearance is part of the Kanawha Valley Civil War Roundtable lecture series.