Dr. John Hood and the Legacy he left in Galesburg
It’s funny
sometimes how leads to articles drop in one’s lap. My interest in Dr. John Hood was piqued thanks
to a recent article in the Galesburg
Register-Mail about the gorgeous home that is located on 545 North
Prairie Street. Tom Wilson mentioned in
the article that Dr. Hood was a veteran of the Civil War, had been incarcerated
in Libby Prison, and jumped off a train in an attempt to reach the Union
lines. This roused my curiosity. I wanted to learn more about Dr. Hood and his
Civil War experiences.
John Hood was
born in Washington County, Illinois on November 17th, 1838. His father was Archibald Hood, a native of
South, Carolina, one of the many of Scotch Irish descent who settled in the
upper Carolina region. These were
independent folk, not the type to be trifled with as Patrick Ferguson and the
Tories he led found to their dismay at their disastrous defeat at King’s
Mountain during the American Revolution.
John’s father travelled to Illinois at about the age of 30, lured as
were so many others by the stories of the cheap and fertile farmland available
there, eventually settling in Sparta, Illinois.
From his
boyhood young John was earmarked by his father for the ministry, but the young
man balked at his father’s plans for his life.
He went to the University of Indiana with the goal of pursuing a career
in law and politics instead. He
graduated in 1862 and immediately enlisted in the Union army as a Lieutenant in
Company F of the 80th Illinois Infantry, being mustered in at
Centralia, Illinois. He participated in the bloody battle of Perryville, in
Kentucky, where both the division and brigade commanders were killed, as well
as a number of line officers. On the
death of Capt. Jones, John Hood was promoted to that rank to take his place,
effective April 30th, 1863.
In March of 1863,
Union General William S. Rosecrans came up with a plan for a mounted brigade of
men to make a raid across northern Alabama into northwest Georgia. The object of the raid would be to strike the
Western & Atlantic Railroad, an important Confederate supply artery. The 80th Illinois, John Hood’s
regiment, was among the 1700 troops chosen to be part of this expedition that was to be under the command of Colonel Abel Streight. Remember this number, 1700, and contrast it
with the number of men that Nathan Bedford Forrest would later bring against
them.
Lacking enough
adequate horses for the planned foray into Alabama, some lackwit quartermaster
came up with the idea to use mules for transportation. Sure, they could be readily procured from
rural yet shrewd Tennessee farmers, but a mule is a temperamental creature, and
to make things worse, many of those bought or appropriated for the mission were
unbroken, old, or incapable of bearing the burden of a rider for great
distances. The lack of adequate mounts
had a negative effect on Union morale, as no doubt did the ridicule of the
southern farmers that the men had to endure, or the insults of their opponents,
who referred to Streight’s men as “the Jackass Brigade.”
Once underway,
the expedition encountered more problems.
The night that the expedition embarked, a stampede scattered 400 of the
brigade’s mules into the surrounding countryside, causing a delay as Streight
had to halt his command to wait for replacement mules. Once underway, a heavy thunderstorm made the
muddy Alabama roads virtually impassible, forcing another delay. During this halt Colonel Streight met with
General Grenville Dodge, who assured Streight that he had driven Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s
command to the north, opening up a way for Streight’s “Jackass Brigade” to
continue their raid unmolested.
General Dodge was
mistaken. Forrest was well aware of the
whereabouts of Streight’s men and easily maneuvering his men past General
Dodge’s force, he relentlessly drove his command to intercept them. Sniping at their flanks and rear, Forrest’s
expert use of his command dogged Streight to the point where he dared not stop
to rest his weary men and mules. Giving
Forrest the slip was impossible. The
“Wizard of the Saddle’s” scouts later boasted that they could hear the constant
braying of Streight’s mules from 2 miles away.
Streight had to
deal with unfriendly locals as well. At
one crucial point during his raid, a 16 year old girl, Emma Sansom, guided Forrest and his men to a ford which
allowed them to gain a march on the beleaguered Federals. At another point the residents of Rome,
Georgia repelled the raiders attempt to capture a bridge crucial to their
escape hopes, after ferryman John Wisdom, enraged at the wanton destruction of
his ferry, the source of his livelihood, by the Union raiders, raced 67 miles
to warn the Georgia residents of the approaching Union troops. His warning gave them time to gather and
initiate the defense that held the bridge.
By the time they reached Cedar Bluff many of Streight’s men were on
foot, their exhausted mules having given out.
To make matters worse, much of their ammunition had gotten wet and was
useless. Forrest and his 500 men (yes,
only 500) took up positions surrounding Streight’s men, and ordered the Union
commander to surrender. During
negotiations Forrest used every trick he could come up with to convince the
Union commander that he was outnumbered.
Ruses included having his artillery hauled round the Union position in
circles, using a ridge and hills in order to mask their movement to delude Streight into
believing that they were many different units.
The Union commander finally agreed to surrender, convinced by the visual
ruse that Forrest had orchestrated that he faced a numerically superior foe.
When Forrest’s
small division came out after the surrender was negotiated, Streight was incensed
at the trick that had been played upon him.
He angrily demanded that his men be allowed to renege on the agreement
so that they could prove their mettle in a fair fight. Needless to say, Forrest refused the request. Already becoming almost a mythic figure as a
commander, the man who would eventually have 30 horses shot out from under him,
and who would kill the same number of men in one to one combat; his outwitting
of Colonel Streight only added to his rapidly growing legend.
Defeat proved especially
bitter for the soldiers of the 1st Alabama, men who had risked their
families and homes; everything they held dear basically, because they elected
to defend the Union despite their State’s decision to secede. Forrest soon paroled the privates and the
non-commissioned officers, not having the resources to feed them or the men to
guard them, but the officers, well-trained leaders, one hundred and three in
number, which included Captain John Hood, were reasoned to be too valuable to
the Union cause to parole. They were to
be held as prisoners until such a time when the Confederate leaders hoped that
they could be exchanged for badly needed prisoners to rebuild the thinning
rebel ranks. Young John Hood’s prison
experiences and his postwar life will encompass the other two thirds of this
article.
After being
captured with Abel Streight’s command, John Hood and the 102 officers that the
rebels opted not to parole were taken to the infamous Libby Prison, an old
tobacco barn that had been converted to a holding pen for captured Union
officers. He spent nearly a year
there. This structure was three stories
high, with the second and third stories designated as inmate holding
areas. The basement once boasted a
kitchen at its eastern end which at one time early in the prison’s history was
used by the inmates, but an infestation of rats and the tendency of the
basement to be subject to flooding led to the abandonment of that section of
the warehouse/prison. The abandoned area
became known as “rat hell.” With time to
reflect upon his life, his situation and the religious upbringing that he had,
he found himself pondering his spiritual welfare. Later in his life Hood said that while enduring
his miserable existence in Libby Prison he first received the call to
enter the ministry.
A group of Union
officers discovered that by removing a stove and chipping their way into an
adjoining chimney, that they could access “rat hell,” the floor of which was
covered with two feet of straw. This straw
was a godsend for both covering earth that had been dug out as the men began to
laboriously tunnel toward freedom. It
also covered the mouth of the tunnel.
The hundreds of rats that made this area their home were a constant
nuisance, finding their way into the tunnel, crawling over the men digging in
the tunnels and basically displaying no fear of the men who had invaded their
sanctuary. The only advantage to the
soldiers was that the presence of the horde of filthy rodents that had taken residence there discouraged searches through that area. The guards tended to shun it. After 17 days of digging by three different
shifts of men, they finally succeeded in tunneling through to a 50 foot vacant
lot near the prison, emerging beneath a tobacco shed.
109 Men used that
tunnel to make an escape from Libby Prison.
John Hood was not one of them.
The escape of the Yankee prisoners though impacted his situation in that
moves were made to address the overcrowding of the prison and to make it more
secure. Captain Hood was one of the
officers who was removed and sent further south.
Macon, Georgia
became his next place of confinement, but events in Charleston, South Carolina
were stirring that would impact Captain Hood’s life. Confederate Major General Samuel Jones had
been assigned to command of the city.
Despite Mexican War experience, service at the Rebel victory at First
Manassas, and the responsibility of commanding a brigade in both Florida and
Virginia, Jones had earned a reputation for being difficult to work with. He questioned his superiors, at times
disregarding their order, and was loathe to relinquish troops that he had
command of when ordered to send them to areas where they were desperately
needed. After arguing with General
Robert E. Lee about such issues, he was relieved of his Virginia command and
sent to Charleston.
By the time
General Jones arrived at his new command, the city had suffered eight months of
intermittent bombardment. The streets
were pockmarked with shell craters and many of the buildings had sustained
serious damage. Jones wanted the shelling
to cease, and finally decided to take a drastic measure to do so. On June 1st, 1864, he requested
permission from General Braxton Bragg, Jefferson Davis’ military advisor by
this time, to have 50 Federal prisoners sent to him to be “confined in parts of
the city still occupied by civilians, but under the enemy’s fire.” General Jones’ request was approved, and
orders were issued to pull that number of prisoners from Camp Oglethorpe in
Macon, to bring them to Charleston. They
arrived on June 12th.
The Charleston
Mercury took a great deal of pleasure in reporting the plight of the
unlucky 50 high ranking Yankees, besides Captain Hood, a collection of officers
that included 5 brigadier generals. “These prisoners, we understand, will be
furnished with comfortable quarters in that portion of the city most exposed to
enemy fire. The commanding officer on
Morris Island will be duly notified of the fact of their presence in the
shelled district, and if his batteries still continue at their wanton and barbarous
work, it will be at the peril of the captive officers.”
General Jones officially notified
General Foster, the commander of the Union force that was besieging the city,
of his actions. Foster replied angrily
that Charleston was a legitimate target given that it had munitions factories
and wharves to unload supplies that could make it into the harbor past the
Union blockade. General Foster said that
‘to destroy these means of continuing the
war is therefore our object and duty.
You seek to defeat this effort, not by honorable means, but by placing
unarmed and helpless men under our fire.”
This war of words escalated with Jones
responding that “I cannot but regard the
desultory firing on this city, which you dignify by the name ‘Bombardment’,
from its commencement to this hour, as anti-Christian, inhuman, and utterly
indefensible by any law, human or divine.”
Clearly Jones had his dander up, and he wasn’t about to back down or
show any sympathy to the Union officers that he was callously exposing to
danger.
General Foster
responded by bringing 50 Rebel prisoners to a place of incarceration on Morris
Island, just in front of the Federal batteries, placing an equal number of the
enemy in harm’s way. Federal officials
were made aware of the stalemate, and an understanding had just about been
reached to exchange both sets of prisoners to eliminate the impasse, when
Sherman’s thrust in Georgia threatened the Infamous prison camp at
Andersonville and authorities there sent hundreds of prisoners to Charleston
for safekeeping. This despite General
Samuel Jones’ objection that it was both "inconvenient
and unsafe.”
The Union commander became upset and
angry when he heard of the new influx of prisoners into the city, believing
that they were sent there to serve as more human shields. A stockade was built in front of Battery
Wagner, and 600 Confederate officers were shipped in from Fort Delaware. In this high stakes game using human lives as
chips, now each side had put 600 officers in the line of fire.
As the number of
inmates grew, conditions in the camp that held the Union prisoners
deteriorated. Soon 600 officers were
sharing space with 300 enlisted men, both black and white, as well as local
criminals and deserters from both sides.
Most of them were jammed into A-frame tents set up in the
courtyard. An inmate described the yard
as “a dirty little place unfit for human
beings to live in.” Another Federal
officer, Louis Fortescue, wrote home to describe the “intolerable heat” that the prisoners had to endure in a courtyard
that did not have a single shade tree in it.
Life here was every bit as debilitating as the conditions that the men
had to endure in Libby Prison, and to add to the stifling heat and humidity of
summer, yellow fever introduced itself into the camp and soon began to take a
frightening toll of the weak and malnourished prisoners.
General Jones,
the Confederate commander, reacted to the outbreak of the disease by issuing
orders to his Provost Marshall to remove as many of the sick and wounded
prisoners as possible who were able to travel and have them shipped back to
other prison camps. One of these
gentleman was Captain Hood, who was being sent to Columbia, South
Carolina. While being shipped via train
to their destination, Hood and Lieutenant Goode, an Indiana native, jumped from
the moving train, using the darkness of night to cloak their departure. The plunge left them badly bruised and hurt,
but despite their suffering, they had to immediately get up and hobble toward
the shelter of the woods. Like the
escaped slaves who would hide during the day and travel at night in their trek
north toward freedom, Hood and Goode entered into the same routine; they
learned to follow the North Star as well, the beacon of freedom. They had an arduous journey of over 400 miles
ahead of them if they were going to reach the Union lines in East Tennessee and
freedom.
In his “Lecture on Prison Life,” a 174 page
manuscript which is in the possession of Duke University in their Rubenstein
Library Collection, Dr. Hood speaks with gratitude of the kindnesses shown to
him by blacks along their route, one of whom risked his own life in order to
provide the two escapees with gray uniforms to replace their Union blue. He also talks of the cruelties that their
Rebel captors inflicted upon them during their time in prison, as well as the
meager rations and the filth of the surroundings that they were forced to exist
in. Goode and Hood persevered,
travelling through South Carolina and Georgia in the hope of reaching the Union
line in East Tennessee. Within 20 miles
of the Atlanta and Chattanooga railroad, which was in Union hands, they were
accosted by bushwackers and eventually identified as escaped prisoners. It had to be frustrating and terribly
disheartening to have gotten so close to freedom only to be recaptured and sent
back into captivity.
Captain John Hood
was sent first to a camp near Athens, Georgia.
Later he was moved again. He remained
a prisoner until being paroled as part of a prisoner exchange that took him out
of confinement in Goldsboro, North Carolina.
He returned to Company F of the 80th Illinois infantry on
October 20th, 1864. He
remained with them until the end of the war, receiving an honorable discharge
on May 15th, 1865. In
November of the same year he entered a Reformed Presbyterian theological
seminary in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania.
The following year he became Superintendent of Public Schools of Sparta,
Illinois. He received his license to
preach in 1869 and completed his theological studies in 1870. By this time, a Doctor of Divinity, “Doctor”
Hood married Miss Mary Gault of Randolph County, Illinois. Their union eventually brought them a
daughter. From 1870 to 1878 he served as
the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Sparta, leaving there on June 30th,
1878 to become the spiritual leader of the Second Presbyterian Church of Cedar
Rapids, Iowa. He remained there until
1889 when he assumed the leadership of the Presbyterian Church of Galesburg,
Illinois.
Dr. John Hood,
during his time in Galesburg, was instrumental in erecting two imposing
edifices that still remain to testify to his importance to the community. The first, the home he had built on 545 North
Prairie Street, is a multi-story home, a remarkable example of the Queen Anne
style of architecture, boasting a series of arches and curves. The structure is especially noted for the
curved front porch that protrudes to the south.
It was designed by the local architects Charles Gottschalk and J. Grant
Beedle. According to an article about the
home written by Tom Wilson, the leaded windows of the home are among the
prettiest in the city. Dr. Hood lived
here until he retired from the ministry in 1897.
During Dr. Hood’s
eight year tenure as the spiritual leader of the Presbyterian Church in
Galesburg, he was responsible for raising the funding and enthusiasm for
building a new sanctuary of worship. At
the cost of $70,000, an imposing stone edifice, still one of the most striking
and visually attractive buildings in Galesburg, was erected on the corner of
North Prairie and East Ferris Streets.
Yes, Dr. Hood has left a legacy in the city that does credit to his memory.
Dr. Hood was in demand as a lecturer and
patriotic speaker as well. More on this
will be addressed in the last paragraph of this article. His learning and experiences generally earned
him flattering reviews, although one commentator notes that “Hood’s voice was a high-pitched, irritating
disappointment, lacking resonance.” This Civil War officer, prisoner of war,
respected lecturer and spiritual advisor to Presbyterian communities of worship
died while in Austin, Texas on January 29th, 1905. His body was returned to Cedar Rapids, Iowa
to be interred next to his wife, Mary, who had died and was buried there in
1886. A white obelisk marks their burial
site, next to which is a simple Grand Army of the Republic stone that
commemorates his Civil War service, referring to him as “Lieutenant” John Hood.
Dr. Hood’s papers
are in the possession of Duke University, who purchased them in an on-line
auction hosted by Dorothy Sloan
Books. Looking at the contents
of the lot, it is to be greatly regretted that these papers couldn’t have been
acquired by a Knox County library or college.
The documents had at some point endured some smoke and fire damage, but
the contents are still readable and hopefully someday will be on-line for
everyone to access. Meanwhile, an
aspiring scholar looking for a graduate treatise could do much worse than
writing a dissertation about Dr. Hood’s life and Civil War experiences. The centerpiece of the collection is his 174
page “Lecture on Prison Life,” but it
also contains a two and a half page autobiography, correspondence and military
papers including pension applications, correspondence from the Galesburg
Presbyterian church and the Sparta Church calling upon him to become their
minister, newspaper clippings about the lecture on prison life that he had
delivered at Greene’s Opera House in Rapid City, Iowa, memorial addresses that
he had delivered at Moscow, Illinois, Aledo, Illinois and a speech that he delivered in honor of John A.
Logan. Sloan Books touts Hood’s lecture
on prison life as “a major, unpublished
Civil War POW narrative.”
Dr. John Hood was
one of the lucky ones, a man who survived the debilitating conditions of being
incarcerated in Rebel prisons. He went
on, like so many veterans did after this and future wars, to set an educational
goal, pursue it, and use his learning to benefit the communities that he served
in. Perhaps you’ll think of him next
time you stroll or drive past the beautiful church structure that he helped
make possible.
Bibliography
Immortal 600; Prisoners under Fire at Charleston Harbor During
the American Civil War “America’s
Civil War Magazine” June,2006
Guide to the John Hood Papers Collection Guides/ Rubenstein
Library Duke University
“Reverend John Hood (1838-1905)” Find a Grave Memorial
History of the
Presbyterian Church of the State of Illinois 1879
Church History History of Galesburg Presbyterian On-line article
Galesburg Oldest
notable Homes: Former home of Dr. John
Hood “Galesburg Register-Mail”
6/08/14
Dorothy Sloan Rare Books
Auction 22 Listing. John Hood Lot
“Libby Prison Escape”
Wikipedia article
“Encyclopedia of Alabama:
Streight’s Raid On-line article
