John Bell Hood

From Dixiepedia: The PC-Free Encyclopedia

John Bell Hood (1 June 1831 – 30 August 1879) was born in Owingsville, Kentucky, son of John W. Hood, a doctor, and Theodosia French Hood. He was the cousin of future Confederate general Gustavus W. Smith and the nephew of U.S. Representative Richard French. French obtained an appointment for Hood at the U.S. Military Academy, despite his father's reluctance to support a military career for his son. Hood graduated in 1853, ranked 44th in a class of 52, after a tenure marred by disciplinary problems and near-expulsion in his final year. At West Point and in later Army years he was known to friends as "Sam". His classmates included James B. McPherson and John M. Schofield; he received instruction in artillery from George H. Thomas. All three of these men would become Union Army generals who would oppose Hood in battle.

Hood was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the 4th U.S. Infantry, served in California, and later transferred to the 2nd U.S. Cavalry in Texas, where he was commanded by Colonel Robert Edward Lee. While commanding a reconnaissance patrol from Fort Mason, Hood sustained one of the many wounds that marked his lifetime in military service — an arrow through his left hand in action against the Comanches at Devil's River, Texas.

After the War Between the States, Hood entered the cotton brokerage and insurance businesses in New Orleans, Louisiana. On 30 April 1868 he married native New Orleanian, Anna Marie Hennen and over the next ten years he would father eleven children, including three sets of twins. Hood would lose all of his modest fortune during the winter of 1878-1879 due to a yellow fever epidemic that closed the New Orleans Cotton Exchange, and wiped out almost every city insurance company. Later that year, John Bell Hood died of yellow fever within days of his wife and oldest child. His ten orphaned children, all under the age of ten, were left destitute. They would ultimately be adopted by seven different families in Louisiana, New York, Mississippi, Georgia and Kentucky..