Peachtree Creek: Hood's First Blow
Georgia
On July seventeenth, eighteen sixty-four, Confederate President Jefferson Davis made a decision that many historians consider the single most consequential personnel change of the war. Frustrated by General Joseph Johnston's months-long defensive retreat from Dalton to the outskirts of Atlanta, Davis replaced him with Lieutenant General John Bell Hood, a hard-fighting Texan famous for personal bravery and frontal assaults. Johnston had kept his army largely intact and had imposed heavy casualties on Sherman through brilliant defensive tactics. Hood would try something different.
Three days later, on the afternoon of July twentieth, Hood launched his first offensive at Peachtree Creek, a wooded stream running roughly two miles north of downtown Atlanta. His plan was ambitious: while two of Sherman's three armies were crossing the creek in separate columns, Hood would strike the exposed Army of the Cumberland under General George Thomas before it could consolidate. If the attack succeeded, he could destroy one Union army in detail, then turn on the others.
The attack was delayed for nearly three hours, from one in the afternoon to four, largely because of coordination problems between corps commanders. That delay was fatal. By the time Confederate forces stepped off across open ground and into the creek-bottom tangles, Thomas's men had already dug rifle pits and were waiting. Hood's assault bent the Union line in several places, and there were moments of genuine crisis where Confederate troops fought their way through to the Federal rear. But the line held everywhere it bent, and Union reserves sealed each breakthrough.
By nightfall the battle was over. Confederate casualties totaled at least twenty-five hundred. The Union lost about seventeen hundred and seventy-nine. Hood had gambled his army's strength in his first engagement and had nothing to show for it. Three days later he attacked again at the Battle of Atlanta on July twenty-second, with similar results. Atlanta would fall to Sherman on September second.
