Towards an Understanding of the Bloodbath at the Battle of Franklin, November 30, 1864.
Whether injected, mixed with water, or utilized topically, morphine was common at battlefield hospitals on both sides during the Civil War. That narcotics were common is confirmed by the fact that the Union Army requisitioned over nine million opium pills and over 2,840,000 ounces of other opium products including powdered opium, opium with ipecac, paregoric and laudanum, while 29,828 ounces of morphine sulfate were issued to the medical corps. Because of its effectiveness as an analgesic agent it was liberally given to battlefield casualties on both sides. Physicians in gray and blue prescribed opium for dysentery and diarrhea, demonstrably the two foremost causes of death in the war. William H. Taylor, a Confederate Assistant Surgeon, revealed just how freely opium was dispensed for abdominal ailments. According to Taylor, while on the march he carried in one pocket a ball of a purgative called "blue mass," and in the other a ball of opium. Each morning at sick call he would first ask each soldier: "How are your bowels? If they were open, I administered a plug of opium, if they were shut I gave a plug of blue mass." Given the ubiquitousness of malaria, dysentery, and diarrhea (or the "Tennessee Trots") and the almost cavalier issuance of opium, one may begin to understand the ease with which soldiers on both sides of the conflict contracted the "soldier's disease." It must not have been long that a soldier𠏋 answer to the question "how are your bowels" was unexceptionally "loose," whether or not that was the case.
Moreover, despite the Union blockade, opiates were surely easily available in the Confederacy as well, as the example of Confederate Commissary Sergeant John Coffee Williamson demonstrates. Williamson was participating in General Joe Wheeler𠏋 Middle Tennessee raid and was near Smithville, TN, on the night of August 29, 1864. The sergeant wrote casually in his diary:
"I have been sick all day, and at night I was perfectly worn out. We got up no rations. I took a dose of morphine and slept soundly."
When the Confederate quartermaster sergeant described himself as being sick all day he must surely have been describing the symptoms of narcotic withdrawal. He calmed his illness by "scoring" and taking a "dose" [today a "fix" of morphine]. He seemed content with the results, having "slept soundly. It seems difficult to believe that he just used it for sleeping purposes, like we use over the counter sleep medicines today.
It may be deduced, or at least suggested, that Confederate General John Bell Hood was addicted to painkillers of the type described above. He could conceivably have acquired an addiction as an outcome of the severe wounds he sustained at Gettysburg and subsequently at Chickamauga. (At the former his shoulder was shattered, at the latter he lost a leg.) It may be likely that Hood was addicted to some kind of opiate painkiller at the time of his North Alabama and Middle Tennessee offensive in October-November 1864. Certainly his rank afforded him no more relief from pain than the unwounded and addicted Sgt. Williamson or any other seriously wounded soldier. Narcotic dependency may have marred his soldierly judgment, for example, at the Battle of Franklin. There he ordered Confederate soldiers to assault a securely established Federal position seated on the high ground. Federal General John M. Schofield had already obeyed one of the first precepts of military science, specifically: "take the high ground." A second precept is to go around the high ground if it cannot be taken. Hood would have been better served to go around the hill and attack Nashville ?or even attack Chattanooga - than to waste so many lives.
Why would he behave so? The noted and respected historian Thomas L. Connelly in his Civil War Tennessee: Battles and Leaders, makes allusions to Hood having "fumbled" a chance to destroy Schofield's army, that Hood "whether from exhaustion or other [emphasis added] reasons" did not strike when he had an opportunity, that the erstwhile Kentuckian was "totally unreasonable" or that he was "too emotionally distraught to continue in command." Could drug addiction be one of the "other reasons" that caused Hood to make such unbefitting and wasteful actions? Why else would an otherwise apparently competent general order his men to cross two miles of open field to make frontal attacks against a fortified enemy position on top of a hill? And, not just once, but six times resulting in casualties exceeding 6,000 Confederate soldiers.
So, it appears that Hood was most probably a junkie-general. But in the 1860s, of course, there was no drug problem ? isn㦙 that right? Remember, opiates don㦙 care who they addict. Surely the past was different than we portray it today, because, as Big Brother would say: "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."
Every Day in Tennessee History