John Bell Hood was one of the most notorious Confederate generals of the Civil War, arguably the best division commander in the Army of Northern Virginia and also arguably the worst overall army commander of the Confederacy. The big Texan and his brigade were crucial at Antietam, and he fought hard and was injured at Gettysburg and Chickamauga, but when he took over the Army of Tennessee in 1864, he made disastrous decisions that wrecked the army at Franklin and Nashville. Hood died in 1879, fairly shortly after the war, but his generalship was so controversial that he felt compelled to defend it in a hastily written memoirs. In addition to talking about his own experiences, it rebuts General Joseph E. Johnston's writings, as the two men traded blame over the Atlanta campaign against Union general William Tecumseh Sherman.