All the Fighting They Want

John Bell Hood brought a hangdog look and a hardfighting spirit to the Army of Tennessee. Once one of the ablest division commanders in the Army of Northern Virginia, he found himself, by the spring of 1864, in the war’s Western Theater. Recently recovered from grievous wounds sustained at Chickamauga, he suddenly found himself thrust into command of the Confederacy’s illstarred army even as Federals pounded on the door of the Deep South’s greatest untouched city, Atlanta.

His predecessor, Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, had failed to stop the advance of armies under Federal commander William T. Sherman, who had pushed and maneuvered his way from Chattanooga, Tennessee, right to Atlanta’s very doorstep. Johnston had been able to do little to stop him.

The crisis could not have been more acute.

Hood, an aggressive risktaker, threw his men into the fray with unprecedented vigor. Sherman welcomed it.

“We’ll give them all the fighting they want,” Sherman said.

He proved a man of his word.

In All the Fighting They Want, Georgia native Steve Davis, the world’s foremost authority on the Atlanta campaign, tells the tale of the last great struggle for the city. His Southern sensibility and his knowledge of the battle, accumulated over a lifetime of living on the ground, make this an indispensible addition to the acclaimed Emerging Civil War Series.