Let's replace a Confederate general's name with the name of the Union officer who crushed Hood's army.
George Henry Thomas was a Southerner who chose to fight for the Union in the Civil War. He rose to the rank of Major General.
His service in the Western Theater kept him from the glory and accolades that attended to those who fought in the East, but his accomplishments were no less and in many ways far superior to other, more renowned Generals. Unfortunately, outside of the history books -- and even then, rarely in those books not exclusively about Union military tactics in the West -- the "Rock of Chickamauga" is largely unknown and unsung. He holds the distinction, however, as the only Union commander who drove a major Confederate army away from a prepared position in a complete rout -- and he did it twice, first at Chattanooga in 1863, later at Nashville in 1864, when Thomas destroyed John Bell Hood's Army of the Tennessee, effectively ending the War in the West.
Whenever debates about the Lost Cause and the glory of the Confederacy are belabored yet again, it is wise to remember the impeccable words General Thomas wrote after the war:
[T]he greatest efforts made by the defeated insurgents since the close of the war have been to promulgate the idea that the cause of liberty, justice, humanity, equality, and all the calendar of the virtues of freedom, suffered violence and wrong when the effort for southern independence failed. This is, of course, intended as a species of political cant, whereby the crime of treason might be covered with a counterfeit varnish of patriotism, so that the precipitators of the rebellion might go down in history hand in hand with the defenders of the government, thus wiping out with their own hands their own stains; a species of self-forgiveness amazing in its effrontery, when it is considered that life and property—justly forfeited by the laws of the country, of war, and of nations, through the magnanimity of the government and people—was not exacted from them.
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