Why John Bell Hood nickname was Old Wooden Head?

Answer 1

There isn't a single contemporary record of anyone ever calling John Bell Hood "Old Woodenhead." It is a myth.

Unfortunately, theperception of Hood as "Old Woodenhead" has become so common that Wikipedia and New World Encyclopedia list John Bell Hood's nicknames as "Sam" and "Old Woodenhead." Yet there is no historical evidence that anyone ever called Hood "Old Woodenhead."

The genesis of this derogatory epithet seems to be Lost Cause historian E.A. Pollard, who was a devotee of Hood's arch-rival Joseph E. Johnston. Pollard provided no source when he wrote in Southern History of the War in 1866 that Hood "had the heart of a lion, but, unfortunately, with it a head of wood." In 1914, James C. Nisbet, apparently paraphrasing Pollard, wrote in Four Years on the Firing Line: "It has been said of Hood, 'He was a man with a lion's heart, but a wooden head.'" Because of Hood's physical condition, it is probable that some of his men called him "Old Pegleg," but "Woodenhead" seems to have evolved from later Hood critics combining "Old Pegleg" with the disparaging remark from Pollard and Nisbet.

(Edward Albert Pollard, Southern History of the War: The Last Year of the War, [New York: C. B. Richardson Publisher, 1866], 86; James Cooper Nisbet, Four Years on the Firing Line,[Chattanooga, TN: The Imperial Press, 1914], 305.)