Hood's Texas Brigade: Its Marches, Its Battles, Its Achievements

Civil War Texas Infantry, #1

"Hood's Texas Brigade: Its Marches, Its Battles, Its Achievements," by Joseph B. Polley is a first-hand, eyewitness recounting of the history of the famous Hood Brigade, made up of the First Texas Infantry Regiment, Fourth Texas Infantry Regiment, Fifth Texas Infantry Regiment, and various regiments from Arkansas, Georgia, and South Carolina at various periods in the Civil War.

General John Bell Hood became commander of the brigade in February 1862, and although he served only six months as its leader, permanently lent his name to the force. Hood and his regiment established a reputation for hard fighting which is described by brigade member Joseph Polley. The unit served in twenty-four major battles, including Antietam and Gettysburg. Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, and James Longstreet all praised Hood’s Texas Brigade as one of the finest units of the Confederate Army. The unit reached a maximum strength of 4,400 men during the war, but numbered only 600 officers and men at the close of the conflict.

When a British officer criticized to Lee, the rag tag appearance of the Texas Brigade as it passed them late in the war, Lee replied: "that's all right, Colonel, the enemy never sees the back of my Texans."

This memoir of Polley's army service, "Hood's Texas Brigade," is considered one of the classics of Civil War literature. Historian Charles Ramsdell. notes that "the author's happy style makes this book very readable, very unlike the great bulk of regimental and brigade histories." A great Civil War history for the reader interested in the war from the Confederate side.

There are approximately 115,700 words and approximately 385+ pages at 300 words per page in this e-book.

NOTE: This book has been scanned then OCR (Optical Character Recognition) has been applied to turn the scanned page images back into editable text. Then every effort has been made to correct typos, spelling, and to eliminate stray marks picked up by the OCR program. The original and/or extra period images, if any, were then placed in the appropriate place and, finally, the file was formatted for the e-book criteria of the site. This means that the text CAN be re-sized, searches performed, & bookmarks added, unlike some other e-books that are only scanned---errors, stray marks, and all.

We have added an Interactive Table of Contents & an Interactive List of Illustrations if any were present in the original. This means that the reader can click on the links in the Table of Contents or the List of Illustrations & be instantly transported to that chapter or illustration.

Our aim is to provide the reader AND the collector with long out-of-print (OOP) classic books at realistic prices. If you load your mobile device(s) with our books, not only will you have fingertip access to a large library of antiquarian and out-of-print material at reasonable prices, but you can mark them up electronically & always have them for immediate reference without worrying about damage or loss to expensive bound copies.

We will be adding to our titles regularly, look for our offerings on your favorite e-book site.