John Bell Hood - Old Wooden Head

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John Bell Hood (1830- 1879)
John Bell Hood General

His nickname among his own troop in the "Texas Brigade" was "Old Wooden Head" while they fought as part of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. Because of his ability to lead his troops in a number of daring assaults, he was promoted to head of a division working for General James Longstreet's First Army Corps.

During the battle of "Second Bull Run" (or, in Southern histories "Second Manassas") Hood's men lead the attack on the flank of John Pope's Union army, which thought it was closing in to destroy Stonewall Jackson's troops trapped at Stony Ridge, and was completely surprised when Longstreet's combined force of 25,000 men from five divisions came down on them from the right. Hood was 32 years old at the time.

Hood had an arm rendered useless for life by shrapnel from an exploding shell at Gettysburg, and after recuperation, had a leg destroyed (and amputated four inches below the hip) in another battle. Still he was named head of the Army of Tennessee, the Confederate's chief force to the West.

After the war, he married and lived in New Orleans, Lousiana, where he fathered eleven children, including three sets of twins. He was killed in one of the yellow fever epidemics at New Orleans in 1879.

Robert E. Lee apparently had full confidence in Hood as a subordinate, but when Confederate President Jeffereson Davis was naming Hood head of the Army of Tennessee in 1864, Lee advised that Hood was "all lion, no fox."

Wikipedia has info and so does a whole site at johnbellhood.org which says:

Among the Confederate officers who lived through that terrible war there can hardly be found a more emblematic personality of Southern manhood than John Bell Hood. Those intimately acquainted with him, in victory or defeat, spoke without hesitation of a man of stainless character, wholly devoted to his country, his cause, his army, and after the war, to his friends and family.