DRIVEN MAD
On a winter day in 1876, former Confederate Brig. Gen. Thomas Benton Smith armed himself with a bow and arrows, mounted a horse, and rode near Nashville “attacking everyone he met.” Among the 37-year-old veteran’s victims was his cousin, struck in the leg with a steel-tipped arrow. “Imagining himself to be the Indian Emperor of America,” Smith fled into the hills around the city, where he finally was captured with “great difficulty” and jailed.
“He deserves too much from his State to be sent as a common thief to jail,” a Nashville newspaper wrote about Smith’s arrest, “and it is a shame upon the laws that makes no distinction between a thief and a lunatic.”
Obviously unwell, the Tennessee native was committed by his sister to the Central Hospital for the Insane in Nashville, a foreboding, castle-like building southeast of the city that was finally demolished in 1999. From 1876 to 1923, Smith was confined there, reportedly leaving only once or twice a year for Confederate veterans’ reunions. In the years after his confinement, Smith was
