The point was, to draw Sherman's attention away and to cut his Nashville railroad supply lines. As ever, folks give too much credit to hindsight in the aftermath. It wasn't a bad plan at the time.
Agreed.
the fact that it didn't work doesn't necessarily mean it couldn't have worked. There were plenty of Union commanders - and plenty more politicians - who would have panicked when Hood moved towards Ohio and gone after him. Even Grant was uneasy about the situation.
Problem is, the commander on the scene was Sherman, who wasn't that easy to scare.
On top of that, Hood and his pal Jeff in Richmond were faced with a problem which kept recurring for the South during the war, namely the need to do something.
Joe Johnston's solution, which Davis detested, was to basically do nothing until some Union commander made a mistake. Which is why he got sacked and why they got Hood and why that army got trashed. They knew that Hood would do something.
Problem is, Hood had no really good alternatives; they were all bad. We can criticize the man all day - there's certainly more than enough cause, and his execution was simply atrocious - but he was charged with using the army he was given and, within those parameters, there was nothing that was anymore promising.
The fact is that Jeff Davis killed that army. He wanted it used to attack the Federal forces, and got what he wanted. Unfortunately,there was never any real chance of success against a numerically superior, vastly better supplied, veteran (to a man) force led by as shrewd a guy as Sherman.
They didn't like Johnston's approach, and Hood's didn't work out too well either. The bottom line is that, by that time, there was no solution for the South. Wiser men would have surrendered after July 1863 when anyone could see that they were doomed.
But wiser men wouldn't have started that war in the first place.