Battle of Franklin

• 1. Introduction

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  The Battle of Franklin, fought on the 30th of November 1864 in Franklin, Tennessee, lasted only a few hours but produced a catastrophe that echoed through the final months of the Civil War. Before dusk, six Confederate infantry divisions containing nearly 20,000 men surged across two miles of open ground toward heavily fortified Union positions. By the time the shooting slowed, fourteen Confederate generals had fallen as casualties. Five of them were dead on the field.

  What drove a commander to order such an assault? Why did Confederate Lieutenant General John Bell Hood send his Army of Tennessee headlong into prepared earthworks in fading afternoon light, against the advice of his own generals? And what happened to the men who broke through the Union center only to find themselves trapped in a desperate, close-quarters brawl around a farmhouse and a cotton gin?

  The answers lie in a week of pursuit through the Tennessee countryside, a missed opportunity at a crossroads village called Spring Hill, and a commanding general whose boldness had curdled into something his officers could not quite name.

• 2. The Road North

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  Hood's offensive began on the 21st of November, when the Army of Tennessee marched north from Florence, Alabama. His aim was to strike portions of Major General George H. Thomas's force before they could concentrate. The two halves of the Union defensive force were 75 miles apart at the start, and Hood moved fast: a series of marches covered 70 miles in three days.

  Major General John Schofield, commanding both the IV Corps and the XXIII Corps, reacted with a rapid retreat from Pulaski toward Columbia. Despite harassment from Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest's cavalry along the route, Union forces reached Columbia and erected fortifications just hours before the Confederates arrived on the 24th of November. For five days, from the 24th to the 29th, a series of mostly bloodless skirmishes and artillery exchanges held Hood at the Duck River crossing.

  On the morning of the 29th, Hood sent two corps on a flanking march east of Columbia, crossing the Duck River at Davis's Ford. He left most of his artillery on the south bank to make Schofield believe a frontal attack was coming. The maneuver worked. By noon that day, Schofield's command was split and his army was in critical danger.

  At Spring Hill that afternoon and night, Hood had what his own men later called a golden opportunity. His forces had already reached the turnpike that separated the Union halves. But a cascade of command failures left the road open through the night, and Schofield's entire army, infantry and supply wagons together, slipped past in the dark. Hood woke on the 30th surprised and furious to find the Federals gone.

• 3. Building the Trap

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  Schofield's advance guard reached Franklin at about 4:30 in the morning of the 30th of November, after a forced march north from Spring Hill. Brigadier General Jacob Cox took temporary command of the XXIII Corps and immediately set his men to work on defensive positions built around the deteriorated earthworks left from a 1863 engagement.

  Schofield had no choice but to defend with his back to the Harpeth River. The pontoon bridges that should have allowed a crossing had been left behind during the retreat from Columbia. Engineers were sent to repair a burned wagon bridge and to lay planking across an intact railroad bridge so it could carry wagons and troops. Until those crossings were ready, the army stayed.

  By noon the Union line was complete. It formed an approximate semicircle around the town, anchored at both ends by the river. The actual earthworks were formidable: attacking infantry would first face a ditch about four feet wide and two to three feet deep, then a wall of earth and fence rails four feet above ground level, and finally a defender's trench three to four feet deep with narrow head-gaps formed by logs. In the southeast portion of the line, Osage-orange shrubs formed a nearly impenetrable abatis.

  At the center of the line stood the Carter House, taken over by Cox as his headquarters. Just east of the Columbia Pike ran the Carter cotton gin building. Around that gin, the Union earthworks formed a minor salient, a slight irregularity in the line that would soon become the focus of the Confederate breakthrough.

  Two Union brigades under Colonels John Q. Lane and Joseph Conrad were posted about half a mile forward of the main works, a placement that would prove catastrophic. They had few entrenching tools and used bayonets, tin cups, and bare hands to scratch at the ground.

• 4. Hood's Fateful Order

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  Hood's army began arriving on Winstead Hill, two miles south of Franklin, around 13:00. Sunset that day was at 16:34, leaving only a narrow window of daylight. Hood ordered a frontal assault immediately.

  His senior generals objected. Forrest argued that with a single division of infantry to accompany his cavalry, he could flank Schofield out of his position within an hour. Frank Cheatham told Hood directly, "I do not like the looks of this fight; the enemy has an excellent position and is well fortified." Hood countered that he preferred to strike now, rather than attack Nashville where the Union had been entrenching for three years.

  Patrick Cleburne studied the Federal works and told Hood he would either take them or fall in the attempt. Riding away, he remarked to Brigadier General Daniel C. Govan, "Well, Govan, if we are to die, let us die like men."

  Some accounts painted Hood as acting from rage at Schofield's escape the night before, but contemporary observation suggests he was determined rather than furious. His choice was consistent with the aggressive style practiced in the Army of Northern Virginia. His specific fear was practical: if he tried to cross the Harpeth and get between Schofield and Nashville, the open terrain would reveal his movements and Schofield would simply withdraw again.

  The Confederates moved forward at 16:00. Cheatham's corps took the left, Stewart's the right. Lee's corps and nearly all of the army's artillery had not yet arrived from Columbia. The attacking force of about 19,000-20,000 men crossed two miles of open ground supported by only two batteries of artillery.

• 5. Breakthrough at the Carter House

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  Lane's and Conrad's forward brigades collapsed almost immediately. They fired a single strong volley and a two-gun section of Battery G, 1st Ohio Light Artillery discharged canister, and then the veteran soldiers of those two brigades ran. Nearly 700 of Wagner's men were taken prisoner. The Confederates pressed so close behind the fleeing Federals that defenders at the main breastworks could not fire without hitting their own men. A cry passed along the Confederate line: "Go into the works with them."

  The divisions of Cleburne, Brown, and French converged on the gap and broke through. Within minutes the Confederates had penetrated 50 yards deep into the Federal center. The 100th Ohio Infantry was driven from its position east of the pike; Strickland's brigade was forced back to the Carter House; the left wing of the 72nd Illinois was swept away.

  Emerson Opdycke's brigade was in reserve, positioned in a meadow about 200 yards north of the Carter House. Opdycke repositioned his veterans into a line of battle straddling the pike and drove them forward into the mass of fleeing Union troops and pursuing Confederates. Major General David Stanley arrived at the same moment. He later wrote that he gave Opdycke no orders because he saw the colonel already doing the one thing that could save the line. As Stanley rode forward, a bullet passed through the back of his neck and his horse was shot out from under him.

  The hand-to-hand fighting around the Carter House was unlike almost anything veterans of the western armies had experienced before. They had fought since Shiloh, but this was the first time the bayonet and musket butt were used with such abandon. Opdycke emptied his pistol at the Confederates, then used the weapon as a club until it broke, then seized a musket and used that. Arthur MacArthur, after having his horse shot and taking a bullet himself, ran through a Confederate major who had just shot him in the chest. When Union artillerymen ran out of cannonballs, they fired pine cones.

  Near the Carter House, 350 men of the 12th Kentucky and 65th Illinois carried 16-shot, lever-action Henry rifles, the predecessors to the Winchester repeating rifle. Those weapons could fire 15 to 30 rounds per minute, giving their bearers several times the firepower of a typical infantryman with a muzzle-loading rifle-musket.

• 6. Losses in Leadership

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  Patrick Cleburne, widely regarded as perhaps the best division commander of either side, was killed during the assault near the cotton gin. Fourteen Confederate generals in total became casualties at Franklin: six killed, seven wounded, and one captured.

  Five generals died on the field: Cleburne, John Adams, Hiram B. Granbury, States Rights Gist, and Otho F. Strahl. A sixth, John C. Carter, was mortally wounded and died on the 10th of December. Adams fell attempting something remarkable: he had galloped his horse directly onto the Federal earthworks in an effort to rally his brigade, and as he reached for the flag of the 65th Illinois, both he and his horse were shot and killed.

  Among the Confederate dead was a man whose story carried a particular weight. Tod Carter was the middle child of the family that owned the Carter House, the very building Cox had taken as his headquarters. He had enlisted in the Confederate army three years before the battle and had not returned home since. On the 30th of November 1864, he was wounded just a few hundred yards from his own front door. His family found him after the fighting ended. He died early the next day.

  Historian Andrew Bledsoe concluded that the loss of the officer corps irreparably harmed Hood's army's morale, disrupted its command structure, and deprived it of talented and experienced commanders. Bledsoe also noted that the timing of the assault, just before twilight, was itself a key factor: most officers were mounted during the attack to preserve command and control in the fading light, making them conspicuous targets on the open ground.

  Fifty-five regimental commanders also fell as casualties. The historian Jonathan Steplyk observed that the involvement of field officers directly in the fighting, rather than leading from slightly behind, showed the desperation with which they engaged; regimental officers were normally expected to inspire, not to brawl.

• 7. Aftermath and Reckoning

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  Schofield ordered his infantry to cross the river at 23:00, despite objections from Cox that Hood was now weakened and should be counter-attacked. Schofield had received Thomas's evacuation orders before Hood even attacked, and he followed them. By noon on the 1st of December, the Union army was entering the breastworks at Nashville.

  Hood held the Franklin battlefield but had not destroyed his enemy. Union losses were reported as 189 killed, 1,033 wounded, and 1,104 missing, though Schofield may have under-reported casualties given the confusion of the night evacuation. The Confederate commanding general's own claim of 6,252 Confederate casualties, including 1,750 killed and 3,800 wounded, was not corroborated by Confederate records.

  Some Confederate soldiers insisted the battle was a victory. James Lanning of the 25th Alabama Infantry wrote in his diary, "victory is ours but very dearly bought." Joseph Boyce of the 1st Missouri Infantry acknowledged that many in the army felt they held the field and therefore won, but added his own judgment: "two such victories will wipe out any army."

  Hood advanced his 26,500-man force toward Nashville anyway, where Thomas had assembled more than 60,000 Union troops. On the 15th and the 16th of December, Thomas attacked and decisively defeated Hood at the Battle of Nashville. The Army of Tennessee retreated to Mississippi with just under 20,000 men, barely half of what it had fielded at the opening of the campaign. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Battle Cry of Freedom, James M. McPherson wrote that the Army of Tennessee "had shattered itself beyond the possibility of ever" assaulting breastworks again. Hood's career was finished.

  Schofield's own verdict on Hood's persistence captured something of the battle's larger meaning: "I doubt if any soldiers in the world ever needed more cumulative evidence to convince them that they were beaten."

• 8. What Remains

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  The Carter House still stands in Franklin and is open to visitors. The house and outbuildings still carry hundreds of bullet holes from the battle. The site covers about 15 acres.

  The Carnton Plantation, home of the McGavock family during the battle, also survives. During and after the fighting, the house became the largest field hospital in the area; as many as 30 wounded soldiers lay in each small room. Adjacent to Carnton is the McGavock Confederate Cemetery, where 1,481 Southern soldiers killed at Franklin are buried. The location where General Cleburne fell was covered for decades by a Pizza Hut restaurant; the site is now Cleburne Park, part of a serious preservation effort that began in 2005.

  In 2006, half an acre of land bordering the southwestern end of the Carter House property was acquired with help from the American Battlefield Trust and local organizations. That land was part of the Carter Family Garden, which saw some of the fiercest fighting and the brief Confederate breakthrough. Excavation of the original Federal entrenchments there turned up human bones.

  On the 24th of November 2010, the State of Tennessee awarded a $960,000 enhancement grant from the Tennessee Department of Transportation to help purchase additional parcels. The American Battlefield Trust and its partners have acquired and preserved more than 180 acres of the battlefield across more than a dozen separate transactions since 1996.

  The character Rhett Butler, in Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, mentions that he fought at Franklin. The novel's film adaptation went further: a character remarks that Butler was decorated by the Confederate Congress for his services there. The Battle of Franklin had passed so thoroughly into Southern memory that it could serve as a credential for a fictional rogue.