November 30th will see the 160th anniversary of the Battle of Franklin, fought in Middle Tennessee towards the end of the last full year of the American Civil War. As Franklin was a central part of my inspiration, I couldn’t let it pass unmentioned. Sam Watkins, a private in the 1st Tennessee, and fighting only a little way north of his home, wrote, ‘I shrink from butchery. Would to God I could tear the page from these memoirs and from my own memory.’
I attended the 2014 commemorations for the 150th; lectures, re-enactments, tours and concerts. Franklin is one of many American small towns that live with a civil war battle as part of their personality; Gettysburg, Fredericksburg, Sharpsburg, Perryville. Sadly, it’s not a short list. Some towns live with the history more easily, some less so. Franklin I would put among the former, at least in recent times. The Battle of Franklin Trust has steadily reclaimed small sections of the battlefield, as well as suppressing battle myths in favor of researched history. The homes of Carnton, the Carter House and Rippavilla are lovingly preserved. Franklin wants you to know its story. My first visit spawned the ambition to write the Shire’s Union trilogy (see Tigers in Franklin). The 125th Ohio comes full circle to Franklin, having billeted there in the winter and spring of 1863. There are so many lesser tales that live alongside the dominant story of the battle.
Why the battle took place here is a tale in itself. The Union’s General Sherman had taken Atlanta in the summer, some two-hundred and fifty miles to the south-west as the crow flies, deep inside the Confederacy. Despite the newly promoted General Hood’s attacks on his extended supply lines, Sherman determined to make the long march to the sea across Georgia and lay waste to the farms and industries that supported the rebellion. Rather than attempt to defend Georgia, General Hood set off in the opposite direction to try and recapture Tennessee and maybe even invade Kentucky. Strategically, it might have been the South’s last hope, but it was akin to abandoning your sheep to the wolves and taking your dogs off to hunt elsewhere. Hood might reasonably have expected Sherman to be forced to chase him, but by this stage in the war, the Union had a lot more men and many more competent high-ranking generals than the South. Rather than turn Sherman around, the Union command instead relied on General George Thomas to gather enough men to face Hood.
Hood didn’t take the crow’s route, instead shuffling along south of the Tennessee River until he eventually crossed his army at Florence, Alabama. General Schofield’s smaller Union Army of the Ohio fought to delay Hood rather than confront him, buying time for Thomas to gather his forces in the fortress city of Nashville. Hood tried his level best to head off Schofield and destroy him in battle, almost succeeding at Spring Hill. Schofield miraculously escaped on the night of November 29th, quietly marching by the sleeping camps of Confederates. Reaching Franklin early on the 30th, he quickly put up defenses while repairing bridges for his army to cross the swollen Harpeth River.
It was an angry General Hood that ordered the charge across the plains south of Franklin late in the afternoon. Some historians have suggested he was punishing his army for letting the Yankees escape at Spring Hill. Maybe, but it’s a strange general who would do that. More likely, he reasoned that an attack at Franklin was his last chance before the army facing him made it to Nashville to combine with Thomas. The last chance for him, and maybe the last chance for the Confederacy.
The Union army had barely a day to prepare, but prepare they did, and while there were some untested regiments in their ranks, for the most part they were seasoned veterans. Hood’s army was around 30,000 men, Schofield’s a few thousand less. The losses were not so evenly matched. Of the approximately 10,000 casualties, three-quarters were in Hood’s Army. Six Confederate generals were killed or mortally wounded, along with a huge proportion of unit commanders. All in just a few bloody hours. In terms of the numbers in the attack, the width of the front and the soldiers killed, the charge at Franklin was significantly bigger than the more famous Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg the year before.
For my characters, fictional and real, the day didn’t present itself as a morbid statistical competition with battles that had gone before. If you were in Hood’s Army of the Tennessee, many close to their homes, it presented itself as a forlorn charge to a likely death. If you were in Schofield’s Army, it was a desperate fight either side of sunset with your back to a flooded river, firing shells and bullets, thrusting bayonets and swinging rifle butts, for hour upon hour. If you were a citizen of Franklin, it was as if the very heart of the war, with all its blast and terror, had descended on your small town. It left almost every home a hospital. The injured and dead were beyond counting.
Arguably, the war was largely won in the West. From ‘62 to ‘64, Union armies steadily took Tennessee and Georgia while eventually capturing the full length of the Mississippi and cutting the Confederacy in two. And yet this climax at Franklin didn’t achieve the notoriety of the more fabled battles in the East or even of the great battles of Shiloh, Chickamauga and Atlanta in the West. Schofield’s Army left the town in the night over the reconstructed bridges, so the field was left to Hood. He was slow and inaccurate in reporting casualties back to his government. To his troops he represented it as a victory, but they knew it was anything but, and that their army had been gutted. Possibly, even the Union army was slow to realize the scale of the damage they’d inflicted, as were the Union press, though they roundly celebrated the victory at the battle of Nashville two weeks later. Hood had stumbled on that far only to face utter defeat and a long retreat through the December snow.
The term ‘the death knell of the Confederacy’ has been applied to more than one battle. When it sounded at Franklin, as surely it did, it largely went unheard except by those who were there. Today, if you trouble to go to Franklin, you can stand on the slopes of Winstead Hill as Hood did when observing the attack, or on the earthworks of Fort Granger, from where the Union rained shells on the wide rebel front. You can see where the Union Army escaped on the 29th near Rippavilla, visit the ordered Confederate cemetery at Carnton, and best of all, hear the story of the Carter family enduring the battle at the Carter House.
Shire’s Union
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