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Battle of Franklin: The Death Angel's Last Harvest

The Battle of Franklin (30 November 1864) was a major battle in the western theater of the American Civil War (1861-1865). In his push to liberate Nashville from Northern occupation, Confederate Lieutenant General John Bell Hood invaded Tennessee and cornered a Union army under Major General John M. Schofield at the town of Franklin. Despite finding the enemy strongly entrenched, Hood launched a massive frontal assault, sending 20,000 men across two miles (3.2 km) of open field with minimal artillery support. The result was catastrophic, as 6,200 of his men were killed or wounded, including twelve generals, turning Franklin into one of the worst Southern defeats of the war.

The March Through Tennessee

On 21 November 1864, the Confederate Army of Tennessee wended its way north into the state that had given it its name. The men were tired and gaunt, an army of scarecrows whose threadbare uniforms, worn-out and faded, hung loosely on their battered bodies and did little to protect against the early winter chill. Many went barefoot, marching over dirt roads that had been churned to mud by the recent torrential rainstorms. Others had empty haversacks, sucking on sugarcane or hickory nuts to ward off the gnawing sense of hunger. But despite these hardships, the 39,000 men of the Army of Tennessee were determined. They were going home – home to a land ravaged by three years of brutal warfare, home to a state that had been occupied by the Yankee invader for nearly as long. Home to see their mothers, their friends, their sweethearts. Few could have realized that some of the worst horrors that the war had to offer still awaited them in the soft, green fields of their own backyards.

Lieutenant General John Bell Hood rode at the head of this ragtag army, strapped into his saddle, his wooden prosthetic leg fixed in its stirrup. Although the war had taken its toll on his body – he had lost his right leg at Chickamauga, the use of his left arm at Gettysburg – and although he had recently failed to prevent the fall of Atlanta, Hood was not the sort of man to give up. With the fate of the Southern Confederacy balancing on a knife's edge, and with his own demoralized army in danger of disintegrating by means of desertion, Hood knew that he had to win a decisive victory fast. His plan was to capture Nashville – a major supply and manufacturing center – before pushing on into Kentucky, perhaps as far as the banks of the Ohio River. He expected that this success would rally 20,000 reinforcements to his banner, which he would use to march into Virginia to the aid of General Robert E. Lee, whose own beleaguered army was under siege at Petersburg. It was a desperate plan bordering on fanciful. Yet it was all that Hood had.

Standing between the tattered Confederate army and Nashville were 60,000 Union soldiers under the overall command of Major General George H. Thomas. Luckily for Hood, these Yankee soldiers were not all in one place; Thomas himself was in Nashville with 30,000 men while his subordinate, Major General John M. Schofield, was at Pulaski with the other 30,000, about 75 miles (120 km) away. If Hood could get in between these two Union armies and destroy each in isolation before it had the chance to join forces with the other, then the road to Nashville – and beyond – would lie wide open. With this goal in mind, Hood set out for Columbia, a riverside town approximately halfway between Thomas and Schofield. For days, the Confederates embarked on a grueling 70-mile forced march, moving through freezing sleet and driving rain. When they got to Columbia, however, they were dismayed to find a blue line of Federal troops already entrenched on the northern side of the Duck River. Schofield had guessed Hood's intentions and had gotten to Columbia first, having made better time by crossing over the shorter, easier roads from Pulaski.

For the next several days, scattered skirmishing could be heard along the Duck River as the rebels vainly searched for a place to cross. Finally, on 28 November, Confederate cavalry troopers under the infamous Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest forded the river to the east of the town, giving the Southerners a toehold on Schofield's side of the river. Considering himself outflanked, Schofield decided to pull his men back to the town of Franklin, where he would dig in as he awaited support from Thomas. The next morning, having found that the Federals had stolen away in the night, Hood ordered a pursuit, sending Forrest on ahead to pin the Yankees down. On 29 November, around 11 a.m., Forrest's cavalrymen engaged a Union infantry division at Spring Hill, skirmishing with them for hours to buy time for the rest of Hood's army to show up. Hood did not arrive until 3:45 p.m., at which point everything fell apart; due to a series of miscommunications, the rebels were unable to inflict serious damage. After fending off a late afternoon attack by a Confederate division under Major General Patrick Cleburne, the Union army once again slipped away into the night, headed toward its original destination of Franklin.

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Battle of Nashville: The Bitter End of the Army of Tennessee

The Battle of Nashville (15-16 December 1864) was the last major battle in the western theater of the American Civil War (1861-1865). After suffering a catastrophic defeat at the Battle of Franklin (30 November), Lieutenant General John Bell Hood led the once-proud Confederate Army of Tennessee onward in a desperate attempt to capture Nashville, a major supply and manufacturing center. He clashed with a 55,000-man Union army under Major General George H. Thomas a few miles south of the city, and, after a brutal two-day battle, the rebel lines crumbled. At Nashville, the Army of Tennessee was neutralized as an effective fighting force, bringing an end to the war in the West.

The Killing Fields of Franklin

A pale sun clawed its way into a frosty sky on the morning of 1 December 1864, shining its light over a carpet of bloodied corpses in the fields outside Franklin, Tennessee. Mere hours before, these fields had been alive with the blaring of bugles and the banging of drums, the clatter of musket fire and the roar of artillery, the thunderous footfalls of thousands of soldiers and the bitter screams of the dying. Now, as the morning mists dissipated, an eerie silence hung over the town of Franklin, broken only by the distant rush of the Harpeth River and the ambient calls of birds. Presently, details of weary Confederate soldiers went out with spades and shovels to get to work burying the dead, pouring dirt over the heads of men who had been their friends and comrades.The Battle of Franklin

The Battle of Franklin had been the culmination of a ten-day Confederate invasion of Tennessee. Lieutenant General John Bell Hood had led 39,000 rebel soldiers across the Tennessee River, with wild dreams of liberating Nashville from Union occupation before pushing up through Kentucky to plant the Confederate flag on the banks of the Ohio River. All that stood in their way were two Union armies of 30,000 men each – one was under Major General George H. Thomas at Nashville, the other under Major General John M. Schofield, 75 miles away (120 km) at Pulaski. Hood hoped to destroy each of these Union armies piecemeal before they had a chance to join forces. He went after Schofield first – after failing to trap him, first at Columbia, then at Spring Hill, Hood finally cornered him at Franklin. Although he found Schofield's army strongly entrenched, Hood decided to attack anyway, ordering his men to embark on a frontal assault over two miles (3.2 km) of open ground with minimal artillery support. The result was catastrophic: the Confederates lost 6,200 men killed or wounded, including 55 regimental officers and 12 generals. It was one of the most devastating Southern defeats of the war.

Having held off Hood's assault at the cost of only 2,300 losses of his own, Schofield slipped away during the night. On 1 December, as the battered Confederates spent the day burying their dead, Schofield's tired troops marched into Nashville and linked up with General Thomas, bringing the total number of Union soldiers in the city to just about 55,000 men. Nashville had been occupied by the Union since February 1862, and, in the intervening two and a half years, the Yankees had worked to improve the city's defenses. By now, they had built a seven-mile-long (11 km) line of fortifications that formed a semicircle around the southern and western sides of the city, while the mighty Cumberland River served as a natural barrier on the northern and eastern sides. For Hood's weakened army to attack Nashville against these odds seemed borderline suicidal. Yet the yellow-bearded, one-legged Confederate general felt he had no other choice – if he were to retreat from Tennessee now, his demoralized army would surely melt away from desertion. So, Hood pressed on, arriving outside Nashville on 2 December. Rather than laying siege, he decided to goad the enemy into coming out of their fortifications and attacking him. He staked out a position to the south of Nashville and dug in, forming a four-mile-long (6.4 km) defensive line of his own. The rebel soldiers then hunkered down to await the attack that would decide the fate of the war in the West.

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Battle of Bentonville: The Fight for North Carolina at the end of the US Civil War

The Battle of Bentonville (19-21 March 1865) was among the last major battles of the American Civil War (1861-1865). Having cut swathes of destruction first through Georgia, then through South Carolina, Union Major General William Tecumseh Sherman next invaded North Carolina, with the goal of pushing up into Virginia to join forces with Ulysses S. Grant's army outside Richmond. The Confederates hastily stitched together an army to oppose him, which was placed under the command of General Joseph E. Johnston. This campaign culminated at Bentonville, where the rebel army was defeated and forced to retreat. A little over a month later, Johnston would surrender to Sherman at Bennett Place.

Background: 'To Fight Longer Is Madness'

On the night of 15 November 1864, the city of Atlanta, Georgia, went up in flames. By morning, a full third of the city lay in smoldering ruins as 62,000 Union soldiers marched out of Atlanta and into the heart of Georgia, to begin what would become known as Sherman's March to the Sea. Led by Major General William Tecumseh Sherman, the Union army advanced in two columns, pillaging the Georgian countryside while simultaneously destroying factories, ripping up railroads, and liberating thousands of slaves. Since the main Confederate army in the region, the Army of Tennessee, was off conducting a desperate invasion of its namesake state – which would culminate in the army's destruction at the Battle of Nashville – the Confederates could offer little resistance as Sherman's troops tore through Georgia, leaving a path of destruction in their wake. On 21 December, the coastal city of Savannah fell to the Union troops, and Sherman sent off a triumphant telegram to US President Abraham Lincoln: "I beg to present you, as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah, with 150 heavy guns and plenty of ammunition" (quoted in Foote, 712).

But although he had accomplished his objective, Sherman was not yet finished. Indeed, his gaze turned northward to the troublesome state of South Carolina. The first state to have seceded from the Union in December 1860, South Carolina was blamed by Sherman and his men for having started the war, a debt they were eager to pay with interest. "The truth is," Sherman reported to his superiors in Washington, "the whole army is burning with an insatiable desire to wreak vengeance upon South Carolina. I almost tremble at her fate" (quoted in McPherson, 826). So, on 1 February 1865, Sherman marched out of Savannah with 60,000 men up into the vulnerable underbelly of the Palmetto State. Like they had done in Georgia, his men conducted a campaign of scorched earth, but this time, they were much more thorough in their destruction. "In Georgia, few houses were burned," wrote one Union officer. "Here, few escaped". Indeed, this campaign of fire and fury climaxed on 17 February, when the state capital of Columbia was captured and subsequently burned. While Sherman did not intentionally burn Columbia, his officers did not do much to restrain their men from pillaging and burning. By the next morning, two-thirds of Columbia had been destroyed.

Sherman's rapid march through first Georgia and now South Carolina both terrorized and disheartened the Confederate population. "All is gloom, despondency, and inactivity," wrote one South Carolinian after the fall of the state capital. "Our army is demoralized, and the people panic stricken…to fight longer seems to be madness" (quoted in McPherson, 827). Continuing to fight against such overwhelming odds may well have been madness, but Confederate President Jefferson Davis was determined to fight, nonetheless. As the iron vices of Union Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant clamped down on the Confederate capital of Richmond, Davis tasked General Joseph E. Johnston with scraping together an army with which to defend the Carolinas. Throughout the course of the war, Davis and Johnston had rarely seen eye to eye – indeed, the president had fired Johnston from an important command as recently as July – but every other Confederate general with the needed level of experience and esteem was either preoccupied, incapacitated, or dead. So, on 22 February 1865, Johnston officially took command of all Confederate forces in the Carolinas. Most of these soldiers were the survivors of the disastrous incursion into Tennessee, while others were garrison troops pulled from Charleston. In all, Johnston had around 20,000 men to oppose Sherman's 60,000.

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The Confederate Army of Manhattan, a band of eight Southern operatives, infiltrated New York City on this day in 1864 with the intention of burning the place down. Their plan failed to catch fire, despite lighting blazes in more than 20 locations, which wouldn't make them the first country boys to get burned by the big city.