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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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