The Battle of Franklin (30 November 1864) was a major battle in the western theater of the American Civil War (1861 to 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.

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.

The town of Franklin, nestled along the Harpeth River, was a small, upscale village of around 900 residents. The townsfolk were still asleep when Schofield's army arrived at around 4:30 a.m. on 30 November. Having lost his pontoon bridges, the Union general knew he could not get his whole army across the Harpeth River before the Confederates caught up to him. Instead, he decided to dig in the best he could, ordering his troops to form a defensive line with their backs to the river. The blue-coated Union soldiers worked all through the morning, and by noon, their entrenchments were complete, forming a semicircle around the town, stretching from northwest to southeast. The earthworks consisted of a ditch, about four feet (1.2 m) wide and three feet (90 cm) deep, in front of a wall made of dirt and wooden fence rails, piled about four feet (1.2 m) above ground level. Behind this earthen wall was a trench in which the Union infantrymen now stood, awaiting the coming of their foe. The Union works, though strong, did have one glaring weakness. There was a gap at the spot where the Columbia Pike entered Franklin, intentionally left open to allow the passage of wagons into the town. Any opponent intent on breaking Schofield's line would do well to focus on this point.

General Hood, meanwhile, had awoken to find that Schofield's army had slipped from his fingers at Spring Hill. He was, according to one staff officer, as "wrathy as a rattlesnake", blaming his corps commanders for disregarding his orders and allowing the enemy to escape (quoted in Foote, 662). His army marched double-time to catch up; to keep their spirits high, one military band moved to the side of the road and struck up the familiar rebel tunes "Bonnie Blue Flag" and "Dixie". Finally, at 1 p.m., the Army of Tennessee arrived at the outskirts of Franklin to find, once again, that the Federals were already strongly entrenched. Hood took a few minutes to survey the enemy position before calling an impromptu war council with his officers. "We will make the fight," he announced, laying out his plans for a frontal assault against the enemy lines. This pronouncement was followed by an uncomfortable silence – such an attack would require the Confederate soldiers to cross over two miles (3.2 km) of open field, into the musket and cannon fire of a well-entrenched enemy.

When Major General Benjamin F. Cheatham expressed his concerns, Hood replied that he would rather attack Schofield here, where he had had only a few hours to hastily throw up fortifications, than at Nashville, which the Yankees had been fortifying for almost three years. When Forrest offered to outflank the enemy as he had done at Columbia, Hood refused, claiming it could not be done. Only a spirited frontal assault could dislodge the Union troops from their entrenchments. Hood dismissed his war council and sent his generals to prepare for the charge, leaving them with the order: "Drive the enemy from his position and into the river at all hazards" (ibid).

When the order to charge was passed down through the ranks, most soldiers recognized it for what it was: suicidal. As General Patrick Cleburne relayed the orders to his officers, one of them said, "Well, general, there will not be many of us that will get back to Arkansas," to which the Irish-born Cleburne gloomily replied, "if we are to die, let us die like men" (quoted in Sword, 180). Some generals tried to rouse their men with fiery speeches, while others wore sad expressions and said little. In one brigade, many troops went to their chaplain with watches, letters, and photographs to give to their families in case they were killed. The chaplain refused; he would be advancing alongside them and sharing in their dangers.

In the many decades that have since transpired, historians have puzzled over why, exactly, Hood ordered such a risky charge. Traditional histories assert that he was blinded by rage over the lost opportunity at Spring Hill and wanted to punish his generals and discipline his soldiers. According to more recent scholarship, however, he was likely thinking clearly and genuinely believed the attack would be successful. After all, he had built his reputation on similar frontal assaults and had served under General Lee, who owed his many victories to aggressive and risky maneuvers. Such a charge was, in Hood's opinion, his last, best chance at saving the Southern Confederacy from collapse.

And so the plan was made – the three divisions of Major General Cheatham's corps (Bate, Brown, Cleburne) would attack on the right, while the three divisions of Lieutenant General Alexander P. Stewart's corps (French, Walthall, Loring) would move in on the left. The third Confederate corps, under Stephen D. Lee, had not yet arrived, but Hood was impatient to attack and would make do with what he had. At 2:45 p.m., the columns of gray-coated troops moved into the open to get into battle formation. They were young men, most of them under the age of 22, and as they stood along the Columbia Pike, one Union soldier could not help but admire this "living wall of men and glistening steel" (quoted in Sword, 180). A little over an hour later, at 4 p.m., the order to charge was given. Officers yelled, bugles blared, and nearly 20,000 rebel soldiers marched forward, with all the discipline and precision of troops on a military parade. Another Union soldier would later recall, "for a moment, we were spellbound with admiration, although we knew that in a few brief moments…all that orderly grandeur would be changed to bleeding, writhing confusion" (quoted in Foote, 667).

As the gray line surged forward, it closed in on two Union brigades under Brigadier General George D. Wagner that held an advance position about half a mile (800 m) in front of the main Union earthworks – Wagner had ignored, or perhaps misinterpreted, an earlier order to pull back, leaving his men exposed. At 4 p.m., most of these men were lounging about, hardly expecting the enemy to attack so late in the day, when they were jolted to their feet by the sound of drums and bugles and thousands of marching feet, drawing ever nearer. The rebel troops soon came into view, preceded by terrified jumping rabbits and shrieking conveys of quail looking for shelter. At once, the Confederates broke into a run, shouting their high-pitched rebel yell. Wagner's troops managed to fire off one good volley before they were overrun – two Confederate divisions, under Cleburne and Major General John C. Brown, swarmed the hapless brigades, striking against their front and flanks.

The panicked bluecoats threw down their weapons and ran, rebel bullets whizzing around their heads. "It seemed bullets never before hissed with such diabolical venom," one Union captain recalled. The cries of the wounded Yankees, terrified at being left to the mercy of the savage rebels, "had a pathetic note of despair that I never heard before" (quoted in Foote, 668). As the Confederate soldiers tasted this success, their discipline unraveled, and they rushed toward the main Union line. "The triumphant Confederates," wrote a colonel, "now more like a wild, howling mob than an organized army, swept on to the very works, with hardly a check from any quarter" (quoted in Foote, 669).

Having driven back Wagner's brigades, the rebels' blood was up. The men of Cleburne's and Brown's divisions sprinted the last half mile (800 m) to the Union breastworks, far outpacing the other Confederate units. With this momentum, they smashed through the center of the Union line, pouring into the critical gap at the Columbia Pike. In the chaos that followed, the rebels pushed back the defenders and penetrated 50 yards (45 m) deep into the Union line. They captured four cannons filled with canister that they turned around and used on the Yankees. It was at this moment that Union Colonel Emerson Opdycke rushed forward with his Ohio brigade, forcing the rebels back and plugging the gap. For the next several hours, some of the most desperate and bloody hand-to-hand fighting of the entire war occurred at the Columbia Pike breach. Men shot each other at point-blank range and gored one another with a range of weapons, including bayonets, spades, axes, and picks.

The breach at the Columbia Pike was the high watermark of Hood's assault; elsewhere, the rebels fared less well. On the Confederate left flank, two divisions from Stewart's corps came under murderous fire from the Yankee cannons. Still, they managed to inch their way forward until they came to an entrenched Union brigade armed with deadly repeating rifles. Here, their attack stalled. Hoping to inspire his men forward, Brigadier General John Adams leapt on top of the Union earthworks on his horse, only to be ripped apart by rounds of grapeshot. He was one of many Confederate officers to fall in the fighting; in one brigade, so many officers were killed or wounded that the highest-ranking officer left standing was a captain.

Back at the center, General Cleburne had been killed, felled by a shot to the heart, while Brown was seriously wounded and removed from the field. Two other generals, Otho Strahl and States Rights Gist, were killed in the close-quarters fighting along with hundreds of their men, whose bloodied corpses piled on top of one another. "I never saw the dead lay so thick," Opdycke would remember. "I saw them upon each other, dead and ghastly in the powder-dimmed starlight" (ibid). One Confederate soldier, Sam Watkins, would offer another vivid, haunting description of the battle:

'Forward, men,' is repeated all along the line. A sheet of fire was poured into our very faces, and for a moment we halted as if in despair, as the terrible avalanche of shot and shell laid low those brave and gallant heroes, whose bleeding wounds attested that the struggle would be desperate. Forward, men! The air loaded with death-dealing missiles. Never on this earth did men fight against such terrible odds. It seemed that the very elements of heaven and earth were in one mighty uproar. Forward, men! And the blood spurts in a perfect jet from the dead and wounded. The earth is red with blood. It runs in streams, making little rivulets as it flows. Occasionally, there was a little lull in the storm of battle, as the men were loading their guns, and for a few moments it seemed as if night tried to cover the scene with her mantle. The death-angel shrieks and laughs and old father Time is busy with his sickle, as he gathers in the last harvest of death, crying 'More, more, more!' while his rapacious maw is glutted with the slain.

(202 to 203)

Hood, watching the battle from his hillside headquarters two miles (3.2 km) away, knew that the situation was growing desperate. At 7 p.m. – an hour after sunset – he committed his reserve division under Major General Edward 'Alleghany' Johnson. Johnson's men attacked with determination, groping their way through the dark, over the broken corpses that carpeted the ground. Soon enough, they came under heavy fire, too, and were repulsed with significant losses. With no more troops to throw into the meat grinder, Hood called off the attack.

The morning of 1 December found the Union earthworks abandoned – Schofield had once again stolen away in the darkness, marching along the road to Nashville. Hood sent Forrest ahead to bite at Schofield's heels but let the rest of his army rest and concern itself with burying the dead. He had lost around 6,200 men killed or wounded, a staggering 30% of all the men he had sent into the battle. These losses included 55 regimental officers and twelve generals; of these generals, six were dead, five wounded, and one captured. Hood's high casualty rate effectively crippled his army command structure, making Franklin one of the worst Confederate defeats of the entire war. Schofield, in comparison, had lost 2,300 men, more than half of whom were from Wagner's division; indeed, Wagner would pay for his blunder by losing his command.

The Battle of Franklin was one of the bloodiest battles of the war, made all the more terrible by how close it was to the end of the conflict. "The death angel was there to gather its last harvest," lamented Sam Watkins, thinking back to the twisted, blackened corpses of the men that had once been his friends and comrades. Rather than cut his losses, Hood decided to continue his offensive into Tennessee, leading his broken army onward into the sleet and the snow. He would be defeated once again at the Battle of Nashville (15 to 16 December), leading to the final disintegration of his army and the effective end of the war in the West.