Battle of the American Civil War
The Battle of Franklin was fought on November 30, 1864, in Franklin, Tennessee, as part of the Franklin–Nashville Campaign of the American Civil War. It was one of the worst disasters of the war for the Confederate States Army. Confederate Lieutenant General John Bell Hood's Army of Tennessee conducted numerous frontal assaults against fortified positions occupied by the Union forces under Major General John Schofield and was unable to prevent Schofield from executing a planned, orderly withdrawal to Nashville.
The Confederate assault of six infantry divisions containing eighteen brigades with 100 regiments numbering almost 20,000 men, sometimes called the "Pickett's Charge of the West", resulted in devastating losses to the men and the leadership of the Army of Tennessee—fourteen Confederate generals (six killed, seven wounded, and one captured) and 55 regimental commanders were casualties. After its defeat against George H. Thomas in the subsequent Battle of Nashville, the Army of Tennessee retreated with barely half the men with which it had begun the short offensive, and was effectively destroyed as a fighting force for the remainder of the war.
The 1864 Battle of Franklin was the second military action in the vicinity; a battle fought there on April 10, 1863, was a minor action associated with a reconnaissance in force by Confederate cavalry under Major General Earl Van Dorn.
Background.
Military situation.
Following his defeat in the Atlanta Campaign, Hood had hoped to lure Major General William T. Sherman into battle by disrupting his railroad supply line from Chattanooga to Atlanta. After a brief period in which he pursued Hood, Sherman decided instead to cut his main army off from these lines and "live off the land" in his famed March to the Sea from Atlanta to Savannah. By doing so, he would avoid having to defend hundreds of miles of supply lines against constant raids, through which he predicted he would lose "a thousand men monthly and gain no result" against Hood's army.
Sherman's march left the aggressive Hood unoccupied, and his Army of Tennessee had several options in attacking Sherman or falling upon his rear lines. The task of defending Tennessee and the rearguard against Hood fell to Major General George H. Thomas, commander of the Army of the Cumberland. The principal forces available in Middle Tennessee were IV Corps of the Army of the Cumberland, commanded by Major General David S. Stanley, and XXIII Corps of the Army of the Ohio, commanded by Major General John Schofield, with a total strength of about 30,000. Another 30,000 troops under Thomas's command were in or moving toward Nashville.
Rather than trying to chase Sherman in Georgia, Hood decided that he would attempt a major offensive northward, even though his invading force of 39,000 would be outnumbered by the 60,000 Union troops in Tennessee. He would move north into Tennessee and try to defeat portions of Thomas's army in detail before they could concentrate, seize the important manufacturing and supply center of Nashville, and continue north into Kentucky, possibly as far as the Ohio River.
Hood even expected to pick up 20,000 recruits from Tennessee and Kentucky in his path of victory and then join up with Robert E. Lee's army in Virginia, a plan that historian James M. McPherson describes as "scripted in never-never land." Hood had recovered from but was affected by a couple of serious physical battle wounds to a leg and arm, which caused him pain and limited his mobility. Hood spent the first three weeks of November quietly supplying the Army of Tennessee in northern Alabama in preparation for his offensive.
Road to Franklin, November 21–29.
The Army of Tennessee marched north from Florence, Alabama, on November 21, and indeed managed to surprise the Union forces, the two halves of which were apart at Pulaski, Tennessee and at Nashville. With a series of fast marches that covered in three days, Hood tried to maneuver between the two armies to destroy each in detail. But Union general Schofield, commanding Stanley's IV Corps as well as his own XXIII Corps, reacted correctly with a rapid retreat from Pulaski to Columbia, which held an important bridge over the Duck River on the turnpike north. Despite suffering losses from MGEN Nathan Bedford Forrest's cavalry along the way, the Federals were able to reach Columbia and erect fortifications just hours before the Confederates arrived on November 24. From November 24 to 29, Schofield managed to block Hood at this crossing, and the "Battle of Columbia" was a series of mostly bloodless skirmishes and artillery bombardments while both sides re-gathered their armies.
On November 28, Thomas directed Schofield to begin preparations for a withdrawal north to Franklin. He was incorrectly expecting that Major General A. J. Smith's XVI Corps arrival from Missouri was imminent and he wanted the combined force to defend against Hood on the line of the Harpeth River at Franklin instead of the Duck River at Columbia. Meanwhile, early on the morning of November 29, Hood sent Benjamin F. Cheatham's and Alexander P. Stewart's corps north on a flanking march. They crossed the Duck River at Davis's Ford east of Columbia, while two divisions of Stephen D. Lee's corps and most of the army's artillery remained on the southern bank to deceive Schofield into thinking a general assault was planned against Columbia.
Now that Hood had outflanked him by noon on November 29, Schofield's army was in critical danger. His command was split at that time between his supply wagons and artillery and part of the IV Corps, which he had sent to Spring Hill nearly ten miles north of Columbia, and the rest of the IV and XXIII corps marching from Columbia to join them. In the Battle of Spring Hill that afternoon and night, Hood had a golden opportunity to intercept and destroy the Union troops and their supply wagons, as his forces had already reached the turnpike separating the Union forces by nightfall. However, because of a series of command failures along with Hood's premature confidence that he had trapped Schofield, the Confederates failed to stop or even inflict much damage to the Union forces during the night.
Schofield was criticized by the Lost Cause myth for moving slowly in reaction to Hood and being only lucky to escape, but his subordinates defended his reaction as a careful balance between the safety of his army and his mission to delay Hood from striking Nashville before Thomas had amassed all his forces. Through decisive leadership and good luck, both the Union infantry and supply train managed to pass Spring Hill unscathed by dawn on November 29, and soon occupied the town of Franklin to the north. That morning, Hood was surprised and furious to discover Schofield's unexpected escape. Hood ordered his army to resume its pursuit north to Franklin.
Union defensive plans.
Schofield's advance guard arrived in Franklin at about 4:30 a.m. on November 30, after a forced march north from Spring Hill. Brigadier General (BGEN) Jacob Cox, commander of the 3rd Division, temporarily assumed command of the XXIII Corps and immediately began preparing strong defensive positions around the deteriorated entrenchments originally constructed for a previous engagement in 1863.
Schofield decided to defend at Franklin with his back to the river because he had no pontoon bridges available that would enable his men to cross the river. The bridges had been left behind in his retreat from Columbia because they lacked wagons to transport them, and pontoons requested from Thomas in Nashville had not arrived. Schofield needed time to repair the permanent bridges spanning the river—a burned wagon bridge and an intact railroad bridge. He ordered his engineers to rebuild the wagon bridge and to lay planking over the undamaged railroad bridge to enable it to carry wagons and troops. His supply train parked in the side streets to keep the main pike open, while wagons continued to cross the river, first via a ford next to the burned-out pike bridge, and later in the afternoon by the two makeshift bridges. By the beginning of the assault, nearly all the supply wagons were across the Harpeth and on the road to Nashville.
By noon, the Union works were ready. The line, based on the prior year's fortifications, formed an approximate semicircle around the town from northwest to southeast. The other half of the circle was the Harpeth River. Counterclockwise from the northwest were the divisions of Kimball (IV Corps), Ruger (XXIII Corps), and Reilly (XXIII Corps). There was a gap in the line where the Columbia Pike (present day U.S. Route 31) entered the outskirts of the town, left open to allow passage of the wagons. About behind this gap, a 150-yard "retrenchment" line was constructed of dirt and rails, which was intended to be a barrier to traffic, not a full-fledged defensive earthwork. (The gap was also defended by the guns of Battery A, 1st Kentucky Artillery. The men of the 44th Missouri also extended the retrenchment line to the west along their front with hastily dug trenches.) The actual earthworks in the southern portion of the line were formidable. Attacking infantry would be confronted by a ditch about four feet wide and two to three feet deep, then a wall of earth and wooden fence rails four feet above normal ground level, and finally a trench three to four feet deep in which the defenders stood, aiming their weapons through narrow "head gaps" formed by logs. In the southeast portion of the line, Osage-orange shrubs formed an almost impenetrable abatis. Just behind the center of the line stood the Carter House, appropriated as Cox's headquarters. Just east of the pike was the Carter cotton gin building, around which a minor salient occurred in the Union earthworks. Schofield established his headquarters in the Alpheus Truett House, a half mile north of the Harpeth on the Nashville Pike, although he would spend most of his time during the battle in Fort Granger, built in 1863 as an artillery position northeast of the town.
Two Union brigades were positioned about a half mile forward of the main line. George D. Wagner's division had been the last to arrive from Spring Hill, and after briefly stopping at Winstead Hill before Hood arrived, he ordered his brigades under COLs Emerson Opdycke, John Q. Lane, and Joseph Conrad (who had replaced Luther Bradley, wounded at Spring Hill) to stop halfway to the Union line and dig in as best they could on the flat ground. Stanley had earlier ordered Wagner to hold Winstead Hill with two brigades and relieve Opdycke (who had been the tail end of the rear guard) until dark unless he was pressed, and it is possible that Wagner somehow translated these orders into the notion that he was supposed to hold a line south of the main position with all his division. Opdycke considered Wagner's order to be ridiculous and had already been directed by Stanley to retire within the works; he marched his brigade through the Union line and into a reserve position behind the gap through which the Columbia Pike passed. At 12:00, when the other U.S. forces had finished their fortifications, these two brigades had not even started digging in. Conrad's and Lane's brigades had few entrenching tools and used mainly bayonets, cups, and their hands.
Wood's division of IV Corps and all of Wilson's cavalry were posted north of the Harpeth to watch for any flanking attempt. Schofield planned to withdraw his infantry across the river by 18:00. if Hood had not arrived by then. As Hood approached, Schofield initially assumed the Confederates were demonstrating as they had at Columbia, planning to cross the Harpeth and turn the Union position. He did not suspect that Hood would be rash enough to attack the strong defensive line.
Hood's arrival and plan.
Hood's army began to arrive on Winstead Hill, two miles (3 km) south of Franklin, around 13:00 Hood ordered a frontal assault in the dwindling afternoon light—sunset would be at 16:34 that day—against the Union force, a decision that caused dismay among his top generals. Forrest argued unsuccessfully that if he were given a division of infantry to accompany his cavalry, he could flank Schofield out of his position "within an hour." Frank Cheatham told Hood, "I do not like the looks of this fight; the enemy has an excellent position and is well fortified." But Hood countered