What happened at the Battle of Franklin?
On 30 November 1864 General John Bell Hood sent about 20,000 Confederates in a frontal charge across two miles of open ground against John Schofield's entrenched Union army at Franklin, Tennessee. The Union line held. Hood lost over 6,000 men and six generals, and Schofield withdrew to Nashville that night.1
Few places in America saw so much killing in so little time. On the afternoon of 30 November 1864 the Confederate Army of Tennessee marched out of the hills south of Franklin, Tennessee, and charged a Union army dug in on the edge of town. Within about five hours six Confederate generals were dead or dying, thousands of men lay in front of the earthworks, and the army that had invaded Tennessee to win back Nashville had been crippled as a fighting force. It happened one day after the night of Spring Hill, told on our Battle of Spring Hill page.2
This is the story from both sides: why Hood ordered the assault, why Schofield chose to fight with a river at his back, and what the battle cost the families who lived on the field. For the wider war in the West, see our guide to the Western Theater of the Civil War and the overview of the American Civil War.3
Why did Hood invade Tennessee in 1864?
Atlanta fell to William T. Sherman in 1864. John Bell Hood, who had commanded the Confederate army defending the city, then moved north to threaten Sherman's railroad back to Tennessee. The Tennessee Encyclopedia describes his plan as drawing Sherman out of Georgia, taking back Middle Tennessee, seizing the Union depot at Nashville and carrying the war into Kentucky and beyond.4
Sherman followed him for a while, then turned his main army the other way, toward the coast, on the March to the Sea. He left George H. Thomas to defend Tennessee. Thomas was gathering reinforcements at Nashville, and John M. Schofield, with the IV and XXIII Corps, was sent forward to slow Hood down until they arrived. Hood's best chance was to catch Schofield before the Union forces could unite.5
What happened after Spring Hill?
On 29 November Hood got most of his army around Schofield's flank to Spring Hill, beside the road behind him. Confused orders and a failed attack let the chance slip, and in the night the Union army marched north past the Confederate campfires. Schofield's advance reached Franklin at about sunrise on 30 November.6
Hood woke to find the road empty. In his memoirs he calls Spring Hill the best move of his career, thrown away, and the Tennessee Encyclopedia and the American Battlefield Trust both describe him blaming his officers that morning; the Trust says he accused the army of cowardice. He decided to make one more attempt to catch Schofield at Franklin, before it reached Nashville, and to drive it into the Harpeth River.7
Why did Schofield stand and fight at Franklin?
Franklin had been a Union garrison town since 1862, and earthworks from 1863 still ringed its southern edge. Schofield had no choice about stopping there. The Harpeth River bridges were down, there were no pontoons, and his wagon trains had to get across before the army could move on. Cox, who commanded the line, later wrote that the choice was between abandoning the trains and fighting Hood south of the river.8
Through the morning the Union troops rebuilt the old works into a curved line around the south of the town, both ends resting on the Harpeth. Brigadier General Jacob D. Cox woke the Carter family before dawn and made their parlor his headquarters; their brick house stood on a low rise beside the Columbia Turnpike, at the center of the line. In places the men cut Osage orange hedges and young locust trees to make an abatis, a barrier of sharpened branches, in front of the ditch.9
Two brigades of George D. Wagner's division were left about half a mile in front of the main line as a rear guard. Their position would matter more than any other decision of the day.10
Why did Hood order a frontal assault?
Hood's army reached Winstead Hill, about two miles south of the town, in the afternoon. From there his officers could see the Union works across open fields. According to the Tennessee Encyclopedia, Forrest and Cheatham both warned against a frontal attack; the American Battlefield Trust says Hood ordered it over his lieutenants' objections.11
Hood's own account gives his reasons. Franklin was the last place he could strike before Schofield reached the fortifications of Nashville. He also believed his army had grown unwilling to attack anything but troops in the open, and he wanted to break that habit. He compared his order to Robert E. Lee's charge at Gaines' Mill in 1862, across a mile of open ground, which had won. Only part of his army had arrived: Stephen D. Lee's corps came up too late, and two of its divisions never fought.12
In Hood's account, Major General Patrick Cleburne asked to form his men in deeper lines for the attack, then rode off saying he had more hope for the cause than at any time since the war began. Within the hour he was dead.13
The charge across two miles of open ground
At about 4 p.m. the Confederate line, two to three miles long, stepped off with flags flying. Stewart's corps was on the right of the turnpike and Cheatham's on the left. The Union guns opened at once. Hood's own artillery played almost no part: the Trust counts a single battery in support, Cox two, and Hood wrote that he held his guns back because of the women and children in the town.14
The attack swept over Wagner's two forward brigades in minutes. Their men ran back toward the main line with the Confederates on their heels, and the Union soldiers in the works held their fire for fear of hitting their own comrades. Cleburne's and John C. Brown's divisions hit the center around the Carter House with their momentum intact and broke through on both sides of the turnpike.15
Private Sam Watkins of the 1st Tennessee, who was there, later called Franklin the blackest page in the history of the war of the Lost Cause. He wrote that he could not describe it.16
The fight at the Carter House
For a moment the Union center was open. Then Colonel Emerson Opdycke's brigade, waiting in reserve about two hundred yards behind the Carter House, charged into the gap with Union troops rallying around it. The fighting in the Carter yard and gardens was hand to hand, with bayonets, pistols and even shovels, and it pushed the Confederates back to the outer ditch of the works. Hood wrote that a brigade, reported to him as Stanley's, restored the line and took about a thousand prisoners.17
How Opdycke came to be there is still argued. The Trust tells it as defiance: Wagner ordered him into the exposed forward line and Opdycke refused. Cox, writing as the commander of that front, says the brigade had been brought inside the works as a reserve under orders, as it should have been, and that the fault lay with the two brigades left outside. Wagner was removed from his division soon afterward.18
While the center fought, the Carter family, their neighbors and enslaved members of the household sheltered in the cellar. Bullets struck the house all through the battle, and its outbuildings still carry the marks. A son of the house, Captain Theodoric (Tod) Carter, was on the staff of the Confederate brigade attacking across his father's farm. He was shot a few hundred feet from home; after dark his family found him on the field and carried him into the house, where he died.19
Stewart, Forrest and the fight after dark
To the east, Stewart's divisions were squeezed between the river and the turnpike as they advanced. They ran into the Osage orange abatis under rifle and cross fire from artillery and could not get through. Across the river, Forrest's cavalry forced a crossing at Hughes's Ford to get behind the Union left, and James H. Wilson's Union troopers drove them back.20
As the light failed Hood sent in more men. Bate's division came in on the left, and around nightfall Edward Johnson's division of Lee's corps attacked near the Carter House, some of the late attacks guided by torches. Johnson's men reached the works and fought hand to hand on them, but could not break the line. Along the line the two sides fought across the parapet, firing over it at men they could not see. The heavy fighting lasted until about 9 or 10 p.m.21
Which Confederate generals were killed at Franklin?
Six Confederate generals were killed or mortally wounded: Patrick Cleburne, John Adams, States Rights Gist, Hiram Granbury, Otho Strahl and John C. Carter. Schofield's report counted six more wounded and one captured, George W. Gordon; the Tennessee Encyclopedia counts five wounded. The American Battlefield Trust notes that no other battle of the war killed so many Confederate generals.22
Cleburne was born in County Cork, Ireland, in 1828 and came to America in 1849, settling in Helena, Arkansas. He was shot in the chest leading his division against the works, close to the Union line. He had urged the Confederacy to enlist enslaved men and free those who served, a proposal his superiors suppressed. Hood believed the policy might have won the South its independence.23
The loss of field officers was as heavy. The Park Service's 2005 testimony to Congress counts 54 regimental commanders lost; the Tennessee Encyclopedia says 63 of about 100 were killed or wounded.24
How many soldiers died at the Battle of Franklin?
Union losses are known from the returns: 2,326, of whom 189 were killed, 1,033 wounded and 1,104 missing. Schofield's report noted that more than half of the loss fell on Wagner's division, much of it caught outside the works.25
Confederate losses are harder to fix. When Union troops retook Franklin in December they found the hospitals and the graves, and Schofield reported 1,750 Confederates buried on the field, 3,800 wounded in the town and 702 prisoners: 6,252 in all. The Park Service's testimony to Congress gives 6,261, the Tennessee Encyclopedia about 7,000, and Cox, adding the lightly wounded, 8,000 or more. Hood maintained that the loss figure in his own official report was correct and disputed the Union count of captured flags: he admitted losing thirteen, not thirty.26
The Park Service says the Army of Tennessee lost more than a fifth of its men at Franklin; the Trust puts it at 20 percent. Counting both sides, the Trust puts the losses at around 8,500 men.27
Who won the Battle of Franklin?
The Union. Schofield's line held, his wagons crossed the Harpeth, and around midnight his army left its trenches and crossed the river, reaching Nashville the next day. Hood held the field in the morning, but only because Schofield had chosen to go.28
Hood wrote that his army had nearly won, quoting a Union historian on how close his men came to holding the breach, and that nightfall, by keeping Lee's whole corps out of the fight, saved Schofield's army from destruction. The Park Service calls the assault controversial and the Trust ill-fated, and the Trust compares it to Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg: larger, longer and deadlier.29
Carnton and the dead of Franklin
Carnton, the McGavock family's plantation house, became the largest Confederate field hospital of the battle. Hundreds of wounded men filled the house and then the yard through the night.30
On the morning of 1 December the bodies of four generals, Cleburne, Granbury, Strahl and Adams, lay on Carnton's back porch. Most of the Confederate dead were first buried on the field. In 1866 John and Carrie McGavock gave two acres beside their family cemetery, and the soldiers were reburied there. The McGavock Confederate Cemetery is still beside the house.31
Cleburne was buried first in the churchyard of St. John's near Columbia and later moved home to Helena.32
What happened after Franklin?
Hood followed Schofield to Nashville anyway and camped south of the city. On 15 and 16 December Thomas came out of the fortifications with the reinforced Union army and routed him. The Trust says the Army of Tennessee never again fought as a cohesive force; the Tennessee Encyclopedia says that at Nashville it was no longer an effective army. The Union troops reoccupied Franklin in the pursuit.33
The Park Service's testimony to Congress says Nashville essentially ended the war in Tennessee. For other battles of the theater, see Chickamauga, Perryville and Shiloh, and our military history of the United States.34
Where was the Battle of Franklin fought?
On the southern edge of Franklin, in Williamson County, Tennessee, about 20 miles (some 30 km) south of Nashville. Much of the field disappeared under the growing town, and the Civil War Sites Advisory Commission called it fragmented in 1993. Since then preservation groups and the City of Franklin have bought back land around the Carter House, some of it with National Park Service grants.35
The Carter House, owned by the State of Tennessee and a National Historic Landmark, still shows the bullet holes of 1864, and Carnton and the McGavock Confederate Cemetery can also be visited.36
