Whether Cheatham, a bachelor and well-known ladies’ man, spent the evening with Mrs. Peters, drunk or sober, has never been conclusively proven, but it provided a good deal of speculation and gossip then and since.
Benjamin Franklin Cheatham had gained a reputation as a harddrinking, profane general whose troops were among the hardest hitting of any in the Army of Tennessee. He was a muscular, blue-eyed man with wavy hair and a big mustache who was described by a soldier as “one of the wickedest men I have ever heard speak.” When he assumed command of Hardee’s corps after the fall of Atlanta, a New York newspaper writer described Cheatham as “only a fighter, not a general, and a better horse jockey than either.” There was both truth and unfairness in that assessment. Indeed, he was both a fighter and a “horse jockey,” having bred and raised some of the finest thoroughbred horseflesh in Tennessee before the war. He had been born forty-four years earlier on an imposing plantation called Westover on the Cumberland River near Nashville—the eighth generation of American-born Cheathams, who originally descended from British stock.
As a young man he joined a militia company called the Nashville Blues, was promoted captain, and when war was declared with Mexico fought with distinction in several major battles, emerging as a colonel of volunteers. Although not West Point educated, Cheatham showed an aptitude for the military and after he returned home was promoted to major general of the Tennessee militia. Meantime, he had developed a sort of wanderlust that took him to various jobs and businesses from Philadelphia to the California gold rush country, but he was back home farming and dabbling in politics when civil war broke out. He commanded a division early on, taking part in the bitterest battles in the west: Shiloh, Perryville, Stones River, Chickamauga, and Atlanta. Whether he had the mettle to command an entire army corps no longer remained to be seen; it was being seen moment by moment as Hood’s chances slipped away into the cool Tennessee darkness. First Forrest’s chance, then Cleburne’s, then Bate’s and Brown’s—four so far, and all gone awry.
By the time Stewart and Forrest finally arrived at the Absalom Thompson home, they were informed that Hood had gone to bed. Stewart had him awakened and asked if Hood in fact had “changed his mind” and sent the orders for Stewart’s corps to be formed on Cheatham’s right. Hood “replied that he had,” but when Stewart pointed out to him the difficulties he envisioned, Hood waved him off and said just to let the men rest where they were, and they would all continue the fight at daylight. Then, apparently still unaware that Schofield’s whole army was already marching rapidly across his front, Hood asked Forrest if his exhausted troopers could throw a barricade over the pike north of Spring Hill. Forrest, always the good soldier, reminded the general that his men were nearly out of ammunition and had been in the saddle fighting continuously for nearly twenty hours, but the old wizard said that he would try. On the strength of this inconclusive response, the commanding general bade Stewart and Forrest good night and went back to sleep, whereupon the fifth opportunity to seize the pike and cut off Schofield’s army began to fade away.
The boots of twenty thousand Union soldiers on their way to Spring Hill and Franklin trudged by Hood’s army unmolested that night, passing thousands of glowing Confederate campfires, some so close to the road that the federal troops occasionally wandered into them, thinking they were their own. Colonel Isaac Sherwood, commanding the 111th Ohio, remembered that the night was clear, with stars but no moon. Seeing the encampment of an army by the pike, he halted his men and rode over to investigate. Not able to ascertain who occupied the camp, he called out to a figure on horseback in the darkness, “Whose division is that on the left?” When the response came back, “General Cleburne’s,” the astonished Union colonel replied, “All right” and dashed away at a gallop.
The federal column had been instructed to move at a steady pace of four miles an hour, but soon that broke down as wagons and artillery clogged the roads. Captain Levi Scofield, riding with the head of the army, remembered that as they approached Spring Hill, a colonel was posted by the road and cautioned them “with a finger to his lips, not to speak above a whisper, and pointed to the camp-fires on the rolling slopes within sight of the road.” Private Tillman Stevens said that a little before midnight, as they neared Spring Hill, they passed by “thousands of campfires burning brightly, and [they] could see the soldiers standing or moving around the fires.” “It was a rare and grand spectacle to behold,” Stevens went on. “We were one company of thirty-five men passing right through Hood’s army.”
One Confederate officer remembered, “We were actually so close to the pike that many Federal soldiers came out to our fires to light their pipes and were captured.” A few enterprising Confederates waylaid unsuspecting blue-coated stragglers in the dark and took their gear and food, but those were only small incidents. The bulk of Schofield’s huge column snaked right past Hood’s whole army, their flank utterly exposed, for six or seven uninterrupted hours. They did not even stop at Spring Hill but marched on through it, north toward Franklin.
There was yet another chance for Hood. Sometime after midnight a lone barefoot Confederate private somehow found his way to Hood’s headquarters and reported seeing massed columns of federal infantry, baggage wagons, and gun carriages clogging the pike toward Spring Hill in Cheatham’s vicinity south of the town. Hood, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, ordered his adjutant, Major A. P. Mason, to send an immediate order to Cheatham to have a regiment move out and fire on anybody marching on the pike. Cheatham contended that he directed General Edward Johnson—commanding the single division of Lee’s corps that had come north with the army, which was posted near Bate’s earlier position near the pike—to check this out. Johnson, who was only temporarily under Cheatham’s supervision, was none too happy that he—and not one of Cheatham’s command—was the one who had to roust out in the dark of night. But he claimed he did as he was told yet found the pike empty and desolate in both directions and so retired to camp.
It could have been that Johnson arrived after the last of Schofield’s army passed by, or perhaps he encountered a gap in the Union column. Also, it is possible the federals had detoured off the pike onto a country road leading to Spring Hill. Or perhaps Johnson did not go at all. In one of the queerest contradictions in a night filled with queer contradictions, Adjutant Mason the next day confessed that he had fallen back asleep before he could get Hood’s order sent to Cheatham, yet Cheatham oddly claimed that he indeed received this never-sent-order and commanded Johnson to move out in compliance with it. Whichever was the truth, here was a sixth opportunity for the undoing of Schofield squandered.
There was one last hope for Hood to thwart Schofield’s retreat, and that was Forrest, who had sent General W. H. (“Red”) Jackson’s division of his cavalry about four miles north of Spring Hill to try to block the pike. While the rest of the army slept, the Confederate horsemen attacked the Union column that was marching toward Franklin around midnight. They halted the retreat, burning a few wagons and creating havoc until the big blue infantry columns came up and drove them away. That the cavalry was brushed off was almost a foregone conclusion, it being a military axiom that unsupported cavalry alone cannot not withstand massed infantry fire, yet that was exactly what Hood had ordered.
So when Hood arose a little before dawn, eagerly expecting to resume the battle and crush Schofield in place, all he found were empty camps and a few smouldering fires. The whole federal army had escaped, bag and baggage, right under his nose. He was infuriated, and when his generals assembled by invitation for breakfast at the mansion of Major Nat Cheairs alongside the pike, he “lashed out” at them for the failure to contain Schofield’s army. It was said that voices were raised, fingers pointed, accusations made and denied, and at some point the whole thing threatened to turn violent. Brown, upon whom at least some of the commanding general’s maledictions were heaped, described Hood to one of his staff as “wrathy as a rattlesnake this morning, striking at everything.” Hood
himself put it this way: “The best move in my career as a soldier I was thus destined to behold come to naught . . . never was a grander opportunity offered to utterly rout and destroy the Federal army.” And then he went into a tirade about his pet peeve—breastworks. Ever since taking over the army back in Atlanta, this had been on his mind. “The discovery that the army, after a forward march of one hundred eighty miles, was still, seemingly, unwilling to accept battle unless under the protection of breastworks, caused me to experience grave concern. In my innermost heart, I questioned whether or not I would ever succeed in eradicating this evil.” He could not have known it then, but in a few short hours he would at last find out that he had.
11
Franklin, Tennessee
And so the Army of Tennessee followed behind Schofield, angry, sullen, and frustrated. Private Bill Pollard, of the 20th Tennessee, felt “desperate” and was hoping “the enemy would run upon us so that I could fight to the death-spent.” In stark contrast to the army’s mood, it was a pleasant autumn morning, the final day of November 1864. The pike wound through lovely pastoral valleys glowing with the last reds, yellows, and browns of dying foliage. On the hillsides sat white farmhouses with a few grazing cattle and sheep and fields of corn and wheat, and streams shimmered in the sunlight.
Stewart’s corps, with the enraged Hood at its head, led the way, followed by Cheatham and by Lee, who was struggling to catch up from Columbia. Captain Joseph Boyce, near the front of the column, remembered that citizens, “nearly all old people or boys too young for military service, and any number of enthusiastic young ladies, lined the fences, cheering [them] and crying out: ‘push on, boys; you will capture all of the Yanks soon. They have just passed here on the dead run.’” This might have heartened the men somewhat, but in the high command there was rancor and unease and hard feelings.
Hood gave stern instructions that morning: “If there is but a company in advance, and if it overtakes the entire Yankee army, order the captain to attack it forthwith.” Back down the column, Pat Cleburne, wearing a new gray uniform and his favorite old cap with faded gold braid, was riding apart in the fields with General Brown, who had already endured a personal dressing down from Hood that morning. In a letter to Cheatham after the war, Brown remembered the Irishman telling him “with much feeling” that he had heard Hood was trying to put the blame on Cleburne for the Spring Hill business. Brown replied that he had “heard nothing on that subject” and said that he hoped that Cleburne was mistaken. But Cleburne told him, “No, I think not; my information comes through a very reliable channel.” Cleburne, Brown remembered, was “quite angry and evidently was deeply hurt” and stated that he would demand a full investigation. At this point a courier from either Hood or Cheatham arrived with orders, ending the discussion. On parting, Cleburne told Brown, “We will resume this conversation at the first convenient moment.”
The enigma of the Confederate failure at Spring Hill was to remain in deep and seething controversy long after the war. At the time, Hood blamed his generals, specifically Cheatham, Cleburne, Bate, and Brown, as well as the soldiers themselves for what he believed was an aversion to attack breastworks. The generals, in turn—as well as many of the men—blamed Hood; after all, he was in command. Schofield himself, many years later, summed up his fortunate escape this way: “Hood was in bed all night and I was in the saddle all night.”
In the end, there was enough blame to be shouldered all around. Cleburne seems not at all guilty for failing to make a second attack on Stanley; his orders, after all, were to wait for Brown to go first, and Brown never did. But Hood apparently did not know this, and so early on censured Cleburne. Brown’s failure was more pernicious. He was a major general in command of an infantry division and should have known that the actions of the entire corps—and ultimately the army—depended solely on him. Being drunk was certainly no excuse for failing to make his attack, and if Hood had known this, he would surely have had him court-martialed. After the war was over, and before he died, Brown wrote a full personal account of his actions at Spring Hill, but his family refused to make it public, and presumably it was destroyed.
Cheatham also shared the onus. Apparently, he was not very communicative with Hood for most of the afternoon and evening regarding the situation on his front. Hood had ordered the seizing of the turnpike as Cheatham’s main objective, but Cheatham seemed more interested in fighting Stanley’s men instead. Also, there were the rumors that he had been intoxicated or had strayed into the seductive arms of Mrs. Jesse Peters. The fact is that Cheatham neither attacked the federals in Spring Hill with his full force nor secured the pike.
Neither Bate nor Forrest was responsible for the failure. Bate earnestly tried to attack the head of Schofield’s column as it approached him on the pike but was recalled by Cheatham under threat of courtmartial. And after driving the entire Union cavalry corps out of the battle area, Forrest then attacked Spring Hill, but timing—through no fault of his own—had allowed Stanley to arrive with his bristling infantry division. Later that night, Forrest did the best he could with what he had to hold back Schofield’s retreat.
Finally, there was Hood. Altogether he had six opportunities to seal off the Columbia-Franklin Pike: Forrest’s attack at Spring Hill, Cleburne’s assault on Stanley’s troops, Bate’s lost chance at heading off Schofield, Brown’s failure to set into motion a general assault on Spring Hill, Cheatham’s failure to have Johnson or one of his other commands close off the pike late that night, and finally Forrest’s outmatched attempt to hold off Schofield’s retreat north of town. Some of these failures were understandable, but others were not because of possible misfeasance or malfeasance on the part of the officers in command. But Hood ultimately was the man in charge. He wasn’t on the field to see that his orders were carried out, and this was the Army of Tennessee, not the Army of Northern Virginia, where he had served so long. And too bad, because Robert E. Lee did not have to personally supervise the activities of Stonewall Jackson or Longstreet or Ewell or A. P. Hill. It is not to say that the Army of Tennessee was materially or morally inferior to Lee’s army. In strength, courage, and audacity it was certainly on a par, but in leadership experience it was lacking. Spring Hill was Cheatham’s first major battle since being promoted to corps command; Stewart and Stephen Lee had led their corps only in the last days of the Atlanta campaign. And Hood was equally inexperienced. To make matters worse, Hood’s physical condition severely limited him. The night he went to bed at his headquarters near Spring Hill, he had been up since three o’clock that morning and spent an agonizing day in the saddle—including taking a fall—with a throbbing stump of the leg that had been amputated only a year before. He might have been just too exhausted to keep a proper eye on things.
Riding back at the tail of Cheatham’s column was the chaplain, Dr. Quintard, astride a “splendid horse named Lady Polk,” which had been given to him as a present that same morning by General Otho Strahl. While they were still at Columbia, Hood had confidentially predicted to Quintard that the federals “must give me a fight or I’ll be in Nashville by tomorrow night.” Now they were plodding up the pike in Schofield’s rear, outwitted and undone by their own bungling and the vague fortunes of war. Years later, Quintard, trying to unravel the botched-up Spring Hill disaster, wrote to former Tennessee governor Isham Harris, who while in exile had been traveling with Hood’s army, asking if he could shed any light on the subject. Harris answered, “I was there and know much, if not all that occurred, and yet I cannot fix the responsibility upon any one officer. . . . Let’s not open an old sore, and cause it to bleed again.”
It had been a frantic afternoon and night behind the Union lines. Schofield arrived in Spring Hill about 9 P.M. and around midnight got his army hustling on the twelve-mile march toward Franklin, leaving Wagner’s division in a two-mile-long defensive perimeter around Spring Hill. All was hush-hush—at least as much as an army of twenty-five thousand men and enough horses and mules to draw
a thousand wagons and artillery caissons could make it. The men marched “left in front” so if attacked they could simply face to the right and still be on line. They continued the long-strided pace of four miles an hour, so that the head of the army reached the Winstead Hills, just below Franklin, about 3 A.M. The tail, consisting of Wagner’s division, did not finally leave Spring Hill until nearly 6 A.M., with the whole Confederate army in hot pursuit. As Private William Keesy of the 64th Ohio recalled, “Often, as we were coming over a hill and started down the descent we could see the enemy’s advance coming up over a distant hill. The anxiety and excitement became intense.”
Up in Franklin, Captain Levi Scofield of the engineers had been instructed to place the arriving divisions in their defensive positions. He had been with the first of the federals to get into the town, along with General Jacob Cox and his staff. On the outskirts of Franklin, beside the pike, they found the imposing brick home of Fountain Branch Carter, an elderly cotton farmer with two sons now in the Confederate army. General Cox decided to make the Carter house his headquarters, and the aged Carter was unceremoniously rousted out of bed and informed of this. Visiting home at this time was one of Carter’s sons, Colonel Moscow Carter, who was on “parole” after his capture in an earlier engagement. A second son had been severely wounded two years before. The youngest son, Captain Theodoric (“Tod”) Carter, was an adjutant on the staff of General Thomas Benton Smith, the twenty-six-year-old “boy brigadier” in Bate’s division. Three families of young grandchildren were also in the house, and a couple of female servants, Cox recalled, “making a household of seventeen souls.”