Cox and his exhausted people had just about fallen asleep on the downstairs floors and furniture of the Carter house when Schofield burst into the room, back from an inspection of the bridges crossing the rain swollen river to their rear. Red-eyed and pale, the worried commanding general exclaimed, “The pontoon are not here. The county bridge is gone and the ford is hardly passable.” He told Cox that he must take command of the Twenty-third Corps and put it in position to “hold Hood back at all hazards” until the bridges were repaired and they could get across the river.
The river in question was the Harpeth, a not very wide but rather deep stream that snaked up from the southeast and enclosed the northern boundary of Franklin in a sort of semicircle before turning north again. It was the principal terrain feature in the peaceful little valley that was just now beginning to glow with the first pinkish rays of dawn. Some lamps were beginning to come on in the misty first light; alarmed and curious citizens were peeking out of their windows to the noise of tin cups rattling against bayonet clasps as the leading divisions of Schofield’s army began streaming into town. Franklin, a village of about twenty square blocks, with farms and plantations in the outlying fields, had seen its share of fighting during the war but nothing to remotely compare with what was about to be visited upon it. Sallie Carter, who grew up there, remembered in her diary that Franklin was a lovely place, with fresh peaches and apples to be picked and cool swimming holes. About the most violent thing that had occurred there until the war was a duel fought between an Andrew Jackson aide and the brother of future U.S. Senator Thomas Hart Benton, and even then nobody was hurt badly.
Schofield at this point was nearly beside himself with apprehension. First, he had not heard from Wilson and his cavalry since Forrest chased them out of the Spring Hill vicinity the previous day. He was undoubtedly upset over this, because about two hours later he acidly telegraphed Thomas up at Nashville, “I do not know where Forrest is. Wilson is entirely unable to cope with him.” Furthermore, his telegraph communications with Nashville had been either nonexistent or unreliable ever since Columbia when his decoder ran away; afterward, Forrest’s men had cut his wires north of Spring Hill. Before leaving Columbia, Schofield had wired an urgent request to Nashville asking Thomas to send down pontoon bridges so he could cross the Harpeth, but the wires were down, and Thomas never got it. Thus Schofield was understandably agitated when he finally got to Franklin to find the bridges wrecked and no way to get across. Finally, he didn’t know whether Thomas wanted him to fight or run—nor did he know himself. In Cox’s words, “In all my intimate acquaintance with him, I never saw him so manifestly disturbed by the situation as he was in the glimmering dawn of that morning.”
So Schofield did the only thing he could in the circumstance, which was to start rebuilding the bridges over the river from whatever materials he could scrape up in town. One burned wood wagon bridge had to be entirely reconstructed, while a narrow iron railroad bridge was planked over its crossties for troops to use. Meantime, Schofield engaged in a frantic telegraphic correspondence with Thomas to ascertain his next moves. He had believed that the fifteen thousand fresh troops of A. J. Smith would certainly have arrived in Nashville by now and called for them to be sent immediately to his aid. Thomas, however, replied that Smith’s troops were only then beginning to arrive by steamboat and could not be dispatched that quickly. Then he added, “I do not wish you to risk too much. I send you a map of the environs of Franklin.” So Schofield was left with only a map and a wonder about how much risk was “too much.”
Worse, Thomas asked if Schofield could hold Hood at Franklin “for three more days,” while Schofield at that point didn’t even know if he could hold him for three more hours. He wired back: “I cannot prevent Hood from crossing the Harpeth whenever he may attempt it.” He also told him, “I am satisfied that I have heretofore run too much risk to hold Hood in check. . . . The slightest mistake on my part, or failure of a subordinate during the last three days might have proved disastrous. I don’t want to get into such a tight place again.” Years later, Schofield was to charge that Thomas “expected me, with two corps, to fight the entire hostile force until he could complete his concentration at Nashville.”
Meanwhile, the citizens of Franklin were waking up to the chilling realization that a cataclysmic event was about to be unleashed on their sleepy little town.
Frances McEwen, a schoolgirl at the Franklin Female Institute, remembered, “Our teachers’ faces looked unusually serious that morning.” All through the village federal officers were galloping “hither and thither.” Finally, she recorded, “The bell called us to chapel. We were told to take our books and go home, as there was every indication that we would be in the midst of a battle that day.”
To fifteen-year-old Harding Figures, who lived with his widowed mother and brother in a house on the main street of Franklin, it was the scene of a lifetime. That morning, General William Grose, commanding a brigade of the Fourth Corps, arrived in the Figures yard and asked Mrs. Figures if he could pitch his tent there, saying, “In my opinion a great battle will be fought here today.” Young Harding, a Tom Sawyerish sort of boy, later declared, “No mortal can tell with what a thrill of excitement I heard this announcement.” Mrs. Figures and General Grose were in a “more serious mood,” he reported, “and with her usual tact, my mother said: ‘General, instead of pitching your tent in the yard, you can use my parlor for your headquarters, and breakfast is just announced. You and your staff come in and take breakfast.’”
There might have been more to this seeming hospitality than met the eye. Federal soldiers frequently made a practice of stealing from the occupants of Southern homes, and having a Union general using the house for headquarters might just prevent such mischief. Mrs. Sallie Carter, a widow who lived down the street from the Figureses, remembered, “Two mounted Federal officers came to my house and asked for breakfast. I told them that I would give them breakfast willingly, but I had no flour, that their men had taken my flour as it was being brought from the mill. These men belonged to the commissary department, and offered to sell me a barrel of flour, and I gladly paid their price—ten dollars.”
Over at the Fountain Carter house, now Cox’s headquarters, the elder Carter asked the general, “with some anxiety,” whether he should move his family and abandon the house. Cox advised him to stay there until the battle was imminent, saying, “For whilst my headquarters tents were in his door-yard, there was no danger of annoyance from the men of my command.” Eight-year-old Alice McPhail later reported, “[I would never forget how frightened I was when they told us children to keep in the house, for the Yankees were coming. We were afraid of the very name of Yankee.” Alice remembered “Granpa and the negroes digging a big hole out in the middle of the North cellar floor.” She wrote, “They brought all the meat from the smokehouse, potatoes, lard and big sacks of ground meal and everything else they could pack into that hole, then built a plank floor over it and laid the bricks all back and set a big table over it, and I was told it was done to keep the Yankees from getting it.”
* * *
As the sun rose into a cloudless blue sky and warmed the valley of the Harpeth and the town, exhausted federal soldiers “worked like beavers, tossing houses, fences, timber and dirt into their breastworks.” Lieutenant William Mohrmann, of General Thomas H. Ruger’s division, Twenty-third Corps, “arrived about 8 in the morning, hungry and tired out, half dead with want of sleep.” He said, “We drew rations, made coffee, were given an allowance of whisky—ominous sign—and then set to fortify. I showed my men where to dig a line of small pits and when the bright sun warmed up the side of a stump I located my headquarters right there and fell asleep at once.”
Schofield, in apparent worry over the safety of his supply trains, spent his morning personally supervising the rebuilding and repair of the bridges north of town, while Cox was girding for the defense against a Confederate attack. Stanley, with the rear guard of the army, sti
ll had not arrived.
Thirty-six-year-old Jacob D. Cox was descended from an old New York Dutch family, graduated from Oberlin College, and became an Ohio lawyer and politician. He was a staunch abolitionist and one of the organizers of the Republican party in his state. Through his political connections—namely former Ohio governor Salmon P. Chase, now Lincoln’s treasury secretary—he entered the army as a brigadier general less than two weeks after the war began. He fought in the early battles in West Virginia and in 1862 was assigned to General John Pope’s Army of Virginia in time to take part in the embarrassing defeat at Second Manassas. Soon afterward he commanded a division in the Antietam campaign. The next year found him commanding the district of Ohio, and in the spring of 1864 he joined Sherman’s Army of the Tennessee for the Atlanta campaign.
Not being an engineer himself—nor for that matter having any formal military education—Cox skillfully utilized the skills of those who did, including young Levi Scofield, in constructing the impressive line of fortifications around Franklin. More than twenty thousand men with picks and shovels feverishly threw together breastworks up to five feet high and capped by a “head log,” which prevented exposure of everything but a few inches of the face that peeked beneath it.
At first light, Cox and his staff “carefully examined the ground” around Franklin. Standing on Carter’s Hill, just in front of the Carter house, and looking south, Cox saw the Columbia Pike coming straight at him. Carter’s Hill itself, he recognized, would be a salient point in any attack, as would the Carter cotton gin, located about one hundred twenty yards south and eighty yards east of the pike. The Winstead Hills, two miles south, which they had retreated over several hours earlier, formed the southern barrier of the valley of the Harpeth, and the land in between was a clear broad plain of fields and grass, smooth except for a long gentle roll or dip about a half mile away, which could “hide men or teams.”
If Cox had had a balloon to go up in, he would have observed the approaches to Franklin as a series of lines converging on the apex of a divided triangle. To the west was Carter’s Creek Pike, in the center the Columbia-Franklin Pike, and to the east the Lewisburg Pike. In between these last two were the tracks of the Alabama-Nashville railroad. Instead, Cox described it from his own point of view, looking south, as “the left hand extended with separated fingers. The little finger and thumb at right angles represent the Harpeth River and its course from left to right, whilst the three fingers spread in the midst indicate the three turnpikes diverging southward from the village.”
Just northeast of town and across the Harpeth River was Figures Hill, with an old earthen fort built during an earlier battle. This was Fort Granger, named for Union General Gordon Granger, and this was where a federal artillery battery including several long-range three-inch rifles would be positioned after a tortuous fording of the river. From the heights of Figures Hill, these guns could sweep the approaches of the southern plain for more than a mile, firing well over the heads of any Union soldiers in their breastworks. “Such was the field as it lay before us under the level beams of the rising sun,” Cox said.
So Cox set to work laying out his lines with the help of “an efficient engineer battalion, made up of intelligent mechanics,” in the charge of Captain Twining, chief engineer. Meantime, a steady stream of federal troops and wagons from the remainder of the army continued to pour into town from the Columbia Pike. All morning this monster line of entrenchments grew until it stretched in a two-mile half-moon arc from the river southeast of town to the bend of the river northwest of town—including six well-placed artillery batteries containing about thirty guns. But the most heavily fortified works were along a one-mile front facing due south, toward the Winstead Hills, over which Hood’s army was soon expected to appear.
All morning Hood’s army toiled along the Franklin Pike, with Forrest’s cavalry nipping at the heels of Schofield’s retreating column. Joseph Boyce of the 1st Missouri, Stewart’s corps in the advance, remembered passing a great many abandoned federal commissary wagons. “The enemy was too hotly pressed to have time to unhitch the mules,” Boyce said. “We found the poor creatures dead in their harnesses, having been shot through the head by the drivers or rear guard. Their bodies were still warm and smoking.”
By midday, Hood and the head of the army reached the near side of the Winstead Hills. The white crushed stone of the pike bent upward and over the top, and alongside the road on the upward slope Schofield’s rear guard could be seen. It was the brigade of Colonel Emerson Opdycke of Wagner’s division. Like Cox, Opdycke was an Ohioan with no formal military background and fierce abolitionist zeal. A dry goods salesman before the war, he overcame his lack of military training and turned into a fine combat leader, distinguishing himself at Shiloh, Chickamauga, Chattanooga, and Atlanta. At the tail end of the federal army, Opdycke had fought all day, with Hood’s men close at his heels. Later he recollected how the pike from Spring Hill to Franklin was filled with stragglers, “mostly new men with immense knapsacks . . . so worried as to seem indifferent to capture.” Infuriated, Opdycke ordered his soldiers to “bring along every man at the point of the bayonet, and to cut off the knapsacks,” estimating that he “saved 500 men from capture by these severe measures.” As Hood’s skirmishers spread out and advanced toward him, Opdycke opened fire with a section of artillery, but it soon was apparent that Hood had divided his main column and was going to flank him, and the Ohioan quickly retreated his seven regiments down the opposite side of the hills and on into Franklin.
Hood was indeed flanking Opdycke’s little rear guard. From his temporary headquarters at the Harrison mansion beside the pike, he ordered Stewart to move his whole corps by the right toward the Lewisburg road east of Franklin, while Cheatham’s corps would come straight up the pike over the Winstead Hills—except for Bate’s division, which moved off left through a gap in the hills to emerge close to the Carter’s Creek Pike at the western edge of town.
As the columns moved out, Hood and his staff rode up to the crest of Winstead Hill for their first look at Franklin, below and across the plain, two miles away. Before them, the valley of the Harpeth spread out like a great oriental fan, bluegrass still green, bisected by the whitestone pike and scarcely a tree amid a patchwork of open fields. In the distance was the town, with a few white church steeples rising out of the late-autumn foliage. Off to the east and curving around behind the town was the winding Harpeth, shimmering in the midday sun. The scene would have been peaceful as a landscape portrait, were it not for the dark line of Union breastworks and the frowning guns that could be seen plainly, even without field glasses. As the Confederate troops crested the hill and filed down onto the plain, which one described as “level as a floor,” they began to cheer. For most this was native soil, and the elusive enemy was finally before them.
The sun did not rise high into the sky on that short winter day but made a low sullen arc southeast to west and glared down on the valley with a rarefied hue. Particularly visible from the point of view in the federal entrenchments was the bright white line of the Columbia-Franklin Pike extending from town straight across the plain and then rising through the cut between the green-cedar Winstead Hills. A little past 1 P.M. a near hush stilled all work in the Union fortifications, and the men looked southward. Where the pike descended the slope of the hills, long lines could be seen toiling down it. From that distance, the lines appeared black against the stark whiteness of the crushed stone, like columns of thousands of black ants. Captain Levi Scofield recorded that Confederate officers on horseback could be plainly seen in the distance, “as though studying our position.”
12
Seeing the Elephant
At the top of Winstead Hill, Confederate Sergeant-major Sumner A. Cunningham of General Otho Strahl’s brigade was halted “near where General Hood, leaving his staff on the southern slope of the hill, rode over a crest and down to a linden tree—the only tree near in any direction—and with his glasses examined the a
rea to Franklin—the breastworks in front of the town and the Fort Figures across the Harpeth River.” Cunningham later recalled, “I watched him closely while there, meditating on his responsibility. When he returned to the top of the hill and near where I happened to be standing, a general officer—I thought [Lowrey] or Loring, but have never known what officer—dressed handsomely and riding a magnificent black horse, met him and Hood said, ‘General, we will make the fight,’ and the two clasped hands. Orders were speedily dispatched to various commanders, a band of music on the slope across the pike began to play, and the Army of Tennessee was soon in motion.”
Whatever the troops may have thought, this news of Hood’s proposed attack was received with less than bounding enthusiasm among his generals. Forrest, for one, soon rode up after his all-day skirmish with Schofield’s army and spoke out against the plan. “Give me one strong division of infantry with my cavalry and within two hours time I will agree to flank the Federals from their works,” he told Hood, adding that he would march east to the Harpeth, cross over, and swing around against Schofield north of Franklin. Hood shook his head. The enemy was there, and there he would attack him. Hood instructed Forrest to put his cavalry on both flanks so “if the assault proved successful, to complete the ruin of the enemy by capturing those who attempted to escape in the direction of Nashville.”
When he learned of Hood’s plan, Frank Cheatham—who had been studying the Union position—also rode up to register a protest, worrying that the army “would take a desperate chance if we attempted to dislodge them.”
“I don’t like the looks of this fight,” he counseled Hood. “The Federals have an excellent position, and are well fortified.”