“For once, and only once,” said a lieutenant in the sad-faced Strahl’s brigade, “we went into battle cheered by the sound of martial music. It was the grandest sight I ever beheld.”
Behind the Union lines over in Franklin there was music, too; the bluecoat bands retaliated with “Yankee Doodle” and the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” As the Confederate army advanced, Schofield’s artillery began firing, but at the range of nearly a mile and a half it did little or no damage. Meantime, the Confederates answered with artillery of their own.
Franklin resident John McEwen found his home occupied as the headquarters of Union General Nathan Kimball. After lunch a federal colonel on Kimball’s staff lingered in the parlor and asked McEwen if his daughters would sing and play for him. Asked what he wished to hear, the colonel replied that he didn’t know one piece of music from the other, so McEwen’s daughters began to play the new tune “Just Before the Battle, Mother” when suddenly a Confederate shell burst outside. McEwen wryly commented, “Colonel, if I am any judge, it is just about that time now” as the federal officer sprang to his feet and rushed outside toward his regiment; but before he reached it he “was shot through the lungs, the bullet passing quite through him.”
McEwen hustled his family into the cellar, where, his daughter Frances recorded, “A few minutes later there was a crash! and down came a deluge of dust and gravel. The usually placid face of our old black mammy, now thoroughly frightened, appeared on the scene. She said a cannon ball had torn a hole in the side of the meat house and broken her wash kettle to pieces.” Over at the Carter house, things were much the same. Fountain Branch Carter, the grandfather, put rolls of rope in the cellar windows to “keep the bullets out,” and Alice McPhail Nichol, who had been living there, later recalled, “Now I remember the first sound of the firing and booming of the cannons, we children all sat around our mother and cried.”
Out in the federal trenches, Private Adam J. Weaver was writing a letter as the Confederate lines approached: “The air is hazy. I can hear bands playing, and I see a few rebels being deployed in line of battle in the far distance. Cousin Rhody tells us it is 3:30 P.M.”
Half a mile in front of the main Union line, General George Wagner’s two rear-guard brigades were still toiling frantically to throw up some sort of breastworks against Hood’s advancing army.
Conrad’s brigade had only two picks and two shovels to the company, and, according to Private Bill Keesy, “They were worked by willing men for all that was in them. Every man tried to get a root, chunk, log, rail, or anything he could to help strengthen the protection we realized would soon be sorely needed.” Captain Shellenberger added, “Whenever a man working showed the least sign of fatigue, a comrade would snatch the spade out of his hands and ply it with desperate energy.”
Wagner’s advanced position astride the Columbia Pike was in an abandoned cotton field, directly in the path of Hood’s army—three thousand Union men against twenty thousand Confederates. Despite the orders for Wagner to “give the men a few volleys” and then bring them “in behind the works in good order,” Wagner had arbitrarily decided to stay and fight it out—or at least to have his men stay and fight it out; Wagner himself remained safe behind the main Union breastworks. Captain Levi Scofield was standing atop the fortifications beside the pike in conversation with Wagner, who was “reclining on his elbow, his feet hanging over the works, with a staff or a crutch in his hand; he had fallen with his horse and was lame.” As Hood’s army pressed down on Wagner’s little rear-guard force, a staff officer from Conrad’s brigade galloped up to Wagner and said excitedly, “The enemy are forming in heavy columns; we can see them distinctly in the open timber and all along our front!”
Wagner merely looked at the officer and ordered, “Stand there and fight them,” then, turning to Scofield, he roared, “And that stubbed, curley-headed Dutchman [meaning the argumentative Opdycke] will fight them too.” Scofield, who was on Cox’s staff and aware of the instructions given Wagner, said, “But General, the orders are not to stand, except against cavalry and skirmishers, but to fall back behind the main line.” Wagner, however, did not respond. A short while later, another courier from the imperiled brigades dashed up, and this time several other officers of Cox’s staff had gathered around Wagner and Scofield. This rider informed Wagner that the Confederates were “advancing in heavy force” and “would overlap the two brigades on both flanks and he did not think they ought to remain there any longer.” But Wagner blithely replied, “Go back, and tell them to fight—fight like hell!” When the astonished messenger protested that “Hood’s entire army is coming,” Wagner “struck the ground with his stick and barked, ‘never mind, fight them.’”
Among other events, Wagner’s unusual behavior went to show that unsoldierly conduct was by no means confined to Hood’s army, for, like the Rebel General Brown at Spring Hill, Wagner, it seems, was drunk that afternoon. No less an authority than his corps commander, General David Stanley, was to testify, “Wagner was, to say the least ‘full of whisky’ if not drunk. . . . He was in a vainglorious condition, though it was not known at the time by General Scofield or myself.” Captain Marshall Thatcher remembered that “a staff officer was sent a second time to see if Wagner understood the order, but the poorest charity we can extend him is that he must have been drunk.”
In any case, as soon as word of Wagner’s sacrificial intention was delivered to the two little brigades, a near panic erupted. In Conrad’s brigade, an orderly came with orders for Captain Shellenberger, he said later, to “hold the position to the last man, and to have my sergeants fix bayonets and to instruct my company that any man not wounded who should attempt to leave the line without orders would be shot or bayonetted by the sergeants. The indignation of the men grew almost into a mutiny. Even the green drafted men could see the folly of our position. One of them said to me: ‘What can our generals be thinking about in keeping us out here?’” From Lane’s brigade, Private W. W. Gist wrote, “The suspense and the nervous strain became greater and greater. Nearer and nearer the Confederates approached with the precision of a dress parade. We wondered why we were not moved back. It was plain that someone had blundered.”
As the weight of Hood’s army bore down on the exposed rear guard, Private Bill Keesy described “the swords glistening and bayonets flashing.” And went on, “They are moving into close order now. See those lines closing up! Now our picks and shovels are thrown aside. Every man carefully examines his gun. Our orderly sergeant is calling very imploringly to the captain: ‘Captain, for God’s sake, let us get in behind the works. Why, just see them coming! Enough to swallow us up!’ But the captain, poor fellow, is under orders too, and all that he can say is, ‘Sergeant, keep your place, sir, and not another word.’ ”
By now it was nearly four o’clock, and the sharp crack of rifles was added to the roar and crash of artillery in the town of Franklin. Young Harding Figures had impishly “spent the entire afternoon upon the top of the barn and woodshed, in a tree top and other high places, seeing all that could be seen.” But now, he said, “The bullets were flying and whizzing around everywhere to such an extent that I concluded I was as liable to be hit as a soldier, and I retreated to the cellar.”
In the Confederate line that was steadily advancing toward the breastworks, the veterans knew exactly what a clash of this scale meant. They even had an expression for it. As the sun closed slowly over the low hills, they were going to “see the elephant.”
13
An Indescribable Fury
Colonel Ellison Capers was a twenty-seven-year-old regimental commander in States Rights Gist’s brigade. As Cheatham’s corps advanced to pierce the federal center, Capers described the battlefield from the point of view of an officer in the front line:
Just before the charge was ordered the brigade passed over an elevation, from which we beheld the magnificent spectacle the battlefield presented—bands were playing, general and staff officers and gallant
couriers were riding in front of and between the battle lines. 100 battle flags were waving in the smoke of battle and bursting shells were wreathing the air with great circles of smoke, while 20,000 brave men were marching in perfect order against their foe. . . .
General Gist ordered the charge in concert with General Gordon. In passing from the left to the right of the regiment the general waved his hat to us, expressing his pride and confidence in the twenty-fourth, and rode away in the smoke of the battle, never to be seen by the men he had commanded on so many fields. His horse was shot and, dismounted, he was leading the right of the brigade when he fell, pierced through the heart.
Uncle Wiley Howard had followed his owner into the battle, for what purpose is not clear, but, as the Gist family recorded him later, he remembered the following: “De last time I seen Marse States he was on foot, nigh er sugar maple tree, still leading hiz men. Joe [Gist’s horse] had been shot through de neck, en was rearing and plunging so he had ter dismount. . . . When it got so hot, I went back ter our tent.”
From the other side, Union Captain Scofield could also give a graphic description of the Confederate onrush and its clash with Wagner’s vulnerable little brigades out in front of the works:
Soon we noticed the right of Stewart’s command wrapping around Conrad’s left, and then our men rose up and the break commenced. It was a grand sight! For the moment we were spellbound with admiration, although they were our hated foes. . . . The day had been bright and warm, reminding us of the Northern Indian Summer; the afternoon sun, like a ball of fire, was settling in all its southern splendor in a molten sea of bronze, over the distant hills, and in the hazy, golden light, and with their yellowish-brown uniforms, those in the front seemed to be magnified in size, one could almost imagine them to be phantoms sweeping along in the air.
On they came, and in the center their lines seemed to be many deep and unbroken, their red-and-white tattered flags, with the emblem of St. Andrew’s Cross as numerous as though every company bore them, flaring brilliantly in the sun’s rays. . . . Scattered along in front of them were our men, bent almost to the ground, with their heads turned to see if the enemy were gaining on them. It was every man for himself and devil take the last man over the works. As forerunners well in advance, could be seen a line of rabbits, bounding along for a few leaps, and then would stop and look back and listen, but scamper off again . . . and quails by the thousands, in coveys here and there would rise and settle, and rise again to the warm sunlight, until finally they rose high in the air and whirred off to the gray skylight of the north.
The corps of Cheatham and Stewart simply steamrolled over the brigades of Lane and Conrad with bayonets fixed, firing at will. Captain Shellenberger’s company had only time to fire five or six rounds before they gave way despite Wagner’s orders to stand and fight. “They were coming on a run,” Shellenberger said, “emitting the shrill rebel charging yell and so close that my first impulse was to drop flat on the ground and let them charge over.” In Conrad’s brigade Bill Keesy reported, “[There is] a wall of blazing guns all along our front. Every second some one is killed. We are working like demons ourselves, loading and firing till the gun-barrels burn our hands with every touch. We are all mixed up in hand to hand conflict. The order is faintly heard above the din, ‘fall back.’ To stay means imprisonment or death. To attempt a retreat over that open field at this short range is taking a risk equally as great.”
Like a gigantic gray dragon, the surging Confederate line swept the field, and as the break turned into a general rout, Confederate officers began shouting, “Go right on into the works with them, boys!” Most of the panicked bluecoats headed straight back up the pike to the gap in the federal lines, but hundreds were shot down or captured and sent to the rear. The scene was a combination of melee and half-mile sprint and posed a chilling dilemma from the aspect of Union soldiers behind the main breastworks: a whole Confederate army was rushing toward them, but they could not fire at it for fear of killing their own men.
Captain Shellenberger had nearly reached the Union line when his legs and lungs simply gave out. Thinking that his “time had come,” he suddenly remembered his mother’s parting words to him, “Well, if you must go, don’t get shot in the back,” and turned around to face a Confederate soldier looming up on him. “He was coming directly toward me on a dog trot, and was withdrawing the ramrod from the barrel of his gun . . . he stopped to prime and then aimed and fired at a little squad of our men on my right. I heard the bullet strike and an exclamation from the man who had been hit. The rebel then started to trot forward again, at the same time reaching back with one hand to draw a fresh cartridge.” Somehow, Shellenberger managed to reach the safety of his lines.
The exhausted Keesy found himself running for his life over knap-
BATTLE OF FRANKLIN
November 30, 1864
sacks, haversacks, overcoats, canteens, blankets, and guns thrown away in the mad rush to escape. “Inspired by ten thousand flying bullets,” he staggered toward the works, while all around him “wounded men would topple over, while some would waddle onward, or pitch headlong and bullets would go shrieking through the air.” He wrote, “The cotton stalks were dropping off around me as the bullets would zip, zip, zip through them. On coming to our line of works, a man ahead of me had jumped across the outside ditch and was mounting the bank when a ball struck him in the head. He rolled back into the ditch and was dead.”
All along the Union line, those blue-clad soldiers of Wagner’s rear guard who had so far escaped Hood’s advance scrambled breathlessly over the breastworks, and some were trampled to death by their comrades as they slipped into the four- or five-foot ditch on the outside of the fortification.
When most of the federals were across in safety, “the long line of blue-coats within the trenches rose, and a flash of flame shot out in a sinuous line, and the white smoke rose like the foam on the crest of a breaker. The few straggling blue-coats and the long line of gray went down like over-ripe grain before a blast of wind and hail.” So said Bill Keesy, who had managed to haul himself over the breastworks and was watching from a location just behind the lines. But then, he reported, “Another long line came beating up and yet another; and the long line of blue gave way, while the greycoats came pouring over the embankment like a flood.” When that happened, a Confederate general remembered, “All hell broke loose in our faces.”
What had happened was that the gap in the federal line where the Columbia Turnpike ran through it had been breached by the onrushing Confederates of Brown’s and Cleburne’s divisions as they swept into the Union works on the heels of Wagner’s fleeing brigades. When Wagner’s men got inside the breastworks, they did not stop but kept on running into and through the town, and, from either confusion or fear, several federal regiments holding the sides of the pike abandoned their positions and began running, too. With this development, the triumphant Confederates began pouring into the Union lines, and a savage hand-to-hand brawl spread up and down the lines.
Seeing his division fleeing, Wagner—in spite of his inebriation—managed to mount his horse and was “riding backward and facing the disorganized brigades, trying as hard as ever a man did to rally them. With terrible oaths he called them cowards and shook his broken stick at them; but back they went to the town and nothing could stop them,” said Levi Scofield, adding, “Oh what a mistake the brave Wagner made.”
For a moment it seemed the Confederates had won the victory. Thousands were streaming in over the embankments and the gap at the pike. Tom Thoburn, a lieutenant in the 50th Ohio, just west of the gap, recorded, “Rebs were pouring over the works all the way along and from the direction of the pike the enemy was sweeping along the rear of our lines in a solid mass. I quickly said, ‘Boys, we must get out of here; every man for himself.’” Levi Scofield, trying to help the hapless Wagner corral his panicked brigades, had his horse shot from under him and was wounded in the leg. With the whole Union line seemingly ab
out to break, the Confederates had also driven away the members of a crucial federal artillery battery just east of the pike. They had turned the guns around to use them on the bluecoats but could not find any primers. Just then, Scofield recalled, the battery commander, Lieutenant Charles W. Scoville, “cracked his blacksnake whip round the ears of his artillerymen, and drove them back to the guns. At it they went with pick-axes and shovels, splashing all around them with a ferocity of demons.” Meantime, Scofield said, two reserve federal regiments composed of soldiers from Tennessee and Kentucky soldiers who had remained loyal to the Union cause “sprang over the low rifle-pits like tigers” and “went pell-mell into the mass of Confederates who had taken [their] line but did not know what to do with it. It was right in those few minutes that the fate of one or the other of the armies was to be decided.”
The Confederates who had rushed into the gap behind Wagner’s fugitives were eight regiments of Tennesseans commanded by Brigadier General John Gordon, who held down Brown’s right on the west of the pike, and nine regiments of Texans belonging to Brigadier General Hiram Granbury, who anchored Cleburne’s left on the opposite side of the road.
As the Confederate line surged across the plain, Pat Cleburne met several times with General Brown, and as the line closed on the federal breastworks he sent for his aide, L. H. Mangum, who was off positioning an artillery battery. When Mangum rode up, Cleburne hollered at him to forget the battery. “It is too late. Go on with Granbury,” the general roared, then galloped off to the right where Govan’s brigade was making its charge. Moments later Cleburne’s horse was shot out from under him a few hundred feet from the breastworks, and while he was mounting another, it too was killed by a cannonball. As Govan watched, the Irishman “moved forward on foot, waving his cap; and,” he said, “I lost sight of him in the smoke and din of battle.” Seconds afterward he was shot down, a bullet just below the heart. Govan said, “[His body] was found within twenty yards of where I last saw him waving his cap and urging his command forward.”