By now the thick white smoke of battle had obscured the field, making it virtually impossible to see much more than twenty feet away. About the time Cleburne had gone steaming off into this cauldron of flame-stabbed smoke and dust and racket, Colonel Emerson Opdycke, whom Wagner had disgustedly told to “fight when and where you damn please,” was preparing to do exactly that.
As the rest of Wagner’s division fled past him up the pike, Opdycke witnessed from his reserve position a hundred yards behind the Carter house the Confederates gaining footholds not only inside the federal fortifications but up to the very yard of the Carter house itself. Without orders, the “stubbed, curley-headed Dutchman,” as Wagner had branded him, formed his seven regiments of Illinoians, plus some men of Reilley’s reserve, and plunged them headlong into the deadly fracas, which he later characterized as an “indescribable fury.”
Coming from the direction of town, General Stanley had nearly been swept off his horse by Wagner’s fleeing men. After trying unsuccessfully to stanch the retreat, he gave up and rode to Opdycke’s position to get him in the fight, only to find that he was already on his way. A man in one of Opdycke’s regiments recalled, “We had our guns stacked and were ready to make coffee when, like a thunderbolt out of a clear sky, on looking up we saw the line breaking in front of us.”
Young Union Colonel Arthur MacArthur—who was to live to sire a famous general—was commanding the 12th Wisconsin of Opdycke’s brigade. He swung into the saddle shouting, “Up Wisconsin,” and sabered his way toward the leading Confederate flag. One of his staff officers recorded that MacArthur’s horse was shot down, and he was hit by a bullet in the shoulder. On foot, the colonel fought his way forward until he came to the Confederate major who was holding the flag. The Confederate shot MacArthur in the chest, MacArthur stabbed the major through the stomach, and even as he was falling, the Confederate managed to shoot MacArthur in the knee.
Stanley, who had galloped forward when the uproar began, was horrified to encounter a mass of hundreds of Confederates, “seen dimly through the smoke, jumping over onto our side of the low breastworks.” Frightened that his lines were broken, the corps commander rode closer to get a better look. Just then a bullet cut down his horse, while another smashed through the back of his neck, and he was out of the battle. Before going from the field, he learned that the Confederates he saw were not charging but surrendering.
In all its bloody four years, the war had rarely—if ever—seen fighting so ferocious on so large a scale in so confined a space. For nearly an hour, thousands of men within an area no larger than a few acres shot, bayonetted, gouged, and bludgeoned one another to death with rifle butts, axes, picks, guns, knives, and shovels. One Union colonel saw a Confederate run one of his men through with a bayonet, but before he could pull it out, “His brains were scattered on all of us that stood near, by the butt of a musket swung by some big fellow whom I could not recognize in the grim dirt and smoke that enveloped us.” Opdycke himself started swinging a gun butt after “firing all the shots in his revolver and then breaking it over the head of a rebel.” A captain in Colonel Silas Strickland’s brigade testified: “I recollect seeing one man, with blood streaming down his face from a wound in the head, with a pick axe in his hands, rushing into a crowd of the enemy and swinging his pick.” At one point, said the captain, “A rebel colonel mounted the breastworks and profanely demanded our surrender.” A Union soldier stuck a gun to his stomach and said, “I guess not,” and pulled the trigger, which “actually let daylight through the victim.”
Slowly, grudgingly, the Confederates gave ground as more and more federal fugitives were rallied and sent back into the fight, and the Union line was reinforced from the flanks. As the graycoats were ejected from the grounds of the Carter house, Union infantrymen threw up hasty fortifications there and began a galling rifle fire. The Carter house faced the pike and so was perpendicular to the Confederate advance. Its outbuildings consisted of a wood-frame office and a stone smokehouse. These and the house itself were filled with Union riflemen firing from any opening. A low picket fence embraced the south side of the house from the pike to the smokehouse, and a federal line was drawn up behind it. The Confederates of Cheatham’s corps charged these structures a dozen times but were repulsed after each charge with horrible losses.
Now the fighting took on a new dimension. The Confederates of Brown’s and Cleburne’s divisions finally retired to the ditch behind the main federal breastworks and an almost point-blank butchery that lasted for hours. In many cases, the line was such that the Confederates were in the trenches on the outside of the works, while the federals were on the inside, with only a mound of dirt separating them. To make matters worse for the graycoats, the line was not a smooth curve but was angled at places to allow Schofield’s army a fierce enfilading fire on the attackers.
Here Brigadier General George Washington Gordon, a twentyeight-year-old former Tennessee surveyor, huddled helplessly in the ditch with what was left of his command, exposed to such fire from a federal salient on his left. Gordon’s soldiers, unable to either move forward or retreat because of the deathly fire and with men dropping all around, began putting their caps on their rifle barrels and waving them above the works as a signal of surrender. At first the federal shot at these, but they eventually stopped firing and allowed the Confederates to give up. Gordon was asked by the only other man who stayed behind if he was not going to go over. Gordon said No, he would “remain under cover of the dead in the ditch until night, which was fast approaching.” But quickly the storm of fire resumed with even more intensity, and Gordon, remarking, “We shall be killed if we remain here,” handed his subordinate a white handkerchief with which to surrender them. As he came inside the federal works, a Union soldier bashed at his head with a gun butt, but another bluecoat intervened, and Gordon was marched off to the rear, a prisoner.
In the brigade to Gordon’s immediate left, Brigadier General Otho Strahl was having the fight of his life. Sergeant-major Sumner Cunningham recalled how the men had to plow through a cheval-de-frise of sharpened locust tree branches the federals had thrown up in their front. It was impossible to shoot from the deep ditch outside the breastworks, so the Confederates devised a system by which some men would crawl up on the embankment and fire, while others in the ditch handed them loaded weapons.
By now a murky twilight had settled over the battle area. The sadfaced General Strahl stood on a pile of dead bodies in the ditch, loading and handing up weapons like everybody else. Those riflemen shooting from the embankment had a fearfully short life expectancy. The enfilading fire cut them down with such regularity that the ditch was soon “leveled up” with the dead. Sergeant-major Cunningham, who watched the men around him get hit and slide back into this grizzly mass grave, finally worked up the courage to pose to Strahl a pleading question—on grounds, he said later, that, “I felt there was no rule of warfare whereby all the men should be killed.”
“What had we better do?” Cunningham asked.
“Keep firing,” was Strahl’s stern reply, but those were also his final orders. At that moment the man on Cunningham’s right was struck down, and at the same instant Strahl was shot in the neck, and, “throwing his hands over his head, almost to a clasp,” the general fell limp on his face. Cunningham at first thought he was dead, but then, calling for Colonel Stafford, his senior regimental commander, Strahl began to crawl away, “his sword dangling against dead soldiers.” Several members of his staff tried to carry him off the field, but a simultaneous double death warrant of two bullets killed him on the spot.
The brigade to Strahl’s immediate left was commanded by Brigadier General John Carpenter Carter. A tall, lanky, thirty-seven-year-old Memphis lawyer and graduate of the University of Virginia, Carter had distinguished himself in practically all the battles of the Army of Tennessee. In his part of the line the men had devised an ingenious, if unpleasant, method of getting at the bluecoats on the opposite side of the breastw
orks. They collected the abandoned rifles of the dead and wounded and pitched them bayonet-first over the pile of dirt that separated the two sides. Carter was directing operations much as Strahl had been, when a bullet also cut him down with a mortal wound.
By this time Brown’s division had been virtually decimated, and, to make matters worse, Brown himself was shot off his horse by a bullet that shattered his leg. Thus the division lost not only its commander but all four of its brigadier generals; Gordon, Strahl, Carter, and Gist were by now either dead, dying, or captured. Not only that, but by this time most of the brigade’s staff officers and regimental commanders were killed or wounded, too. With the exception of States Rights Gist’s brigade, which consisted of South Carolinians and Georgians, the vast majority of these men were Tennesseans—twenty-five regiments in all—“the flower of Tennessee youth,” one participant noted, “in the midst of their homes and friends.”
Over in Pat Cleburne’s division on the eastern side of the pike, things were no better. Cleburne was lying cold and dead, and not less than fourteen of his brigade and regimental commanders were killed, wounded, or missing, including Brigadier General Hiram Granbury, who had led eight regiments of Texans into the fray. Granbury was a boyish-looking thirty-three-year-old native Mississippian who before the war had been a lawyer in Waco, Texas. Like most other general officers in this army he had fought in almost all the campaigns in the west, from Fort Donelson to Vicksburg to Chickamauga and the Atlanta battles. Cleburne’s aide, Lieutenant Mangum, who had been told to go with Granbury by his commanding general just before his death, was within ten feet of him when Granbury shouted his final words: “Forward men; never let it be said that Texans lagged in the fight.” As he spoke, Mangum recalled, “a ball struck him in the cheek and passed through his brain. Throwing both hands to his face he sank down on his knees and remained in that position until his body was taken off the field after the battle.”
Brigadier General Mark Lowrey, whose brigade of Alabamians and Mississippians was on the right of Govan’s, testified that at least half of his men had been cut down in successive charges against the federal works near the Carter cotton gin. Like the scene in front of Brown’s division, the ditch along Cleburne’s entire front also was heaped with Confederate dead, and the ground for fifty yards in the rear was strewn with corpses and mutilated men. In the dim and din of the roaring, flashing twilight, the gray-clads charged a dozen times to force their way over the Union breastworks. A federal soldier in General James W. Reilly’s brigade recalled, “I saw three Confederates standing within our lines, as if they had dropped down unseen from the sky. They stood there for an instant, guns in hand . . . dazed, as in a dream. I raised my gun, but instinctively I felt as if about to commit murder. When I looked again, the three were down—apparently dead; whether shot by their own men or ours, who could tell?”
The battle was now more than an hour old, but Cheatham knew little of the fate of his corps. Smoke and darkness had obscured the battlefield, and from his command post about half a mile away on rocky Merrill Hill all that could be divined even with binoculars or spyglass was a seething, stinking, flame-stabbed cloud from which the tumult of gunfire and battle-racket echoed relentlessly across the valley floor. Practically all the couriers and staff officers that Cheatham had sent riding into this evil storm had failed to return, and the corps commander was now left to fret and worry and wonder as the night came down.
Way back in his straw pen near Winstead Hill, John Bell Hood was even more in the dark. As he looked forward from his blanket on the ground, the “blue light of battle” might have flickered in his eyes, and he could certainly see the flashes of guns and hear the ceaseless muttering of gunfire, but the success or failure of the twenty thousand soldiers he had plunged toward Franklin that afternoon was totally obscured by the fog of war. The one thing both Cheatham and Hood did know at this point was that the charge had not been repulsed. What they could not know was that the Confederates were actually stuck in their exposed positions outside the Union works like animals in a slaughter pen; to go forward was to be shot in the face, to retreat meant being shot in the back. One Confederate testified, “Sixteen of our soldiers sprang up and ran out of the ditch . . . a whole volley of musketry killed them to the last man. I raised in a stooping position, thinking I would run also, but they being killed so quickly caused me to abandon the idea of escape.”
In the town the terrified civilians huddled in basements and wondered what was to become of them. The schoolgirl Frances McEwen remembered that “the patter of the bullets on the blinds was anything but soothing.” Young Harding Figures, who had spent the afternoon on rooftops and trees watching the battle take shape, was now in his house a hundred yards behind the Union lines. “Every minute or two,” he said, “a bullet would strike the house above and frequently sizzle in a pile of potato’s in the cellar.” Harding’s mother had hustled her smaller children to a house farther away, and only Harding, his older brother, and a Negro man remained while the tempest raged above them. Something caused Harding to laugh, and the Negro man said, “Marse Hardin, don’t you know that we will all be killed if you laugh?” Harding’s dog, Fannie, “crouched at [his] feet and moaned piteously.”
Finally, when a large cannon shell tore into the house, Harding ran out of the cellar and up the stairs only to find his home filled with wounded Confederate prisoners, guarded by a few bluecoats. “I made up fires, found pillows,” he said, “and made them all as comfortable as possible by making pallets on the floor and dressing their wounds as best I could.” Soon Figures realized a physician was needed, and he raced down to the Public Square, where he found a doctor. “I shall never forget his reply,” Figures wrote afterward: “‘If they are as bad off as you say, I could not do them any good, and it is too dangerous to risk going up there.’ I was ashamed of him then, and am ashamed of him now, and will not give his name.”
Meantime, Sallie Carter, who that morning had been obliged to purchase a sack of flour for $10 in order to cook two federal officers their breakfast, watched a host of Union wounded coming by her house nearer town. “Some of them asked for water. One was very weak from loss of blood, and I gave him some whisky. Another was badly shot, and I tore one of my lace curtains for a bandage.”
Private Bill Keesy had been on a weird kind of odyssey since being routed with Wagner’s unfortunate brigades at the beginning of the battle. First he had run with everyone else into the town, looking to get to safety across the Harpeth River. But on reaching the bridge, he found guards posted to prevent anyone from crossing. He wandered around for a while, at one point observing two fugitive Union officers swimming across the river to safety, and finally decided to go back to the front and try to find some part in the battle. Walking down the “fair street, which one hour ago [had been] a thing of beauty,” he described it now as “literally covered with wounded, dying and dead men. They are lying with their heads toward the fences and buildings and their feet toward the streets,” he said. Their cries and moans, coupled with the brays of mules, the clink of surgeons’ tools, orders being shouted by officers galloping past, and the dull racket of the carnage still in progress led him to imagine that he was “just awakening from some horrible nightmare.”
Before darkness closed in, General Schofield had been observing the action from his command post a mile behind the lines at Fort Granger on Figures Hill, which, as one participant put it, was “well out of harm’s way” on the far side of the Harpeth. A fellow general later charged it was common knowledge in the army that Schofield was personally cautious “to an eminent degree” and reluctant “to expose his carcass to the fire of the rebels.” Captain Shellenberger characterized the conduct of his commanding general this way: “When Stanley started for the front, Schofield started for the rear.” Whatever the case, from Figures Hill, Schofield had a commanding view of almost the whole battlefield. One of his surgeons, who had joined the general and his staff to observe the scene, remembered fol
lowing with his eyes the black cabbage-sized shells as they arced out of the artillery at Fort Granger and struck at Hood’s advancing lines.
As the Confederate army marched toward him on a two-mile front, Schofield waited impatiently for Wagner’s little rear guard to fall back to the Union breastworks, but impatience turned to horror when the vast gray host began to envelop and grind up those helpless men. Furious at Wagner for having left his two brigades exposed to the tender mercies of Cheatham’s whole corps, Schofield later suggested that not only Wagner but the individual brigade commanders, Lane and Conrad, as well should “be court martialed and shot. My heart sank withm me,” Schofield said, as he witnessed Cheatham’s men mauling their way into his lines behind his fleeing federals.
The Union commander’s anxiety became indescribable as the Confederates pressed on to the very grounds of the Carter house, threatening to pierce his center irrevocably, but his heavy heart was lifted by the charge of Opdycke’s brigade and Reilly’s reserve, which he characterized as “magnificent.”
Meantime, though Hood’s attack on the federal center had stalled, there was still Stewart’s entire corps charging down on the right, and, over on the far left, the nearly corps-sized elements under Bate, including his division, plus Johnson’s division of Lee’s corps, as well as Chalmers’s dismounted cavalry—perhaps seven thousand in all—were beginning to make their attack.