Major General Alexander Peter Stewart—“Old Straight” to his soldiers—was a West Point graduate who had resigned from the old army to become a college mathematics and physics teacher before the war. His soft-spoken, studious demeanor could be misleading, for he was also a brazen fighter who had been wounded several times in battle. Just turned forty-three, Stewart led the late Bishop Polk’s corps onto the field as the right wing of Hood’s advance, with orders from Hood to “drive the enemy into the river at all hazards.” However, Stewart—like Bate over on the far left—had a greater distance to travel to reach the Union lines than did Cheatham’s corps, which charged straight up the Columbia Pike. From the aspect of the advancing Confederates, the shape of the battlefield was more or less conical, with the width contracting toward the Union fortifications at the bottom of the cone. Thus the march of both Stewart and Bate had to be made en echelon—what the soldiers called “stair-stepping,” a kind of crablike sidle left or right, in Stewart’s case, left—in order for Hood’s whole line to strike the federal position simultaneously. Trouble was, Stewart did not strike the enemy simultaneously with the other corps—or even with his own corps.
Stewart’s advance was roughly northwesterly, along the Lewisburg Pike. On the left of his march were the tracks of the Alabama-Nashville railroad, which ran almost due north into the far left of the federal line. His divisions were arranged as follows: French on the left, Walthall in the center, and Loring on the right. Things started out pretty well but quickly began to go wrong. As Stewart’s corps neared the Union works, Walthall and Loring encountered obstacles, which left Sam French, alone and unsupported, to slam into the enemy line with his small division of two brigades; his third brigade, General Matthew D. Ector’s, was back in the rear, guarding the pontoon train.
French’s line of march was toward the Carter family cotton gin, an imposing barnlike structure about a hundred yards across the pike from the Carter home. When they got within shooting distance, the Confederates witnessed an astonishing spectacle. Standing exposed on the parapet of the federal breastworks was a man making a speech. This was Colonel John (“Jack”) Casement, commanding the Second Brigade of Cox’s division. “Men, do you see those damn rebel sons of bitches coming?” Casement shouted, “Well, I want you to stand here like rocks and whip hell out of them.” Having delivered this oratory, Casement then “faced about and fired his revolvers until they were empty, and jumped down with the men.”
French hit the Union breastworks at about the same time Cleburne and Brown did, but with even worse success. His regiments had marched right up to the line with bands playing when the first federal volley blasted them full in the face with a terrific sheet of flame. At the same time, artillery in their front and from across the river at Fort Granger let loose a splintering barrage that decimated the leading brigade. These were the Missourians of Brigadier General Francis Marion Cockrell, a dignified-looking thirty-year-old lawyer who had fought in all the bloody early engagements across the Mississippi before joining the Army of Tennessee. Not only did Cockrell’s men find no gap in the works to their front as Cleburne and Brown had, but they also drew the bad luck to attack the part of the Union line that was held by infantrymen armed with the revolutionary Spencer repeating rifles. Observers from the Union side reported that the Missourians marched into this deadly cyclone actually “bent over, with their hats pulled down over their eyes and their arms shielding their faces, as though for protection in a hail storm.”
Probably a third of Cockrell’s brigade were casualties at this point, but the others went on, driving up to the crest of the Union breastworks, where, as instructed, they delivered a massed volley and then pitched down into the mass of bluecoats with bayonets. Some federals were thrown back, but most held firm, and the slaughter continued. Capturing enemy regimental flags was, of course, a matter of great import on both sides. Private J. K. Merrifield, of Opdycke’s brigade, noticed a “fine-looking” Confederate officer advancing with the regimental banner of the 1st Missouri Infantry. A Union volley smashed into the gray line, and it went down in a heap—including the fine-looking officer, who was regimental commander Colonel Hugh Garland of St. Louis, Missouri. On some odd impulse, Merrifield scrambled over the works and rushed forward about a hundred feet to where the Confederate colors had gone down. As he picked up the flag, Garland, who had been shot in the knee and was pinned under several dead bodies, asked Merrifield to “pull a dead man off his leg.” “He then asked me for a drink of water,” Merrifield said. “I leaned over so he could drink out of my canteen without my taking it off my neck.” Garland then asked Merrifield to unbuckle his sword belt, which he was in the process of doing when he saw a second line of Confederates coming, and he rushed back to his own lines carrying the flag, the belt, and Garland’s sword. Moments later Garland was killed by a second shot.
Some of Cockrell’s men managed to push through the federal lines toward the Carter cotton gin, but not Cockrell, who was shot down at the works. Those who got through weren’t all men, either. At least one was a drummer boy “of not more than 15 years, with a drum on his back, belonging to one of the Missouri regiments.” According to Captain Levi Scofield, this boy “foolishly attempted to force his way through one of the embrasures” surrounding a battery of federal artillery and “thrust a fence rail into the mouth of a cannon thinking, by his brave act, to stop the use of that gun. It was heavily loaded at the time and was fired, tearing the poor boy to shreds, so that nothing was found of him.”
Now Walthall’s division began to come up on the right of the beleaguered Sam French. They had had a hard time of it even before they reached the Union line, when, about fifty yards from the breastworks, they encountered a “splendid hedge of osage orange” that stopped them in their tracks. “They were bewildered,” Scofield testified. “They couldn’t get over it; they undertook to pull it away, but the sharp thorns pierced their hands, and they gave that up; then, right in the smoke of our guns they faced to the right and filed through a gap made by a wild charging horse.”
They soon must have wished this gap had not appeared and they could have stayed to contend with the thorny hedge, because these men—Tennesseans of General William Quarles’s brigade and General Dan Reynolds’s Arkansas—were greeted with a gruesome cyclone of artillery fire that literally blew them off their feet.
Captain Aaron Baldwin, commanding the 6th Ohio light artillery, had noticed the Confederates’ plight through the Osage orange and decided to take advantage of it. Seeing that the long gray line had broken up and the men were filing in mass through the break in the hedge, Baldwin ordered his men to take off their shoes and socks and stuff the stocks with bullets from the infantry ammunition boxes. These deadly packets of hosiery, called “dummies,” he crammed into his guns one after the other until the cannon were loaded with them up to the muzzle.
“At every discharge of my gun there were two distinct sounds,” Baldwin reported later, “first the explosion, then the bones.” That the captain was able to distinguish between the blast of his cannon and the subsequent crunching of human bones is testimony enough to the fury of the fight on this part of the line. From his vantage point, Levi Scofield recorded that the Confederate dead in front of Baldwin’s battery “were piled up like snowdrifts in winter time.” John Copley, a private in Quarles’s brigade, told of whole platoons of men being killed in this fashion. “In many places they were lying on their faces in almost as good order as if they had lain down on purpose,” he said, adding that, “the force and wind of the grape and canister would lift us clear off the ground at every discharge.”
Those of Walthall’s men who did reach the ditch found the going there about the same as it was all along the line, and so the work settled down in deadly earnest. The method of choice for both sides was simply to hold up a loaded gun at arm’s length above the parapet and fire it down into the opposite side. “Two lines of men fought with but a pile of dirt between them,” said D. H. Patterson. ?
??In firing, the muzzles of the guns would pass each other, and nine times out of ten, when a man rose to fire he fell back dead.” Another soldier added that “many of the men had both hands shot off.” Another resourceful way of dealing with a persistent enemy shooter was to reach out and snatch him by the hair or collar and drag him back over the fortifications, which was done on numerous occasions. As the grim work continued, corpses and the bodies of the wounded piled up in the ditch, the bottom of which “was covered with blood to the depth of the shoe soles.”
Walthall was having a rough afternoon; his chain of command was by now almost nonexistent. Quarles’s brigade was practically without leadership—Quarles had been shot in the head, his whole staff was killed, and all of his regimental commanders were casualties. Ultimately, the ranking officer in the brigade was a captain. Not only that, but Walthall himself was having impossible trouble coordinating his attack. The thirty-two-year-old former district attorney of Holly Springs, Mississippi, had already had two horses shot from under him that afternoon but still found time for courteous formalities. After the second horse was killed, he looked up to a mounted staff officer and said, “Let me have that horse if you please.” According to William M. Pollard, who was there, the staff officer graciously dismounted, and Walthall got on and was about to ride off when the general, suddenly conscious of the fact that Confederate officers owned their own mounts, turned to the officer and asked, “Has this horse been appraised?” When the officer replied that it had not, Walthall called for someone knowledgeable about horses and “then and there they had an appraisal, and the value of the horse was fixed. All this was done in the twinkling of an eye.”
Things were going no better on the far right of Stewart’s line. There, Major General William Wing (“Old Blizzards”) Loring, who had lost an arm in the war with Mexico, was encountering obstacles just as aggravating as Walthall’s. As they approached the federal line, the brigades of the feisty, forty-four-year-old Loring were forced to cross westward over a railroad cut on the Alabama-Nashville tracks, which ran straight into the Union lines. But this crossing point had been enfiladed by the federal artillery, which could shoot straight down the tracks. As Loring’s men began to cross, they were mowed down in whole ranks, just as ten pins in a bowling alley. Worse, they also encountered the terrible Osage orange hedge, which curved around very close to the federal works at this point. “A wall of fire rose that swept our ranks like hail,” an Alabama soldier from Scott’s brigade recorded. “Poor Captain Stewart, the last I saw of him he was trying to cut a path through the hedge with his sword. He fell with four bullets in him.”
Some of Loring’s two lead brigades—General Thomas M. Scott’s and Winfield S. Featherston’s—managed to get to the ditch, but most were shot down, and still others fell back from the flaming torrent of lead and iron. Loring himself was hopping mad because in the confusion at the railroad cut and the Osage orange hedge some of Walthall’s regiments had become mixed in with his. Finding Walthall directing operations from a small gully, Loring began chastising the Mississippian for allowing this to happen. Walthall listened to all this and then said, “General Loring, this is no time for a personal quarrel. When the battle is over, you will know where to find me.”
Disgusted, Loring rode back to his line, only to find that Scott’s brigade had fallen back, with Scott himself wounded and out of action. Chaplain James M’Neilly, who was organizing the litter bearers, said Loring tried every ploy to rally the men—“commanding, exhorting, entreating, denouncing . . . to no purpose.”
Then, M’Neilly said, as the men streamed past him toward the rear, Loring turned his horse to face the Union lines, to which he must have presented an appalling sight: “He was in full uniform that glittered with golden adornments,” M’Neilly remembered. “His sword belt around him and the broad band across his shoulder and breast were gleaming in gold; his spurs were gilt; his sword and scabbard were polished to the utmost brightness; over his hat drooped a great dark plume of ostrich feathers.”
“He sat perfectly motionless,” M’Neilly said, “glittering in the light of the sinking sun. As the bullets hissed about him thick as hail, he seemed to court or defy death . . . and he cried out, ‘Great God! Do I command cowards?’ ”
Loring got Scott’s men reformed and sent them tearing back into the smoky maelstrom, only to be repulsed again. Nothing living could stand this for long—but now it was General John Adams’s turn to try. His brigade had been in reserve, but now he brought it smashing into the federal position. Early on in the fight the thirty-nine-year-old West Point graduate and career officer in the old army had been severely struck in the shoulder by a bullet, but when urged to leave the field, he replied, “No; I am going to see the men through.” Adams then rode his horse from the rear to the front of his men but apparently became separated from most of them in the heavy smoke of battle because he was several hundred yards to the west of his main body—in front of Walthall’s division, near the cotton gin—when Private Tillman Stevens, of the 65th Illinois, recorded the following:
Just then, for the first time, we noticed Gen. Adams conspicuously. He rode along the line urging his men forward. He then rode through the line and placed himself in front and rode straight toward the colors of the Sixty-fifth Illinois. We looked to see him fall every minute, but luck seemed to be with him. We hoped he would not be killed. He was too brave to be killed. He seemed to be in the hands of the Unseen.
Adams dashed up to the federal works, leaped his horse across the ditch, and bolted up the parapet where the colors of the 65th Illinois were planted. As he reached out to grab them, he was shot down, horse and all, by a point-blank volley from the color guard. The Union soldiers were astonished with admiration for this death-defying act, and when the Confederate charge was repulsed, they rushed to the parapet and dragged Adams from beneath his horse.
“He was perfectly conscious and knew his fate,” remembered Lieutenant Colonel Edward A. Baker. “He asked for water, as all dying men do in battle. . . . One of my men gave him a canteen of water, while another brought an armload of cotton from an old gin nearby, and made him a pillow. The General gallantly thanked them and, in answer to our expressions of sorrow at his sad fate, he said, ‘It is the fate of a soldier to die for his country,’ and expired.” General John Casement, commanding the Union brigade, took Adams’s saddle, watch, ring, and pistol as trophies of war.
Over on the far left of Hood’s line, the forces under Bate were also making their fight. Bate had not, for some reason, come into contact with the left of Brown’s division so as to make a concerted attack. Some remember that Bate struck the Union line before anybody else; others say he struck it afterwards. Whichever the case, he indeed struck it but with mixed results.
Bate had only two thousand men in his division, but he had the whole six-gun battery of Colonel Steven Presstman to support him, and he was supposed to have an additional two thousand of Forrest’s dismounted cavalry fighting with him under General Chalmers on his left. Since he had a longer way to go than the rest of Cheatham’s corps, he may have been late launching his assault against the Union right, which was defended by the strong division of General Thomas H. Ruger. The Georgians of Henry R. Jackson’s brigade and the Tennesseans of Thomas Benton Smith drove the federals from their breastworks, but—as with Brown and Cleburne—the bluecoats simply retired to the second line of entrenchments around the Carter house, and a merciless exchange of fire began. On his left, Bate was not so lucky—if he called it luck—General Jesse J. Finley’s brigade of Floridians, now led by Colonel Robert Bullock, was repulsed as it hit the Union line at the Carter’s Creek Turnpike and retired from the battlefield. Worse, Chalmers’s two thousand dismounted cavalrymen never appeared, according to Bate, “which exposed [his] flank to a furious fire.” At this point, Bate apparently settled down and hoped for the best. Meantime, Jackson’s and Smith’s brigades were undergoing the same kind of steady slaughter as those in other parts of the l
ine.
Here one of the sad ironies of the campaign occurred. Twentyyear-old Captain Theodoric (Tod) Carter was serving as staff officer to General Smith as Bate’s charge led them toward the Union breastworks just a few hundred yards from the Carter house, where young Tod’s father, brother, sisters, and their children were huddling in the cellar. As the brigade passed their rallying point, a home called Everbright belonging to a widow named Bostwick, it passed into an open field where they became “terribly exposed.” Here, within sight of his own home, which he had not seen for two years, Tod Carter was rallying some troops when he was shot down, a bullet in his brain. Moments before, his fellow captain and close friend, James L. Cooper, had been riding beside him: “I told him not to start the men forward too soon,” Cooper remembered, “but his own reckless daring caused his death. His horse, a powerful gray, lay dead a short distance from him. One by one, my true, tried friends were passing away and I felt that unless I received my quietus soon, I would stand alone.”
Although Bate sourly denounced the character of Chalmers’s cooperation in his after-action report, Chalmers had in fact been on the field—though very ineffectively—and in another bitter twist of irony he alone might have had the best opportunity to stage a convincing breakthrough of the federal position. From Spring Hill, Chalmers had been sent by Hood to march toward Franklin on the westerly Carter’s Creek Pike, because Hood simply could not believe that Schofield’s whole army had slipped away up the Franklin Pike right under his nose. Chalmers discovered that no federals had used the Carter’s Creek Pike and so moved on up to Franklin, where he remained, guarding the Confederate left.
Although Chalmers later testified that he faced an enemy “drawn up in two lines of battle behind a double line of intrenchments,” he actually faced no such thing—or at least not anything like the holocaust that the rest of the army was being called upon to deal with. In positioning the Union defenses, Cox had seen that the heavy work of ditching, barricading, constructing abatis, headlogging, and so on extended to the Carter’s Creek Pike. But from the pike westward, as the line curved back to the north near the Harpeth, it was only lightly fortified, and this was the line Chalmers was supposed to assault. It was defended, however, by the three brigades of Stanley’s First Division, commanded by General Nathan Kimball, a forty-two-year-old Indiana doctor who had fought his war in both the eastern and western theaters.