Chalmers’s dismounted division—actually, it was something less than that in numbers—easily drove in Kimball’s skirmishers, but when it had pushed up to the federal line, Chalmers later reported, “My force was too small to justify an attempt to storm them, and I could only hold my position.” Had he connected with Bate and told that general what the situation was in his front—or had Bate himself gone over to take a look—it is not inconceivable that between the two of them they could have dislodged Kimball and turned the weaker federal right flank in a rush. In any case, that was not what happened, and, as elsewhere that afternoon, Hood’s assault bogged down.
As night enveloped the bloody field, there was one final card left for Hood to play. The army corps of General Stephen Dill Lee had not arrived at the Winstead Hills until 4 P.M., well after the charge by Cheatham’s and Stewart’s corps had commenced, but Hood immediately ordered Lee to move his leading division, belonging to Major General Edward Johnson, onto the field and into the fight “if necessary” and to personally go find Cheatham and coordinate with him. About dark Lee finally located Cheatham and told him that part about “if necessary,” to which the amazed Cheatham responded that not only Johnson but anybody else Lee had on hand was needed “at once.”
So Johnson and his men were filed off the pike to the west and groped their way in darkness across the Franklin plain to a position between Bate’s and Brown’s divisions where finally, around 7 P.M., they were able to form up for an assault. The Mississippi brigades of Generals Jacob Sharp and Arthur Manigault and the Alabamians of General Zachariah Deas were set forward with instructions to forgo the rebel yell and make a silent stealthy rush on the federal works. It almost worked, remembered General Sharp: “We were within thirty paces of the enemy’s works when the darkness was lighted up as if by an electric display.” Cannon and rifle flashes illuminated the field as the Confederates scrambled up to the ditch and over into the works. This new onslaught caught Ruger’s blue-clad division off guard, and for a moment it seemed as though a breakthrough finally was possible. Sharp’s Mississippians managed to capture several stands of Union colors, and the fighting along this front was hand to hand and as savage as anything else that had been seen that day—which is saying a lot—but in the end it too stalled as Ruger’s men poured volley after volley into the Confederates, including General Manigault, who was shot in the head.
Soon a big autumn moon rose up and loomed low over the Winstead Hills, bathing the Golgothan scene with an eerie silver glow. Men were still firing, but the intensity of the battle began to slacken under its sheer weight. The Union soldiers had had virtually no sleep or rest since the long retreat from Columbia began two days before, and the Confederates were not much better off. Now between the diminishing cracks of rifle shots, a horrible and uncanny sound rose off the smoky floor of the Harpeth valley—the pathetic pleadings and cries from thousands of mangled men.
14
All Those Dead Heroes
Late that night as the fighting finally died away and quiet settled over the valley, behind the Union lines there was a kind of collective disbelief at what had happened. The analogy the soldiers most commonly used to describe the Confederate charge was an ocean—a “living sea” or “cresting wave.” One soldier colorfully compared the charging and receding Confederate lines with “the brown seaweed carried by the white-capped waves” from the point of view of someone looking down on the ocean from the Cliff Road at Newport. Most were filled with admiration and awe. A colonel on Thomas’s staff who had been sent to Franklin as liaison said it was “impossible to exaggerate the fierce energy” of the Confederates, who he said fought “with what seemed the very madness of despair.” Another federal said, “I never saw men put in such a terrible position as Cleburne’s division was for a few minutes. The wonder is that any of them escaped death or capture.”
For many soldiers in Hood’s army, however, there were no such words. “To describe truly that which followed is beyond the power of tongue or pen,” one officer said. A private later wrote, “I cannot describe it. It beggars description. I will not describe it.” A colonel on Stewart’s staff wrote his wife, “I am tired of the sickening details. You can see our dreadful loss from published accounts.” Another said, “The scene that met my gaze baffles description.” And these were men who had seen much during four years of war.
As the battle died away, Frank Cheatham came forward from his headquarters on Merrill’s Hill and began to traverse the battlefield, looking into the faces of the dead by lantern light. Seeing firsthand the carnage that had befallen his “boys,” as he called them, “great big tears ran down his cheeks and he began to sob like a child.” Later Cheatham was to say, “You could have walked all over the field upon dead bodies without stepping upon the ground. I never saw anything like that field, and I never want to again.”
Around midnight, Colonel W. D. Gale, A. P. Stewart’s adjutant, rode with his general to Hood’s headquarters, where the commanding general was holding a council of war. When Hood asked for a report from his three corps commanders, Stewart told him his corps was “all cut to pieces; that there was no organization left except with the artillery.” Cheatham’s report “was even more despondent and gloomy.” Finally, Hood “looked fiercely” at Lee, and asked, “Are you, too, going back on me?” Lee replied that one of his divisions was “badly cut up,” but that he still had two left. There and then Hood announced to his astonished lieutenants that he planned to continue the attack in the morning, now that Lee had brought all the artillery onto the field. The plan was to open up on the federals with a daybreak barrage from one hundred guns, after which the whole army would charge the breastworks again at 9 A.M.
Leaving Stewart and the other corps commanders to sort out the details with Hood, Gale rode back across the Franklin plain toward the scene of slaughter, shaking his head at the idea of a renewed assault, which he called “a bitter prospect for our poor fellows.” As he neared the breastworks just to the left of the pike, the spot where Strahl and his men had been cut down so savagely that afternoon, he was “struck by the stillness in the enemy’s works, and asked the officer nearest [him] if the enemy had not gone.” The officer said they had; that he had just a party to investigate, and they had “found no one there.”
* * *
Schofield had indeed pulled out. In fact, he had all his wagons across the Harpeth even before the attack began, but he was afraid to withdraw the army with Hood’s legions about to bear down on him, for fear of being overtaken in the rear. But now that the Confederate assault had failed, Schofield was on the move, in spite of Cox’s strenuous pleadings that they should stay and grind up the rest of the Army of Tennessee at sunrise. Schofield gave as his reason for retreating a telegram he had received from Thomas at 3:30 that afternoon, before the Confederate ranks even hit his line, telling him to move back to Nashville. Thomas’s wire had been in response to an earlier message from Schofield saying, “I do not think I can hold [Hood],” but that, of course, was before he had done exactly that. In any event, shortly before 9:00 Schofield began quietly to move his brigades across the river, so that by midnight the only Union soldiers left to occupy Franklin were the dead and wounded he left behind.
As it became apparent that Schofield had abandoned the field, the Confederates slowly began to approach the town. Chalmers went in on the left, up the Carter’s Creek Pike, while others picked their way through the gap where the breastworks intersected the Columbia Pike, the scene of so much bloodshed—probably half the dead on both sides lay within a few hundred yards on either side of this grim landmark. Meantime, the citizens of Franklin began to emerge from their cellar holes. A few buildings in town, including the stables and the Odd Fellows Hall, had been set afire, and some people were worried that the whole town might be burned. Soon, however, the flames were extinguished, and people began to wander about or open their doors to the arriving Confederate soldiers. Frances McEwen, the schoolgirl, remembered that the first
to arrive at her house was General Bate, a family friend, “all bespattered with mud and blackened with powder, but a grand and glorious soldier under it all.”
Over at the Carter house, the “seventeen souls” came out of their hole to find the house filled with Confederate soldiers and the parlor carpet “wet with blood.” Alice McPhail Nichol remembered “seeing a lot of soldiers in Yankee uniform coming down the stairs with a Confederate officer. He had captured them in an upstairs room. There were thirty of them, and they had never fired a gun.” Not long afterward, as she was standing on the porch, General Thomas Benton Smith rode up and, saluting, asked, “Missie, is this where Squire Carter lives?” When she said it was, Smith told her, “Tell him Captain Carter is severely wounded and I will show him where to find him.”
At this dire news, a search party of family members, including old Fountain Branch Carter, trudged out across the grisly fields, their lamplights reflecting on the faces of the dead and dying. Presently, the older Carter found his son, barely alive and delirious, and with the help of some soldiers brought him to the house. “I can see his limp legs and arms now, with his captain’s uniform and cavalry boots and spurs. He had a black hat with a plume in it,” wrote Alice Nichol. A surgeon cut the bullet out from over his eye, but Tod Carter died, at home, in his bed.
Houses and mansions not only in Franklin but all over the valley of the Harpeth began to fill up with a seemingly endless stream of wounded. At Carnton, the elegant brick estate of Colonel Randall McGavock, which lay in the rear of Stewart’s line, in “every room, every spare space, niche, and corner under the stairs, in the hall, everywhere” lay the bleeding and dying survivors of the charge. Throughout the night, Mrs. McGavock supervised her home as a hospital as the surgeons’ saws and probes did their grim work. When the doctors ran out of bandages, she gave them linen, “then her towels and napkins, then her sheets and tablecloths, then her husband’s shirts and her own undergarments.” But they still came on, until not only the house but the porches and all the outbuildings and even the massive lawns were completely occupied by the wounded and the dead.
Uncle Wiley Howard, General States Rights Gist’s loyal servant, received news from one of the wounded that Gist was shot somewhere on the battlefield, and determined to go and find him. “It tuck me er long time ter make my way. De ground wuz piled wid wounded men an wid dead men. Sometimes I stopped en done what I could. I wuz halted four time. ‘Who goes dar?’ dey wud say. I sez, ‘I’m Wiley, en I want Marse States.’ After a while I got ter de hospital. At de hospital I find Dr. Wright, er friend of Marse States. He sez, ‘What does yer want, Wiley?’ I sez, ‘I come ter see about de General.’ Dr. Wright says, ‘I done all I could, Wiley, but he died at half past eight. He suffered very much et fust, but towards de end, de pain wuz but little. Once or twice he sez, “Take me ter my wife.”’”
A chill mist settled over the valley during the night, and by sunrise a drenching dew had blanketed the field almost as if it had rained. Rising over the trees east of the Harpeth, the sunlight of this first day of December revealed a tableau as chilling as any devised in Dante’s worst nightmare—or, for that matter, the Book of Revelations. More than two thousand dead men lay in inconceivably grotesque positions; at places in the ditch the bodies were stacked seven deep. Some dead men were actually standing, propped up by other fallen comrades. Some were frozen in the act of loading or firing their weapons. Others, blue and gray, were fixed in the act of bayonetting each other. Regimental and company commanders lay with hat in one hand and sword in the other. In front of the federal batteries there were not so much men but parts of men: limbs, trunks, and heads. Not a few of the dead were found with their thumbs gnawed to a pulp, as they chewed them in agony before they died. So many bullets had been fired from the federal works that the torn-up ground, where it was not covered by bodies or the carcasses of horses, for acres all along the line “resembled fields recently raked or harrowed.” West of the pike at the locust grove through which Bate’s and Johnson’s men had passed, the trees that had not been shot down outright were stripped of all their leaves and limbs and bark.
It almost defied reason that anything human could have lived through this, but many did. Six or seven thousand men lay wounded, moaning and begging for water while squads of infirmary corps troops wandered about, hauling them away on litters. As the residents of Franklin began to come onto the field to look for relatives or friends or just to lend assistance, young Harding Figures came upon an old Confederate who was sitting up. His jaw had been torn off by a grape shot, and his tongue and lip were hanging down on his breast. “I knelt down and asked him if I could do anything for him,” Figures said. “He had a little piece of pencil and an envelope, and I shall never forget the impression made by what he wrote: ‘No; John B. Hood will be in New York before three weeks.’ ”
Soon the Franklin citizens were joined by people from other towns in the surrounding countryside who had heard the battle in progress and now came to pick sadly across the battlefield. So many of Hood’s army—more than half—were from Tennessee that the entire state was “plunged into mourning.” More than one Confederate soldier remembered with grim irony the sign they had passed when they crossed the state line from Alabama: TENNESSEE—A FREE HOME OR A GRAVE.”
By midmorning details were busy collecting the bodies of enlisted men—what a Confederate soldier called “all those dead heros”—and burying them in mass graves for more than a mile and a half on both sides of the Columbia Pike. They dug the trenches two and a half feet deep and laid the Confederate men out two to a grave, covering their faces with pieces of oilcloth or blankets. At the head of everyone who could be identified, they put small wooden name markers. The federal dead received somewhat rougher care. They were simply piled pellmell into the ditch by the breastworks—most after being stripped of their clothes—and a foot or two of dirt shoveled on top of them.
The dead Confederate generals and other officers were treated with a reverence believed due their rank. Most were removed to Carnton, the McGavock mansion, and laid out side by side on the wide back gallery. At dawn, a Mississippi officer who had been positioning artillery for Hood’s now canceled barrage came across the body of Pat Cleburne, about fifty yards from the breastworks, “lying flat upon his back, as if asleep, his military cap partly over his eyes. He had on a new gray uniform . . . unbuttoned and open. He had on a white linen shirt, which was stained with blood on the front part of the left side. This was the only sign of a wound I saw on him. He was in his sock feet, his boots having been stolen. His watch, sword belt and other valuables all gone, his body having been robbed during the night.”
The officer, John McQuaide, saw an ambulance up at the breastworks that was in the charge of Reverend Thomas Markham, the Presbyterian chaplain of Featherstone’s brigade. Markham was at that time loading the body of General John Adams into the ambulance; when told that Cleburne had been found, he went and got him, too. Markham drove the bodies of Cleburne and Adams over to Carnton, where they were laid out on the McGavock veranda beside the body of Otho Strahl, who had been brought there earlier. Shortly afterward, soldiers discovered the body of Hiram Granbury, and it was placed alongside the rest of the generals on the McGavock porch, “perfectly protected and cared for until their friends removed them.”
What the Confederates Saw
The Columbia Turnpike, looking north from the hase of the Winstead Hills (courtesy of the U.S. Army Military History Institute)
What the Federals Saw
The view from Carter’s cotton gin, looking south toward the Winstead Hills (courtesy of the U.S. Army Military History Institute)
From the Columbia Turnpike, a view of Carter’s cotton gin house, where some of the most severe fighting took place (courtesy of the U.S. Army Military History Institute)
The Columbia Turnpike, looking north toward the Carter House, where General Opdycke launched his last-ditch attack (photograph taken ca. 1900; printed courtesy of the
U.S. Army Military History Institute)
The McGavock House (Carnton), where the bodies of the dead Confederate generals were placed (courtesy of the Carter House, Franklin, Tennessee)
Confederate Cavalry Commander General Nathan Bedford Forrest
General James Chalmers, who bore the brunt of the Confederate cavalry fighting at Franklin
The Tennessee state capitol at Nashville, the main objective of the Nashville campaign
The Federal gun emplacements on the capitol’s veranda
The outer line at Nashville, December 16, 1864, beyond which Thomas has just advanced his army
Rear-guard Union troops watching the action during the battle, December 16, 1864
The Battle of Nashville, observed from the grounds of the Military Institute
A Nashville hillside where local citizens turned out to watch the final battle
General John Bell Hood, as he appeared during the Nashville campaign (courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society)
Cleburne’s devoted aide, Lieutenant Mangum, arranged for coffins, and as he stood sadly on the porch during the death watch, he removed a “lady’s finely embroidered handkerchief’ that someone had placed over Cleburne’s face, substituting another, saying, “This handkerchief was sent to him from Mobile, and I think he was engaged to the young lady.”