Private Sam Watkins was on the far Confederate left as Wilson’s men poured in on them. He recalled the bluecoats rising out of some bushes and calling for their surrender, at which point he and his men threw down their rifles. But then, Watkins said, the federals raised up and “deliberately took aim,” killing two of his surrendered companions. Watkins recounts how he snatched up his own gun and “killed the Yankee who killed Billy Carr,” then ran into the woods with “a hail storm of bullets” behind him.
Colonel Gale, Stewart’s adjutant, had a commanding view of the Union advance as it “poured over in clouds” into Bate’s division. “We could see his whole line in our front,” Gale wrote his wife, “every move, attack or retreat. It was magnificent; what a grand sight it was. We could see the capitol all day, and the churches.”
As the divisions of Smith’s and Schofield’s corps bore down on the hill occupied by Bate’s men, they struck first a position occupied by the 20th Tennessee, a regiment commanded by Colonel Bill Shy, a likable twenty-five-year-old Franklin farmer. Fighting soon became hand to hand as federals warmed into the Confederate lines, and Shy, like the rest, leaped into the melee. He had just fired a rifle into the line of blue when he was struck dead by a bullet to the head. After the battle federal troops named the hill he died on after him.
Captain James Cooper, formerly of Shy’s regiment, was now adjutant of a brigade commanded by twenty-six-year-old Thomas Benton Smith, known as “the Boy General.” McArthur’s lead brigade, led by Colonel W. L. McMillen, slammed into Shy’s Hill, having been ordered “not to cheer or fire a shot until the works should be gained.” They cheered anyway, however; Cooper, who was just below the crest of the hill, remembered it. “I heard someone say, ‘look up yonder,’ ” he said, “and on looking I saw the Yankees and our men so mixed that it was scarcely possible to tell one party from the other.” Benton Smith’s graycoats were soon overwhelmed and came dashing down the far side of the slope with the federals in hot pursuit. “Our men had to cross a ploughed field where the mud was knee deep, and the vile Yankees were right after them,” Cooper said, “shooting as fast as the Devil would let them, and he seemed to have very little objection to their shooting as fast as possible. I now felt that the Confederacy was indeed gone up, and that we were a ruined people.”
General Benton Smith, a product of the Nashville Military Institute, was holding the line at all hazards when he realized that most of his men had melted away, and he was surrounded. “Drawing his handkerchief from his pocket and waving it above his head, he commanded the little squad near him to ‘cease firing,’” according to Dr. Deering Roberts, the surgeon of Bate’s division. Disarmed, Smith was marched north toward Nashville, guarded by three federal soldiers, when the party came upon Colonel McMillen, whose brigade had led the Union charge. For no apparent reason, McMillen suddenly attacked Smith with his saber, wantonly striking him three blows that split open his skull and exposed his brain. When they got him to a hospital, the Union surgeon, seeing Smith’s brain oozing from a crack in the skull, remarked, “Well, you are near the end of your battles.” But that was not to be. Somehow Smith survived, but he was confined for most of his remaining sixty years of life in the Tennessee State Hospital for the Insane.
Another of Bate’s brigade commanders, General Henry R. Jackson, had been watching the federal assault on his right when suddenly a host of blue-clad soldiers appeared in his rear. As Jackson tried to make his escape across the marshy fields, his knee-high boots became so loaded with mud he found it impossible to run. An aide persuaded him to remove the boots, but just as he had got one off and was trying to remove the other, they heard somebody shout, “Surrender, damn you!” They looked up to see four federals on a fence row not far away with guns leveled at them. The aide said, “They have got us, General,” and cried out, “We surrender.” As Jackson tried to pull his boot back on, the aide slyly turned down the collar on his uniform to disguise the general’s three-star insigne. But when the Union soldiers arrived on the scene, Jackson stood up and turned his collar back up, whereupon one of the bluecoats walked around him a couple of times, then said, “You are a general!” When Jackson replied, “That is my rank,” the soldier began to whoop and wave his hat and holler, “Captured a general, by God! I will carry you to Nashville myself!”
The break of Bate’s division at Shy’s Hill was the catalyst that sent Hood’s whole line crumbling like a row of dominoes. Stewart’s corps, suddenly realizing the enemy was in their rear, quickly joined the flight. Stewart’s adjutant, Colonel Gale, wrote to his wife, who was the daughter of Bishop-General Polk, “It is impossible to give you any idea of an army frightened and routed. Every man fled for himself.” Seeing that the rout was unstoppable, Gale sent a courier to his boss, Stewart, who was at Hood’s headquarters “to inform him of the fact that he might save himself.” But the courier was killed. Gale then rounded up his clerks and rode to where he thought Hood would be, but all he found were bluecoats, who immediately opened fire on him. Gale dashed away but found the hill in front too steep for his horse to climb, so he galloped on, skirting the hills until he found a spot to go up. “All along,” Gale wrote, “frightened fellows were crying out to me, ‘Let me hold on to your stirrup, for God’s sake. Give me your hand and help me, if you please.”’ At some point his saddle got shot off, and he was dismounted, but, he said, “I twisted my hands in my horse’s mane and was borne to the top of the hill by the noble animal, more dead than alive.”
As the blue line swept along, shooting men in the back, brigade after brigade of Confederates streamed eastward and south, across the woods and fields to Granny White Pike and then to the Franklin Pike, their only route of escape. The break was so sudden that practically all the artillery in the main line had to be abandoned because the horses could not be gotten forward in time to save it. In all, fifty-four guns—more than half the army’s artillery—were lost.
Cheatham and other officers—including Hood himself—tried to rally the routed soldiers but with little success. Sam Watkins reported, “It was like trying to stop the current of the Duck river with a fish net. The army was panic-stricken. The woods everywhere were full of running soldiers. Wagon wheels interlocking each other, soon clogged the road, and wagons, horses and provisions were left indiscriminately.” Cheatham managed to stop one soldier with his horse, but as Cheatham started yelling at another fleeing bunch, the soldier ducked under the general’s horse and continued running. At one point a young staff officer who had not been in the battle but had just come up from some point south started riding among the confused mob, shouting, “Stop. Stop. There is no danger there.” A grizzled old soldier looked up at him and said, “You go to hell—I was there.”
By now the entire Union army was in motion. The pouring rain became mixed with snow as the Confederates ran from one hill to the next “as if the devil himself was after them.” Watching the action through his field glasses, Thomas was elated by the cheering of his soldiers as they swept into Hood’s breastworks. “The voice of the American people,” he called it. An officer on Thomas’s staff gave this colorful description:
It was more like a scene in a spectacular drama than a real incident in war. The hillside in front, still green, dotted with the boys in blue swarming up the slope; the dark background of high hills beyond; the lowering clouds, the waving flags; the smoke slowly rising through the leafless treetops and drifting across the valleys; the wonderful outburst of musketry; the ecstatic cheers. . . .
As his army streamed past him, Hood was fit to be tied. “I beheld for the first and only time a Confederate army abandon the field in confusion,” he said later. With his army in full and uncontrollable retreat his only job was to save as much of it as possible from capture. He frantically dispatched a courier ordering Chalmers to “hold the Granny White Pike at all hazards.” Chalmers gathered up his worried little twobrigade command and began piling up fence rails, trees, and anything else he could find to build a barrier on
the newly threatened section of the pike. Presently, Wilson’s cavalry—all four divisions of it—began arriving on the scene, anxious to seize the pike as a route to smash into Hood’s army, which was headed south on the parallel Franklin Pike three miles to the east. It was now so dark Wilson’s men “could scarcely see their horses’ ears,” but a savage battle broke out anyway, with rifle flashes the only light to discern friend from foe. In the melee there was a strange and brutal hand-to-hand clash between two brigade commands, Union Colonel George Spalding’s and Confederate Colonel E. W. Rucker’s.
Spalding and his men had been trying to cut through Chalmers’s barricade when out of the darkness came a voice, “Who are you, anyhow?” When Spalding said who he was, a rider rushed out of the gloom and grabbed his reins, saying, “I am Colonel Ed Rucker commanding the Twelfth Tennessee Rebel Cavalry. You are my prisoner.” Spurring his horse to a leap, Spalding replied, “Not by a damned sight,” and moved out of reach. At this point Union Captain Joseph Boyer joined in the fray, snatching Rucker’s saber from his hand, but Rucker returned the favor by grabbing Boyer’s saber, and the two commenced a swordfight using each other’s swords. Presently, a pistol shot rang out of the darkness and tore through Rucker’s shoulder, putting him out of the fight. He was taken prisoner by Spalding, and later that night, Union doctors sawed off his arm.
As the corps of Cheatham and Stewart streamed down the Franklin Pike, it fell on Stephen Lee and his men to protect the rear of the army. Lee’s corps had suffered little and inflicted great damage on their enemy that day and thus were in high spirits when they received the shock that the other wings of the army had broken and federals were moving on their flanks. Seeing the collapse, Lee dashed on horseback to the Franklin Pike, where he found a few artillery pieces and a stand of colors. Seizing the colors, Lee rode among the fleeing men of Cheatham and Stewart and roared at them, “Rally, men, for God’s sake. This is the place for brave men to die!” A drummer boy took up the challenge and began to beat the long roll, and slowly men began to stop and try to organize themselves into some sort of unit. Some of Lee’s corps had also begun to retreat in disorder, but Lee shrewdly rounded up General Dan Reynolds’s brigade and General Henry Clayton’s division to hold up the federals at points along the Franklin Pike so the rest of Hood’s army could escape. This they accomplished perfectly, under a cold sky that cleared momentarily, bathing the landscape in the glow of a silver wintermoon.
Meantime, Thomas and his staff had ridden in the dark out to where Wilson and his cavalry were still embroiled in a running fight with Chalmers. Coming up beside Wilson with a broad grin, the usually taciturn Thomas was clearly beside himself over the day’s events and “shouted so that he might have been heard a quarter mile: ‘Dang it to hell, Wilson, didn’t I tell you we could lick ‘em, didn’t I tell you we could lick ‘em if they [Washington] would only let us alone!’ ”
18
A River of Fire
As midnight tolled the gloomy Sunday, arguably the darkest day in the Southern Confederacy, Private Sam Watkins unhitched a horse from an abandoned team and rode down toward Franklin until he found a hospital where a doctor sewed up several bullet wounds he had received trying to flee the federals. When he realized the hospital was near Hood’s new headquarters, he went personally into Hood’s tent to ask for a “wounded furlough,” to visit his nearby home. Inside, Watkins claimed, he found Hood “much agitated and affected, pulling his hair with one hand and crying like his heart would break.”
All along the pike from Nashville to Franklin, Confederate soldiers were either walking south or had collapsed from exhaustion by the roadside. Wilson’s cavalry corps and Wood’s Fourth Infantry Corps were pursuing and harassing them, but after the initial break few prisoners were taken. Hood’s first hurdle was to get the Army of Tennessee safely across the Harpeth River at Franklin, and this he did, though not without some trouble. As the troops crossed through the town, they had the dispiriting experience of marching past the grizzly killing field of two weeks before, where the rains had washed away some of the graves and decaying arms, legs, and even heads protruded from the ground. To add to this, a putrefying stench hung over the ground, emanating from dozens of unburied horses, including the mount of General Adams, which remained where it and its owner had died, halfway across the old Union parapet. Meantime, a division of Wilson’s cavalry had crossed below Franklin and immediately began attacking Lee’s rear guard, which still consisted mainly of Clayton’s division.
One of the officers of that outfit, Colonel Robert Lindsay, was commanding a regiment of Louisianans in the brigade of General Randall Gibson. Lindsay recalled that the bullets were flying thick and fast as he, Gibson, and a surgeon rode down the pike accompanying Lee. “As General Lee sat facing the enemy,” Lindsay said, “I heard the ball strike the parlon of his foot. I said, ‘General Lee is wounded’ and about this time Dr. Stewart was wounded, and I said to General Gibson, the next is for him, then mine. But General Gibson and myself got off scot free.” Lee’s wound was painful but not fatal, and he stayed in command for several hours before turning things over to his senior division commander and retiring to an ambulance.
Meantime, the rest of Thomas’s army came lumbering southward after Hood, rebuilding as they went the railroads and bridges the Confederates were destroying behind them. As Hood’s men retraced their own bloody footprints from Franklin to Spring Hill, then to Columbia, they traveled exceedingly light, having lost much equipment during the Nashville disaster. Thomas, however, was finding the going tough. The countryside was virtually stripped of forage, streams were swollen by the rains, and the troops often were held up to wait for the ration trains. This, of course, caused the carping from Washington to begin anew, the subject again being Thomas’s alleged sluggishness. Grant started it earlier when he urged Thomas to give Hood “no rest,” adding, “Much is now expected.” Halleck soon got in on the act, telegraphing, “Permit me General, to urge the vast importance of a hot pursuit of Hood’s Army. Every possible sacrifice should be made . . .” and so on.
Thomas, probably feeling his oats from the spectacular success at Nashville, finally sat down and gave Washington a dose of its own medicine. Insisting that he was doing all he could to capture Hood, Thomas pointed out, “We cannot control the elements . . . pursuing an enemy through an exhausted country, over mud roads completely sogged with heavy rains, is no child’s play,” and went on to complain that Sherman had taken with him the best divisions of the army, leaving for Thomas only a “disorganized” force. The effect of this wintry blast on the secretary of war was to produce what amounted to an apology, with Stanton replying that the government “has the most unbounded confidence in your skill, vigor and determination.” This seemed to end the matter, at least for a while.
When Hood’s lines around Nashville began to collapse, Forrest had been sent an urgent message warning him to leave Murfreesboro and get back to the army as soon as possible. This he did, heading southwestward and driving with him a large store of beef and hogs and captured prisoners and rejoining the army near Columbia. By now the strain of the campaign was wearing on everybody—even Forrest—and for a terrible moment it appeared that one or both of Hood’s two best corps commanders would kill the other.
Frank Cheatham was about to cross his corps over the Duck River when Forrest and his cavalrymen appeared and insisted that they were to cross first. “I think not, Sir. You are mistaken. I intend to cross first and will thank you to move out of the way of my troops,” responded Cheatham. Forrest, who had personally done his share of killing during the past four years, drew his pistol and growled, “If you are a better man than I am, General Cheatham, your troops can cross ahead of mine.” As the standoff grew, “with much tall cursing”—Cheatham and Forrest being among the best cursers in the army—tension mounted in the ranks. Some of Cheatham’s men cocked their rifles, vowing to shoot Forrest or anybody else who did harm to their commander. Finally, Stephen Lee emerged fr
om his ambulance and succeeded in separating the two red-faced generals.
It was obvious to everyone, Hood included, that his army was in terrible shape. In addition to the terrific losses at Franklin, more than four thousand of his men had been captured at Nashville, and the condition of those who were left was deplorable. Many did not even have their weapons. As the ragtag soldiers plodded through Columbia, a resident wrote in his diary, “They are passing all night, going south. They are the worst looking, and most broken down looking set I ever laid eyes on.” And young Isaac Rainey, a cavalryman with Forrest, said: “Not half have blankets, half are without shoes; their feet are tied up in old cloth or gunny sacks.” One of these soldiers was a Tennessean named Carrol Clark who had received a disabling gunshot to the arm way back at the end of the Atlanta campaign and was declared unfit for further service. Nevertheless, he followed the army all the way up to Nashville for no reason other than he “wanted to be with the boys,” and with them now on the long, doleful retreat, all he had for shelter was “a little dog fly, no bigger than a table cloth.” And even this, he said, “I had to slowly tear up, to wrap around my feet.”
It had been Hood’s intention to stop at Columbia and face Thomas on the line of the Duck River. But now he had to reconsider. The one thing evident was that the army had to do something—it couldn’t just run forever. And there was a real prospect that if Hood moved out of Tennessee, there might be mass desertions by the Tennessee troops. Yet the condition of the army was such that Hood was fearful it would be completely destroyed in another major clash with Thomas. “I am afraid that I have been more wicked since I began this retreat than for a long time past,” Hood confided to his friend Chaplain Quintard at Columbia. “I had my heart so set on success—had prayed so earnestly for it—that my heart has been very rebellious.”