Battle of Franklin II

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The Second Battle of Franklin (more popularly known as The Battle of Franklin) was fought at Franklin, Tennessee, on November 30, 1864, as part of the Franklin-Nashville Campaign of the American Civil War. It was one of the worst disasters of the war for the Confederate States Army. While the Union army left the field after the battle, the Confederate army paid a horrible price for it.

Franklin followed the Battle of Spring Hill of the previous day. The Confederate Army of Tennessee, commanded by General John Bell Hood, had failed to destroy part of the Union force in Tennessee, allowing the Union Army of the Ohio, commanded by Major General John M. Schofield, to escape. Hood had hoped to destroy Schofield before he could link up with the Army of the Cumberland, commanded by Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas, farther north in Nashville, Tennessee. That combined Union force would be over 60,000 men, almost twice as large as Hood's army. As the armies met at Franklin, Hood had approximately 38,000 men to Schofield's 32,000.

Schofield's advanced guard arrived in Franklin at about 6:00 a.m., after a forced march north from Spring Hill. Brigadier General Jacob Dolson Cox, a division commander temporarily commanding the Union XXIII Corps (and later governor of Ohio), immediately began preparing strong defensive positions around breastworks originally constructed for the First Battle of Franklin in 1863. The defensive line formed approximately a semicircle around the city, from northwest to southeast; the other half of the semicircle was the Harpeth River.

Schofield's decision to defend at Franklin with his back to a river seems odd. The reason was that he had insufficient pontoon bridges available to cross the river; the bridges had been left behind in his advance to Spring Hill due to lack of wagons to transport them. Now he needed time to repair the permanent bridges spanning the river and calculated that the breastworks were well positioned and adequate to delay Hood's inevitable assault.

By noon the Union line was ready. Clockwise from the northwest were the divisions of Maj. Gen. Nathan Kimball (from the IV Corps), Thomas H. Ruger (XXIII), and Cox (XXIII). Two brigades of the IV Corps division under George D. Wagner were forward, screening the Confederate approach. Thomas J. Wood's IV Corps division was posted north of the Harpeth. Schofield planned to withdraw across the river by 6:00 p.m. if Hood had not arrived by then.

Hood's army arrived at 3:00 p.m. He was noted for his aggressive, sometimes reckless battlefield leadership. Over the objections of his top generals, he ordered a frontal assault in the dwindling afternoon light against the Union forces, now strongly entrenched behind three lines of breastworks. Many historians believe that Hood, still angry that the Federal army had slipped past his troops the night before at Spring Hill, acted irrationally in ordering the attack. The Confederates attacked on the southern end of the Union line, with Benjamin F. Cheatham's corps on the left of the assault, Alexander P. Stewart's on the right.

Hood's attack initially enveloped Wagner's forward brigades, which fled back to the main breastworks. Blue and gray troops were intermingled, which made the Union soldiers defending the line reluctant to fire on the approaching masses. This caused a weak spot in the Union line at the Carter House as an inexperienced regiment, just arrived from Nashville, broke and fled with Wagner's troops. The Confederate divisions of Patrick Cleburne, John C. Brown, and Samuel G. French converged on this spot. An heroic counterattack by the brigade of Emerson Opdycke and two of Cox's regiments sealed the gap after thirty minutes of fierce hand-to-hand combat.

Over and over the Confederates smashed headlong and futilely into the Union line. Just before dark, the division of Maj. Gen. Edward "Allegheny" Johnson arrived and it had no more luck than its predecessors. By 9:00 p.m. the fighting subsided. The overall attack had been awesome, described by some as a tidal wave, and known as the "Pickett's Charge of the West". But it was actually much larger than than the famous charge at Gettysburg. In the East, 12,500 Confederates crossed a mile of open ground in a single assault that lasted about 50 minutes. In Franklin, some 20,000 marched into the guns across two miles and conducted seventeen distinct assaults lasting over five hours.

Across the river to the east, Confederate cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest attempted to turn the Union left flank, but the Union cavalry under James H. Wilson repulsed his advance.

Schofield, who spent the battle in Fort Granger (just across the Harpeth River, northeast of Franklin), ordered a nighttime withdrawal to Nashville, starting at 11:00 p.m. Although there was a period in which the Union army was vulnerable, straddling the river, Hood was too stunned to take advantage of it. The Union army reached the works of Nashville on December 1.

The devastated Confederate force was left in control of Franklin, but its enemy had escaped again. Typically, a Civil War battle is deemed a victory for the army that forces its opponent to withdraw, but Hood's "victory" came at a frightful cost. More men of the Confederate Army of Tennessee were killed in five hours at Franklin than in two days at the Battle of Shiloh. The Confederates suffered 6,252 casualties, including 1,750 killed and 3,800 wounded. Their military leadership in the West was decimated, including the loss of such skilled generals as Patrick Cleburne. Fifteen Confederate generals were casualties (6 killed, the rest wounded and/or captured), and 65 field grade officers were lost. Union casualties were 189 killed, 1,033 wounded, 1,104 missing.

The Army of Tennessee was all but destroyed at Franklin. Nevertheless, Hood immediately advanced against the entire Union Army of the Cumberland, firmly entrenched at Nashville with the Army of the Ohio, leading his battered forces to further, and final, disaster in the Battle of Nashville.

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Battle Cry of Freedom, historian James M. McPherson wrote,

Having proved even to Hood's satisfaction that they could assault breastworks, the Army of Tennessee had shattered itself beyond the possibility of ever doing so again.

The battlefield today

The Carter House, which stands today and is open to visitors, was at the center of the Union lines; it and its outbuildings still show more than a thousand bullet holes. Much of the rest of the Franklin battlefield has been lost to commercial development. The spot where Cleburne fell, for instance, is now covered by a pizzeria. However, city officials and historic-preservation groups have recently placed a new emphasis on saving what remains of the land over which this terrible battle raged. In 2005 it was announced that the Pizza Hut restaurant was purchased by a preservation group and would be removed. But the Civil War Preservation Trust continues to rank the Franklin battlefield as one of the ten most endangered in the U.S.

References

• Eicher, David J., The Longest Night: A Military History of the Civil War, Simon & Schuster, 2001, ISBN 0-684-84944-5.
• Esposito, Vincent J., West Point Atlas of American Wars, Frederick A. Praeger, 1959.
• Foote, Shelby, The Civil War, A Narrative: Red River to Appomattox, Random House, 1974, ISBN 0-394-74913-8.
• McPherson, James M., Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford History of the United States), Oxford University Press, 1988, ISBN 0-195-03863-0.

External links

• West Point Atlas map, Battles of Spring Hill and Franklin (http://www.dean.usma.edu/history/web03/atlases/american%20civil%20war/acw%20pages/franklin_spring_hill.htm)
• Battle website (http://www.americancivilwar.50megs.com/BattleFranklin01.html)
• Carter House Museum (http://www.carter-house.org/index.html)
• Civil War Preservation Trust report on Franklin (http://www.civilwar.org/news/topten2005/franklin2005.htm)