Franklin

On November 30, 1864, Union and Confederate forces clashed at Franklin, Tennessee, a major engagement within the larger Franklin-Nashville Campaign of the Civil War. Few episodes brought the Confederate States Army closer to catastrophe. Lieutenant General John Bell Hood pushed his Army of Tennessee into repeated frontal attacks against entrenched Union lines held by Major General John Schofield, yet the assaults failed to stop Schofield from carrying out an orderly, planned retreat toward Nashville.

Eighteen brigades organized into six infantry divisions, together comprising roughly 100 regiments and nearly 20,000 soldiers, made up the Confederate attacking force, an action later likened to a western counterpart of Pickett's Charge. The cost proved staggering, both in manpower and command: fourteen Confederate generals fell as casualties, with six killed outright, seven wounded, and one taken prisoner, while 55 regimental commanders were also lost. Following this bloodshed, the Army of Tennessee suffered further defeat at the hands of George H. Thomas during the Battle of Nashville. What remained of Hood's force retreated with only about half the troops it had commanded at the campaign's outset, leaving the army effectively broken as a fighting unit for the rest of the conflict.

This clash in 1864 was not the first time armies had met near Franklin. An earlier and far smaller confrontation had taken place there on April 10, 1863, when Confederate cavalry under Major General Earl Van Dorn carried out a reconnaissance in force.

Background

After his setback in the Atlanta campaign, Hood hoped to draw Major General William T. Sherman into a fight by targeting the railroad line supplying him between Chattanooga and Atlanta. Sherman chased Hood only briefly before choosing another path: severing his own army from those supply lines and living off the countryside during his now-famous March to the Sea, which ran from Atlanta to Savannah. This choice spared him from having to guard hundreds of miles of track against endless raids, a task he believed would cost him "a thousand men monthly and gain no result" in fighting Hood's forces.

With Sherman's army marching away, the combative Hood found himself free to act, and his Army of Tennessee could either strike at Sherman or turn on the forces left behind to guard against him. That defensive duty in Tennessee fell to Major General George H. Thomas, who led the Army of the Cumberland. His main strength in Middle Tennessee consisted of the IV Corps under Major General David S. Stanley and the XXIII Corps of the Army of the Ohio under Major General John Schofield, together numbering roughly 30,000 men. An additional 30,000 troops under Thomas were stationed in or heading toward Nashville.

Instead of pursuing Sherman through Georgia, Hood chose a bold northward campaign, despite commanding only 39,000 men against a Union presence of 60,000 in Tennessee. His plan called for pushing into Tennessee, defeating fragments of Thomas's army before they could unite, capturing Nashville as a vital hub of manufacturing and supply, and then pressing onward into Kentucky, perhaps reaching the Ohio River.

Hood also anticipated gathering some 20,000 new recruits from Tennessee and Kentucky along the way, after which he intended to unite with Lee's army in Virginia, an ambition the historian James M. McPherson later called "scripted in never-never land." Though he had healed from severe wounds to his leg and arm suffered earlier in the war, Hood still endured pain and reduced mobility from them. He used the first three weeks of November to resupply his army quietly in northern Alabama before launching the offensive.

On November 21 the Army of Tennessee departed Florence, Alabama, catching Union forces off guard, since their two wings sat 75 miles apart, one at Pulaski and the other in Nashville. Through rapid marching that covered 70 miles in just three days, Hood attempted to slip between these two forces and destroy them individually. Schofield, however, who commanded both his own XXIII Corps and Stanley's IV Corps, responded shrewdly by pulling back quickly from Pulaski toward Columbia, a town holding a vital bridge over the Duck River along the northern turnpike. Although Confederate cavalry under Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest inflicted losses on the retreating Federals, they still reached Columbia and threw up fortifications only hours before Hood's men arrived on November 24. Between that date and November 29, Schofield held Hood at bay there, and what became known as the "Battle of Columbia" amounted mostly to skirmishing and artillery exchanges as each army regrouped.

On November 28, Thomas instructed Schofield to prepare to withdraw north toward Franklin, mistakenly believing that Major General A. J. Smith's XVI Corps would soon arrive from Missouri. He wanted their combined strength to make a stand against Hood along the Harpeth River at Franklin rather than the Duck River line at Columbia. Early the next morning, November 29, Hood sent the corps of Benjamin F. Cheatham and Alexander P. Stewart on a flanking maneuver, crossing the Duck River at Davis's Ford east of the town. Meanwhile two divisions from Stephen D. Lee's corps, along with most of the army's artillery, stayed south of the river to convince Schofield that a direct attack on Columbia was coming.

By noon that day, Hood's flanking move had placed Schofield in serious peril. His command was scattered: part of his wagon train, artillery, and a portion of the IV Corps had already been sent to Spring Hill, nearly ten miles north, while the remainder of the IV and XXIII Corps was still marching up from

Aftermath

After Johnson's assault collapsed, Hood set aside further offensive moves for the night and turned his attention toward renewing the attacks the next morning. Schofield, however, ordered his infantry across the river beginning at