A hundred and thirty autumns ago, the Confederate States of America’s tough but unlucky Army of Tennessee-pugnacious loser of the major campaigns on the Civil War’s western front-followed its destiny of gore and bad generalship to the outskirts of this seemingly placid town.
Two miles south, from a rise in the road between two hills named Winstead and Breezy, the Confederates stared northward at a chilling sight. Intersecting their highway ahead, anchored around a sturdy brick farmhouse, stretched a mile and a half of trenches hastily dug by 28,000 Union troops they had been pursuing for days. The Southerners, roughly equal to their quarry in number, were straining to catch and defeat them before they reached impregnable defenses and formidable reinforcements at Nashville.
The day before at Spring Hill, Tenn., the Confederates had actually gotten between the Federals and the Tennessee capital, but mismanagement and mishandling of orders allowed the Union force to slip quietly past after nightfall. On Nov. 30, 1864, Confederate Cmdr. John Bell Hood, still raging over the Spring Hill debacle, rode up Winstead Hill and reconnoitered the Union lines.
A furious but not brilliant fighter, Hood by then was gravely physically impaired. Having lost a leg at Chickamauga and the use of an arm at Gettysburg, he could sit in his saddle only with difficulty. He, in fact, had been thrown from a mount that very day and was so pain-wracked that many historians assume he was easing his agonies with laudanum-a tincture of opium.
Given his condition and mood, it is hardly surprising that Hood professed to see in the Union’s Franklin defenses only rear guards covering a continued retreat to Nashville. Against the advice of all his senior subordinates, he ordered a frontal charge so disastrous it still haunts students of Civil War history.
“This is where the Army of Tennessee died,” sums up Franklin historian and museum military curator Thomas Cartwright. “In five hours here, about 2,000 men were killed and 5,000 wounded for the South along with 400 killed, 1,300 wounded and 1,200 captured for the North. There were more Confederate casualties here after five hours than after the two days at Shiloh or the three days at Murfreesboro.”
Franklin also boasts, if that is the appropriate term, more generals killed, wounded and captured than “any other battle in the world’s history of warfare,” Cartwright says. No less than six Confederate generals-Irish-born Confederate stalwart Pat Cleburne along with John Adams, States Rights Gist, Hiram B. Granbury, Otto Strahl and John C. Carter-were killed, five more wounded and one captured in the struggle. One Union general also was captured.
“Historians call Franklin the Pickett’s Charge of the West,” Cartwright adds, “but, quite frankly, Pickett’s Charge (the renowned and ill-starred climactic thrust of the Battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania in 1863) is the Franklin of the East. The one here was three times the charge Pickett’s ever dreamed of being.”
Here, thus, occurred one of the most epic, if senseless, battles of the Civil War, one that all but brought down the final curtain on the conflict’s western theater. Yet its present manifestations are far humbler than those of Gettysburg, Bull Run or even nearby Murfreesboro or Ft. Donelson. No national park stands here in commemoration-partly, Cartwright says, because the Franklin casualty lists were so staggering that many Southerners for long afterward wanted only to forget its rivers of blood.
Nevertheless, for today’s visitor the Franklin battlefield is easy to find. Although the view from Winstead Hill crosses the roofs of local industrial plants, farm suppliers, real estate offices, car lots and fast-food enterprises, many of the things Gen. Hood saw that day are still visible.
In the background ahead, under stately trees, sits a bustling, highly cultured little city that has become a favorite hometown of stars and music executives of nearby Nashville-while still brimming with antebellum homes and churches whose rooms in late 1864 served as temporary hospitals, their walls muffling countless shrieks and moans of the horde of the maimed and dying.
Nearly 1,500 headstones in the Confederate cemetery at nearby Carnton Plantation, far to the right, bear silent witness not only to the firepower of the Civil War’s weaponry but also to the primitive nature of its surgery.
In the distance, to the right center, can be seen the walls of Ft. Granger, offering a tourist one of contemporary America’s finer and more extensive examples of permanent Civil War fortifications. Curling at varying distances from right to left is the tree-shrouded Harpeth River, against which the Federals set their backs that awful evening and took their stand.
And in the center, obscured by trees alongside the Franklin-Columbia Pike (now U.S. Highway 31) just past Pizza Hut and Domino’s, rises the two-story brick farmhouse that, amid the battle’s fury, sat occupied by 23 civilians and a swelling number of frightened Union soldiers: the Carter House, the most bullet-riddled complex of Civil War buildings still standing in America.
Attached by a short walkway to the museum Cartwright serves, the Carter House is arguably this nation’s most human and personal relic of Civil War butchery.
Not only were there those 23 civilians-the farm’s owners and their children and slaves, along with another family from across the road-cowering in its basement in fear that all the cannon shot and Minie balls would start a fire that would burn them to death; there was also their son and brother, Confederate Capt. Tod Carter, who was mortally wounded that night in his own yard. When carried in to die in his bed, Carter made his first visit home since enlisting in 1861.
More than 700 bullet and cannonball holes presently visible in the walls of the Carter House and its outbuildings suggest the extent of the Carters’ terror that night.
“The carpets were so full of blood from the work of the surgeons after the battle that they had to be destroyed,” says Lynn Pope, Carter House education director and one of its tour hosts.
Pope adds that the Carters never recovered from the effects of the Civil War. Their fields were so full of horse skeletons, accouterments of battle and other debris that it was almost impossible to plow them for crops, she says.
Cartwright makes the problem even plainer. Whereas most of the war’s major battlefields are miles wide and miles long, virtually all of the dying, wounding and capturing at Franklin was terribly compressed, occurring within a few hundred yards as time and again the Confederates charged, broke through, then were hurled back where the Union lines crossed the Franklin-Columbia Pike around the Carter House.
The fighting was so fierce for this central position that after it ended bodies lay six and seven deep. Some horses and men were crowded together to such an extent that they were discovered “standing up dead,” Cartwright says, and some of the bodies lying atop the breastworks had been struck by so many bullets as the battle progressed that they literally were torn to pieces.
“Three thousand men were killed or wounded within 200 yards of the Carter House,” Cartwright says. “Forty-five hundred of the casualties occurred within 400 yards, 6,000 within 650 yards.
“I can’t emphasize enough what a nightmare it was. Franklin should always be remembered for its illustration of how horrible and obscene war is, and how brave the men on both sides who fought here were. They were the bravest men in the world, and we try to tell their story.”
Cartwright is possibly correct in his contention that no tourist interested in America’s past could better spend $5 than on admission to the Carter House, which offers an excellent film detailing the battle, a guided but unhurried stroll through the grounds and the chance to experience the fascinating house as well as Cartwright’s museum, which he says is designed to accord the visitor the same haunting, “personal” sort of feel of the war that the Carters’ home so memorably provides.
The museum/interpretation center’s relics include the saw that amputated Hood’s leg at Chickamauga. There are uniforms, swords, artillery shells, busts of the six Confederate generals killed here and, in a humanizing touch typical of this place, not only photographs of many of the battle’s lower-ranking participants but letters from them as well.
Franklin visitors who find their Civil War appetites whetted are within easy driving distance of a plethora of more formal battlefields: Murfreesboro 30 minutes away, Ft. Donelson an hour and a half away, Shiloh and Chattanooga two hours away, and so on, but most Carter House patrons probably will find themselves reluctant to leave very quickly.
Those disposed to linger will find the usual accommodations offered by any substantial town beside a major interstate (in this case, Interstate Highway 65 a half-hour south of Nashville). These include a Holiday Inn, a Best Western and a number of B&Bs whose names are available through the Franklin Chamber of Commerce.
Prospective Franklin diners are even luckier, able to choose between a host of the usual franchise cuisine, from pizza and Mexican to the ubiquitous fried chicken, and some memorable one-of-a-kind places as well. The latter include Choices, a genteel establishment with a memorable menu; Dotson’s, a blue-collar cafe whose tasty fare is regularly favored by the area’s country music stars; and (you aren’t going to believe this) the Bunganut Pig Pub & Eatery, a positively Londonesque dining and drinking emporium just across U.S. 31 from the Carter House.
For most visitors, though, Franklin’s primary attraction is likely to remain the Carter House, with its unique glimpse at the real life-and death-involved in America’s greatest era of national crisis.
“History is as boring as yesterday’s soup when all you hear is dates and facts and figures,” Thomas Cartwright says. “It comes to life, and to a reality people can relate to, when you feel its human side.”
The Carter House is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday, 1-5 p.m. Sunday; the last tour leaves at 4 p.m. Admission is $5 adults, $1.50 for children 12 and under. Call 615-791-1861.
The museum/interpretation center is accessible for the disabled. Assistance is provided for anyone needing it on the tour of the house and grounds.
ANNIVERSARY CEREMONIES
FRANKLIN, Tenn.-An unusually large number of visitors from the South and North appear to be headed here for this year’s 130th anniversary of the Battle of Franklin on Nov. 30.
The multiplicity of ceremonies already scheduled or in concrete planning stages include:
– An annual 2-mile walk from Winstead Hill to the Carter House led by Civil War battle re-enactors.
– Post-march ceremonies at the Carter House.
– “Living history” programs.
– Demonstrations of the firing of Civil War weapons.
– A reading of the names of the battle’s dead-on both sides-around the Confederate monument in Franklin’s town square.
– Candlelight services at Capt. Tod Carter’s grave.
Emphasizing that these ceremonies are by no means Confederate-only, Carter House museum curator Thomas Cartwright says several people outside Dixie already are scheduled to prominently participate, including members of the Indianapolis Civil War Round Table and an Ohio state senator who had an ancestor-a private in an Ohio unit-who died in the battle.
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For information on the limited edition prints of Civil War paintings by Keith Rocco, whose “On the Rim of the Volcano: The Battle of Franklin, Tenn.” appears on our cover, contact: Tradition Studios, Box 779, Woodstock, Va. 226644; 703-459-5469 or 703-459-5951. A book-“The Civil War Art of Keith Rocco”-is also available.
