Franklin Battlefield: The Pickett's Charge of the West

On the afternoon of November thirtieth, eighteen sixty-four, Confederate General John Bell Hood ordered something his own officers considered suicidal. The Union Army of the Ohio, under General John Schofield, had slipped past his troops the night before at Spring Hill, an embarrassing failure that Hood blamed on his men's lack of aggression. Now Schofield's forces occupied fortified earthworks on the southern edge of Franklin, Tennessee, and Hood told approximately twenty thousand soldiers to charge them directly, across two miles of open ground, in the fading autumn light.

What followed took five hours and left roughly six thousand two hundred Confederate soldiers dead, wounded, or captured. The Union lost about twenty-five hundred. Hood's army suffered more general officer casualties in those five hours than at almost any other engagement of the entire war: fourteen Confederate generals became casualties. Six were killed outright, including Patrick Cleburne, widely regarded as one of the finest division commanders in the Confederate army. Three of the six generals killed were just thirty-three. The oldest, John Adams, was thirty-nine, and the youngest, John Carpenter Carter, died of his wounds nine days before his twenty-seventh birthday.

Historians sometimes call it the Pickett's Charge of the West, a mass frontal assault against prepared defenses, devastating and arguably unnecessary. But unlike Gettysburg, the Confederates briefly broke through the Union line at a point called the Carter House, where the Carter family sheltered in their basement while fighting surged through their yard. Hundreds of bullet holes still mark the Carter House outbuildings.

A mile south, Carnton Plantation became the largest Confederate field hospital after the battle. Its owner, Carrie McGavock, opened every room to the wounded and, two years later, donated two acres for the burial of nearly fifteen hundred Confederate dead, including two hundred twenty-five men never identified. The McGavock Confederate Cemetery is still there, and it is still tended.

Hood's army limped north to Nashville, where it was effectively destroyed two weeks later. The Battle of Franklin had already broken it.