This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [238]
Schofield let Hood steal a march on him, and by a fast flank movement Hood brought his troops around to a place called Spring Hill on the Nashville turnpike, squarely in Schofield’s rear. Alerted just in time, Schofield turned back in retreat. Hood’s men were where they could have broken up this retreat and compelled the Federals to fight an uphill battle for their lives, but Hood’s command arrangements got fouled up most atrociously, and in some unaccountable way he let Schofield’s army march straight across his front, wagon trains and all, unmolested.1
It was an eerie march, as the Federals remembered it. The men were gloomy, knowing themselves outnumbered, the weather had been bad, and Schofield was pushing them along so fast that they did not fall out for meals but simply munched raw salt pork and hardtack as they walked. When darkness came they could see long ranks of Rebel campfires twinkling in the fields beside the road; officers warned them to keep quiet — although a moving army was bound to make a good deal of noise, and the Confederate pickets obviously had discovered them — and at intervals the whole column would break into a lumbering run, coming down to a walk only when everybody was winded.2
All night long the march went on, and by daybreak, November 30, the army was out of the trap. Forrest was commanding Hood’s cavalry, and in the morning he came slashing in to attack the moving columns. A few infantry regiments wheeled out with fixed bayonets, and some artillery was unlimbered, and when Forrest’s men came riding in they were butchered. Watching with horrified fascination, one infantryman saw what artillery could do to mounted men at close range. He remembered: “You could see a Rebel’s head falling off his horse on one side and his body on the other, and the horse running and nickering and looking for its rider. Others you could see fall off with their feet caught in the stirrup, and the horse dragging and trampling them, dead or alive. Others, the horse would get shot and the rider tumble head over heels, or maybe get caught by his horse falling on him.”3
Forrest was driven off and the Federals tramped wearily up to the town of Franklin, on the south bank of the Harpeth River. The bridge had been burned, and Schofield could not get his guns or his wagons across the river until his engineers had built a new one; so he put his infantry in line in a wide semicircle on a rising ground just south of the town and got them solidly entrenched while the engineers went to work.
Hood’s army was moving fast in pursuit — Hood was furious because of the chance that had been missed at Spring Hill, and he was blaming everyone but himself for it, repeating his complaint that his soldiers were unwilling to fight unless they could have the protection of trenches. His army came up into contact with Schofield’s outposts a little after noon, and Hood immediately decided to attack.
The Union position was powerful, and Forrest argued that it would be better to cross the river, off to the right, and try one more flank movement. But Hood would not listen. He would attack, and he would do so at once, without even waiting for his artillery to come up. He shook his army out into a broad line of battle and sent his men straight in on the strongest part of the Federal line.
It was November 30, a pleasant Indian-summer day with a broad open field rolling gently up to the Union trenches. General Schofield, who was on the far side of the river seeing to the bridge-building job, looked across and saw one of the great, tragic sights of the war. Here were eighteen thousand Confederate infantrymen, more men than had charged with Pickett at Gettysburg, coming forward in perfect order, battle flags flying, sunlight glinting on polished rifle barrels. On came the moving ranks, looking irresistible, battalions perfectly aligned; then the Federal infantry and artillery opened, a dense cloud of smoke tumbled down the slope, and the moment of pageantry was over.
No fight in all the war was more desperate than this one at Franklin.