Battle of Franklin 1864: John Bell Hood's Two-Mile Charge on Open Ground

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

On the afternoon of November 30, 1864, about 20,000 Confederate soldiers stepped off across two miles of open ground toward Union earthworks at Franklin, Tennessee, twice the distance of Pickett's Charge. This episode explains how General John Bell Hood got there. With William T. Sherman marching to the sea, Hood invaded Tennessee hoping to crush John Schofield's force before it reached Nashville. At Spring Hill he got ahead of Schofield and blocked the turnpike on paper, but his exhausted army never closed the road, and the entire Union column, wagons and artillery included, passed the Confederate campfires in the dark.

Trapped against the Harpeth River without pontoons, Schofield dug in behind trenches, head logs and a thorny Osage orange abatis while engineers planked a railroad bridge. Hood rejected Nathan Bedford Forrest's flanking proposal, and the episode frames his decision as a calm, calculated gamble shaped by the sunk cost fallacy rather than blind rage. The Confederates broke the center when two exposed Union brigades under George Wagner fled down the turnpike, shielding the attackers from fire. Close fighting around the Carter House followed, and the Army of Tennessee never recovered.

• Patrick Cleburne told a fellow officer that if they were to die, they should die like men, and he was killed in the assault.
• Union regiments near the Carter House carried Henry and Spencer repeaters, firing about 16 rounds a minute against three from a muzzleloader.
• Captain Todd Carter was mortally wounded yards from his family's home and died there the next day.
• The Confederates lost roughly 6,000 men, 55 regimental commanders and 14 generals, six of them killed.
• General John Adams died after his horse was shot as it crested the Union earthworks.