The Battle of Franklin was fought on this day 161 years ago...

November 30, 1864.

After being outmaneuvered at Spring Hill the night before, Union Major General John M. Schofield’s force dug in south of the town of Franklin, Tennessee, forming a strong defensive line anchored on the Harpeth River. Confederate General John Bell Hood, furious at the missed opportunity and determined to destroy Schofield before he could link up with Union forces at Nashville, ordered a frontal assault across nearly two miles of open ground in the late afternoon hours of November 30.

At about four o'clock, 18 Confederate brigades (roughly 20,000 men) from Hood’s Army of Tennessee stepped off in one of the war’s largest and most desperate assaults. With almost no artillery preparation and against well-prepared Union infantry and artillery behind earthworks, the attack slammed into the Federal center near the Carter House and the Cotton Gin. Fighting became hand-to-hand; Confederate divisions under Patrick Cleburne, John C. Brown, and others temporarily broke the line but were thrown back with horrific losses.

In five hours of savage combat, Hood lost 6,300 men (including six generals killed outright: Cleburne, Granbury, Adams, Strahl, Gist, and Carter, and 6 more wounded or captured), one of the highest casualty rates of loss for any major Confederate army in a single battle. Union casualties were 2,300.

Schofield withdrew across the Harpeth River that night and continued toward Nashville, leaving Franklin as a ghastly Confederate Pyrrhic defeat that effectively wrecked Hood’s army just two weeks before its final destruction at Nashville. The Carter House and Carnton Plantation still bear the scars and bloodstains from that evening, often called “the Pickett’s Charge of the West," only far bloodier and across the entire front.


Elementary students stare at the bullet holes inside the Carter House - still visible in 2025.