Remembering Franklin & Southern sacrifice

By  the League of the South

 

The following is an article written by Calen, an SNN reader, about the Battle of Franklin:

This is a day early, but I want it to be seen. Tomorrow marks an anniversary that every Southerner should remember, but sadly, most have forgotten. It was Pickett’s Charge, multiplied. Tomorrow is Franklin. On 30 November 148 years ago over 20,000 Confederate troops bravely charged into the fire… and nearly 1,500 went on to the halls of their ancestors, with 5,500 more wounded, just south of Nashville, TN. The charge at Franklin was the most glorious, hellacious and devastating charge our people have ever engaged in on this continent. Sam Watkins, Co. H 1st Tennessee infantry, veteran of every battle of the Army of Tennessee, who was there, could hardly write the chapter in his memoirs; in them he stated this: ‘Kind reader, right here my pen, and courage, and ability fail me. I shrink from butchery. Would to God I could tear the page from these memoirs and from my own memory. It was the blackest page in the history of the war of the Lost Cause… I was there. I saw it. My flesh trembles, and creeps, and crawls when I think of it today. My heart almost ceases to beat at the horrid recollection. Would to God that I had never witnessed such a scene.’

In that slaughter on the road back to Nashville, 14 Southern generals fell, 6 mortally: Patrick Cleburne, John Carter, John Adams, Hiram Granbury, States Rights Gist, and Otho Strahl were all killed leading their men in the assault on the Union breastworks at Franklin. Adams was found upright in his saddle, riddled with bullets, with his horse’s legs on either side of the works. Cleburne vanished in a cloud of gun smoke and was found with a bullet in his heart. Fifty-five regimental commanders were lost.

So was Capt. Tod Carter. When the Army of Tennessee crossed the Georgia-Tennessee border, the soldiers were heartened by a sign on the side of the road that read ‘Tennessee, A Grave or A Free Home.’ Those words must have had special meaning for Tod, the middle child in the Carter family, who had enlisted in the Confederate army in 1861. By 1864, he was the assistant quartermaster to Brigadier General Thomas Benton Smith in the Army of Tennessee. On the eve of the Battle of Franklin, a friend described Carter as “in a perfect ecstasy of joy’ to be seeing his family the next day. As part of Bates’s division, Smith’s brigade launched their attack at Franklin from the far left of the Confederate line. Although Tod Carter’s quartermaster duties did not require him to fight, he would not hear of it. He mounted his horse and rode ahead of the brigade, shouting ‘Follow me boys, I’m almost home!’ About five hundred feet from his front yard, Tod Carter was struck by a Union bullet and tumbled into the blood-soaked grass. After the day’s carnage had ended, the Carter family emerged from their cellar only to be greeted by General Smith with the news of Tod’s wounding. By lantern-light, Smith and the Carters spent hours searching the corpse-strewn battlefield for the young captain. His sisters’ screams announced to the party that the search was over. Dying and insensible, Tod was carried back to the Carter House near dawn and set down in his sister Annie’s room. He died the next day.

Not far from Carter, in his same division and on the extreme left flank, was the badly mauled Florida Brigade where my Great-Gr-Gr-Gr-Grandfather, Pvt. Stephen Harris, Company F, 7th Regiment Florida Infantry stood. He’d been with the Army since ’62. In the charge they were initially enfiladed by heavy Federal fire then pinned down by an artillery battery for nearly 8 hours. Had he died there I, as well as every other Smith in my family, wouldn’t exist today.

I myself have marched on what’s left of the field at Franklin. Most is covered by urban sprawl now. I was even close enough to touch Cleburne’s hat and sword belt that he was wearing when he fell. Robert E Lee said Cleburne was ‘a meteor shining brightly from a clouded sky.’ Cleburne bravely took his feared ‘Blue Flag’ division straight up the center, right after telling his troops ‘today we are to die, so let us die like men.’ They did.

So tomorrow know you come from real heroes, real warriors. From Cleburne, Granbury and Carter to Cú Chulainn, Beowulf and Sigurd. Let us be worthy of them, those Men who fought and fell to hand down a future and a noble tradition to the Sons and Daughters of Dixie. Tacitus said long ago of our people ‘as you go into battle, remember your ancestors and remember your descendants.’ So let us remember, let us be proud and unashamed. Let us hold our heads unapologetically high. Let us know we are yet unconquered and un-reconstructed. Let us realize we are strong again. Let us be sure they did not die in vain. I ask you all to think long on what they did for us. What will you do for them? What will you do for your descendants?

‘Fare thee well departed Chieftain
Erin’s Bards send forth a wail
And our country sad laments thee.
Passed so late through death’s dark vale.
Blow ye gentle breezes softly o’er him.
Fan his brow with gentle breath
Disturb ye not his peaceful slumber
Cleburne sleeps the sleep of death.
Rest thee, Cleburne; tears of sadness
Flow from hearts thou’st nobly won;
Memory ne’er will cease to cherish
Deeds of Glory thou hast done…’