This volume describes the events and details of the five hour battle at Franklin, Tenn. in 1864.

In late November 1864, the last Southern army east of the Mississippi that was still free to maneuver started out from northern Alabama on the Confederacy's last offensive. John Bell Hood and his Army of Tennessee had dreams of capturing Nashville and marching on to the Ohio River, but a small Union force under Hood's old West Point roommate stood between him and the state capital. In a desperate attempt to smash John Schofield's line at Franklin, Hood threw most of his men against the Union works, centered on the house of a family named Carter, and lost 30 percent of his attacking force in one afternoon, crippling his army and setting it up for a knockout blow at Nashville two weeks later. With firsthand accounts, letters and diary entries from the Carter House Archives, local historian James R. Knight paints a vivid picture of this gruesome conflict.

At the beginning of the Civil War, John M. Copley was a young boy from Dickson County, Tennessee. As a fifteen year old, he enlisted in Company B, 49th Tennessee Infantry in Charlotte, Tennessee. In this narrative, the reader is taken on a journey with Copley from his enlistment in 1861 through the end of the war. The narrative particularly focuses on Copley's participation in Hood's fateful 1864 Tennessee Campaign and his capture amidst the indescribably staggering carnage of the Battle of Franklin, Tennessee on November 30, 1864. Here, Copley as a soldier in Quarles' Brigade, Walthall's Division, was captured on the east side of the Columbia Turnpike near the famous Carter cotton gin. After an all-night march without rations, Copley and his fellow prisoners were taken to the Tennessee State Penitentiary where they awaited transportation by train to Louisville, Kentucky, and further transportation by rail to Chicago, Illinois. Here, at Camp Douglas, Copley, in vivid details, describes the wretched conditions and inhumane treatment he and others received as Confederate prisoners of war at Camp Douglas, Illinois.

On November 30th, 1864, more than 40,000 Union and Confederate troops converged on Franklin, Tennessee, and fought one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. Said one who saw it, "It was as if the devil had full possession of the earth." The events of that battle have passed not only into history, but into legend. Names like Tod Carter and John Bell Hood have found their ways into our poems and songs and folk tales. But what do these stories have to say to us today? Through the power of music and drama, this original work takes us back in time to witness the tragic struggle between father and son, between master and slave, between North and South. It's a tale of a broken family and a broken nation. But in the end, the story of the Battle of Franklin is about more than mere history--it's about the conflict in all of us, and our hope of restoration.

Excerpt from The Battle of Franklin, November 30, 1864: The Bloodiest Engagement of the War Between the States The battle of Franklin, Tennessee, November 30, 1864, was, on some parts of the line, the bloodiest of the Civil War. Never on any field did braver men go. Nor did men ever dare and do more than was done by the Confederates to whom it fell to bear the heat and burden of that fateful day. That much will be demonstrated in the following narrative so plainly that the assertion may hereafter be accepted as a historic truth; for no statement of material fact will be made which the writer is not prepared to authenticate. To place a proper estimate upon the prowess of the Army of Tennessee at Franklin it is necessary to keep in mind its antecedents, in the then recent past. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.