The Bloody Battle of Franklin (Civil War) | History Traveler Episode 66

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] in your highschool American history class whenever you were talking about the Civil War my guess is that your discussion was pretty much limited to Gettysburg and Vicksburg maybe Shiloh Antietam and Sherman's march to the sea and then that was the complete survey of your study of the Civil War but what if I told you that there was a battle that took place in the latter part of 1864 in the Western theater that involved a Confederate charge over open ground that was further than what Pickett's charge was and resulted in more casualties well that would have taken place right here just south of Nashville at the Battle of Franklin and there was a serious bloodletting that took place right here on these grounds I'm super excited because today I'm going to be linking up with Eric Jacobson who is the CEO of the Battle of Franklin trusts and quite literally wrote the book on the Battle of Franklin so I'm always looking for people who are smarter than me that I can learn from and I think that today is going to be one of those days super pumped [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so I am here at one of the key sites of the Battle of Franklin and I could tell you what I know or I could defer to somebody who actually knows what he is talking about this is Eric Jacobson he is the CEO of the Battle of Franklin trusts and yeah he and a couple of others here at the Battle of Franklin site are gonna kind of walk around with me today and basically teach me some some things that I don't know so I guess maybe can tell me a little bit about the the big picture of what's going on that that kind of sets up the Battle of Franklin okay why did this happen well we're just happy you're here so this is just a great opportunity for for more people to learn about what happened in Franklin it's sort of the big picture this is late in the war so this is this is the last as we call it last great campaign of the war it happens after the fall of Atlanta so John Bell hood who's in command of the southern army is really just trying to drag the war out he's trying to do everything possible to not lose the war for the Confederacy not to lose and and ultimately he's trying to retake the city of Nashville Nashville had fallen early in the war to u.s. troops so hood begins moving up through middle Tennessee with just over 30,000 men under his command he was opposed by a similar number of troops under the command of John Schofield they'd been sent back here by William Sherman a few weeks earlier to try and help defend this area so everything moves very quickly for about a week before the Battle of Franklin is the two armies move up through areas like Lawrenceburg and Pulaski and Columbia and then Spring Hill where Scofield escapes but it all culminates here at Franklin and we're we're standing just inside the US defensive line so everything becomes just a ferocious series of explosions through this area on November 30th but it's it's really as bad as anything that happened during the war that the conflict here was incredibly violent and bloody and I think it's really a culmination of this long three and a half year war and and as I've been saying for years I think to really understand how the American Civil War ends you got a kind of Franklin [Music] so in 1864 hood was coming up out of the south his army was really in a bad shape as a matter of fact hood himself was in a bad shape one arm was withered from an injury at Gettysburg one of his legs had been amputated about a quarter of the Confederate soldiers that were marching with him were doing so and shoes that were either rotten or they didn't have shoes at all so this is a this is an army that is kind of on on their last leg there they're a little bit desperate now where they would have advanced from is to the south or from the south right here towards Franklin headed towards Nashville the Union Army was to the north outside of Franklin and where they first would have engaged the Confederate soldiers is right here at this place called Contin [Music] all right now here's the house that I was just referring to called carton and man this is a behemoth of a house by today's standards much less by civil war standards I was just told that the outer walls are three bricks thick and the inner walls are two bricks thick so this would have been it would have been a house of a very wealthy family but during the Battle of Franklin it would have been turned into a Confederate field hospital so we're gonna go in and check out this house and see what it looks like on the inside [Music] before we go into the house I did want to make quick mention of this this is the the back porch of carton and there is a story that Nathan Bedford Forrest who's a pretty well known General of the Confederacy used this back porch as an observation post or it could have even been up here on the second level which would make make a better point of observation that can't be confirmed with a hundred percent certainty but but that's the story what we can say for certain is that Nathan Bedford Forrest was here and and crossed the grounds here at Taunton so here at court we have a kind of a unique situation because when the Confederates get here they take over this house for use as a hospital and so even though it looks like a normal house set up right now you'd have had an army chaplain and what we believe is about eight surgeons for the Confederate Army who come into the house and they pretty much start having soldiers push furniture to the corners of the room and they set up their tables and then as the Confederates start taking casualties on the field they were brought into Ren's like this and if you can see you know kind of how the floors up right now imagine all the furniture stacked up in the corners and this floor will literally be covered with wounded men so in each room they're gonna bring somewhere between 30 to 40 men and lay them to the floor of each room and these men are being triaged as they're brought in the doctors are looking at them on a case-by-case basis kind of looking at their casualties seeing what their injuries are and if it's Bible to conduct surgery on that man some of these men require something as light as a bandage some of them require full-blown amputations on one of more limbs and as the doctors are working they pretty quickly get overwhelmed because this house would have contained all of the casualties from lorenz division so we know that he takes about 672 casualties during the battle it's very possible that there was some between five to six hundred and fifty men in this house or round it probably in excess of three to four hundred physically inside of the home probably another 150 to 200 out on the grounds and as they start working their way through the soldiers they work on a man 9 to 15 minutes on the table pull them off put somebody else on and so as these surgeons are working in these rooms they're working from the start of the battle well into the night then into the next day and then by December the third they have to pack up their stuff and leave because they are going with the Confederate Army it's part of their job but they leave all the wounded here so as we're talking about what these people are going through their house has literally been taken over we used as a hospital and after you get through two days of surgery and the doctors finally leave and you have all these soldiers who are either going to recover or die and so what you eventually get into is not just one day one week these people are here for months taking care of these soldiers and one of the last soldiers to leave here is in June of 1865 seven full months after the Battle of Franklin and two full months after the Civil War has ended so this house was a hospital for the better portion of the really last year of the war okay just made my way upstairs here at the house at Carleton and man what went on in this place during the Battle of Franklin is almost beyond human imagination and I really want to show you something in this room right here [Music] now this room was originally the nursery in the house but turned into surgical ward and if you look over here those dark spots are the bloodstains of Confederate soldiers absolutely unbelievable and then you can go over here and see some of the surgical instruments that would have been used by doctors at that time which looks quite medieval but Wow that [Music] that makes it a little more real [Music] [Music] I'm back out here on the back porch something's kind of interesting about this back porch is that during the Battle of Franklin there were six Confederate generals who were killed so so this was devastating to their leadership well four of them were laid out right here on this back porch pretty crazy to think about [Music] that was legitimately cool I don't know of any other Civil War battlefield that you're going to be able to visit and see anything like that that that was seriously awesome now the direction that I'm facing is to the north where the Union artillery would have been positioned so I've kind of turn around here you see these fields behind me this is where the Confederates would have advanced and I guess just got cut all the pieces as they were moving north towards the Union line all of this took place in a day so this is this is a really a more violent version of Pickett's Charge that we're talking about looking at at this battlefield and the movement from from this eastern flank all the way up to what's called the Carter House which is where we're going to be heading to next [Music]

Channel: The History Underground

Views: 132,598

Rating: 4.9498072 out of 5

Keywords: history, history traveler, history underground, travel, civil war, battle of franklin, battle of nashville, confederates, john bell hood, nathan bedford forrest, civil war battle, union army, carntan, tennessee, nashville, franklin

Id: WzTozfpQPXU

Length: 13min 54sec (834 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 15 2020