In January 1865, Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood traveled to Columbia, S.C. with the diarist Mary Chesnut and the family of his recent but fading love interest, Sally “Buck” Preston. After some pleasantries, the houseguests discussed the recent, horrific battles at Franklin, Tenn. and Nashville, fought in quick succession in early December. Hood had been the Confederate leader in both battles, and both times had lost thousands in bitter defeat. “My army is destroyed,” he mourned.

The attendees quickly shifted to a more jovial topic, but Hood simply sat, stared into the fire, and relived “some bitter hours,” according to Chesnut. One guest spoke of the emotional agony that appeared writ large on Hood’s face time and time again as he spoke of the “dreadful sight” of so many dead at the battlefield at Franklin.

Hood’s nightmare of shredded flesh and smoldering corpses commenced less than two months earlier in central Tennessee. On Nov. 30, 1864, as part of his strategy to go around Gen. William T. Sherman in Georgia and capture the Union-occupied city of Nashville, Hood sent nearly 30,000 men in a frontal assault against the Union commander John Schofield, whose forces were entrenched just south of Nashville in the town of Franklin.

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The Confederate forces were rapidly torn to pieces by Schofield’s artillery. But they continued forward, smashed into the Union line, and engaged in hand-to-hand combat. The fighting raged back and forth along the Union lines for a few hours, as men shouted, horses collapsed and bodies piled up along the hastily constructed earthworks. The Union line bent but did not break and the Confederates pulled back into the darkness. With the military threat dissipated, Schofield moved his army out of position and headed north into Nashville.

The next morning, the early rays of dawn illuminated a horrific scene of carnage through the lingering billows of smoke. Hood’s army had been decimated, with over 6,000 men dead or wounded, compared with Union casualties that tallied around 2,300. A military chaplain declared, “I could have trodden on a dead man at every step … The dead were piled up in the trenches almost to the top of the earthworks.” Milton A. Ryan, a member of the 14th Mississippi, found himself a member of the burial detail. He recalled, “In places the dead were piled upon each other three and four deep. Sometimes we would find a poor wounded comrade pinned down by several dead comrades lying on him.” Ryan dug a trench two and a half feet deep and wide enough for two bodies to rest side by side. Every face received a blanket or oil cloth, while the known dead got a small wooden headboard with their name scrawled upon it. The Confederate officers sent the men to work as fast as possible in order to stop the intoxicating fumes of death from engulfing the community.

The bodies on the field held a look with “ghastly faces and glassy eyes,” according to one soldier. The dead, according to one Mississippian, “expressed supreme fear and terror.” He described the “mental agony they had endured before death released them.” Lt. M. M. Sanders remembered, “The crimson from chivalrous sons simply stained the field with color so heart rendering it can never be forgotten by those present.” The angel of death and destruction loomed over Franklin, as the entire landscape now seemed obliterated by the hard hand of combat. Another soldier, Moscow Carter, recalled, “On trying to clear up I scraped together a half bushel of brains right around the house, and the whole place was dyed with blood.” Carter continued to clean up after the battle for weeks, which included spending his Christmas “hauling seventeen dead horses from this yard.”

Carter was not alone. The residents of Franklin, a once sleepy village roughly 18 miles outside Nashville, witnessed dozens of buildings transformed into hospitals and temporary morgues. A young resident of the town remembered being overwhelmed “from morning until night” as her family dealt with dozens of wounded soldiers who required the family to make bandages and prepare soups “with which to nourish them.” Hardin Figures, only 15 years old, spent the days after the battle searching the countryside to collect food to feed the malnourished and wounded Confederate soldiers. He remembered, “We would take a large wash kettle, holding about twenty gallons, and make it full of soup with plenty of red pepper. For this soup I brought in from the country Irish potatoes, cabbage, dried beans, and turnips, and in making it we used any kind of meat obtainable. The soldiers thought this was a great diet; in fact, the best they had had for more than a year.”

The Carnton plantation house was transformed into a chaotic hospital and filled with makeshift operating tables, where puddles of blood accumulated on the floorboards, as surgeons removed damaged arms and legs. The bodies of Confederate generals Patrick Cleburne, Hiram Granbury, John Adams and Otho Strahl, all killed in the battle, lay on the back porch before being later moved south for burial.

The impact of so many dead left a powerful impression on soldiers from both sides. A few weeks later, with the Confederates routed at Nashville, some Union soldiers returned to see the remnants of so much carnage. A Union soldier, who later viewed the “rows of graves, side by side” for as far as his eyes could see, explained, “The partially filled ditches told where the dead of the battle were laid. As I stood there and thought of the awful suffering and slaughter of the battle, and how nearly I had come to being one of the number to inhabit those ditches, I trembled; and from my heart I thanked God, and fled from my spot to join my comrades.”

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Lt. Thomas Thoburn of the 50th Ohio recalled that someone reported to him that “he had counted four hundred and fifty graves just in front of the works built by our regiment. “ The dead had been “thrown into heaps” with “earth piled on and over them and arms and legs remained uncovered.” Another Union soldier saw a man sitting on a porch, suffering from a gunshot wound through the jaw that had severed a large portion of his tongue and now protruded out of his mouth, making him incapable of speaking. The wounded soldier had been in this horrific condition for over two weeks.

Yet, even in this scene of so much death and destruction, the soldiers and civilians cared for the wounded and worked to create an appropriate place to pay tribute to the dead. In the fall of 1865, Chaplain William Earnshaw and members of the 111th United States Colored Infantry started work on the Stones River National Cemetery, located in nearby Murfreesboro, Tenn. The Union dead at Franklin, hastily buried along the federal lines, were reinterred at this newly established resting place for the honored dead. Union soldiers wounded at Franklin who later died in Nashville-area hospitals found a temporary burial location right at the hospital before they were later moved to a permanent home at the Nashville National Cemetery, established in the summer of 1866.

As for the Confederate dead, most ended up grouped by regiment and buried on the battlefield, with a small wooden plank indicating the known names and regiments. As time passed, the markers disappeared or deteriorated, prompting John McGavock to turn a few acres of the Carnton Plantation into a cemetery. The identity of many of the Confederate dead, transferred to the new cemetery throughout the spring of 1866, vanished, which forced cemetery organizers to mark over 780 graves by their state, or simply unknown. Today, with so much of the Franklin battlefield hidden beneath modern urban development, the rows of tombstones throughout Middle Tennessee are the only prominent reminders of the dark reality of Civil War combat that erupted on that late autumn afternoon in 1864.

In the days after the fighting, as the burial details went about their exhaustive search, General Hood surveyed the field. He seemed shellshocked, as he quietly took in the awful scene. A Confederate soldier noticed the officer taking in the macabre spectacle and wrote, “His sturdy visage assumed a melancholy appearance, and for a considerable time he sat on his horse and wept like a child.” A young resident of Franklin, Alice Nichol, only 8 years old at the time, saw a man seated in a chair in a yard. “He looked so sad,” recalled Nichol, “and grandpa told me that was Gen. Hood.”

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Sources: Mary Chesnut, “A Diary from Dixie”; Mark K. Christ, ed., “Getting Used to Being Shot At: The Spence Family Civil War Letters.”

Brian Craig Miller teaches 19th-century American history at Emporia State University. He is the author of “John Bell Hood and the Fight for Civil War Memory” and the forthcoming “Empty Sleeves: Amputation in the Civil War South.”