Just after 11:00 p. m. on November 30, 1864, Union General John Schofield abandoned the battlefield at Franklin, Tennessee, leaving his wounded behind. The Confederate Army of Tennessee, under General John Bell Hood, had been shattered in one of the most brutal engagements of the Civil War.
With the enemy gone, Southern survivors spent that night and the following day searching the blood-soaked field for friends and comrades. Soldiers who had seen years of war described Franklin as a scene of unmatched horror. One Alabama soldier wrote: “I have seen many battlefields, but none equal to this. ”
Union losses totaled 189 killed, 1,033 wounded, and 1,104 missing or presumed captured, representing about 8 percent of the Union force at Franklin.
Confederate casualties were never precisely counted. No official tally was made, either because Hood’s army was on the verge of disintegration or because no one wanted to confront the terrible truth. Estimates placed the number at 6,252 casualties, roughly 23 percent of Hood’s command. Of those, approximately 1,750 were killed outright.
The Confederate officer corps was decimated. Losses included 65 division, brigade, and regimental commanders, along with 14 generals: one captured, seven wounded, and six killed. No other single battle in the entire war cost one side such a devastating toll in general officers. Four of the Confederate dead—Generals Patrick Cleburne, John Adams, Otho Strahl, and Hiram Granbury—were laid out on the back porch of the Carter House, the farmhouse that had stood at the center of the fighting.
For John Bell Hood and the Army of Tennessee, Franklin was an unmitigated disaster, a nightmare from which the army would never recover. The battle effectively destroyed the Confederate force as a fighting unit just weeks before the final collapse of the Western Confederacy.