In late 1864, the last major campaign of the Civil War swept into Middle Tennessee as the Confederate Army of Tennessee under Lt. Gen. John Bell Hood moved out of Georgia after the fall of Atlanta, marched across Alabama, and pushed north while Union Major General John Schofield and an army of nearly equal size pursued him under orders to delay his advance until other Federal forces gathered at Nashville. Hood began the campaign in earnest on November 21, and over the next nine days the two armies fought at Lawrenceburg, Pulaski, Lynnville, and Columbia. On November 29 at Spring Hill, 11 miles south of here, Hood’s army nearly flanked Schofield but failed to block the Federal army’s route of retreat, allowing Schofield and his troops to slip past the Confederates during the night into Franklin. There the Federal army built a defensive line south of town because problems with the bridges prevented a crossing of the Harpeth River north of town. Hood pursued Schofield on the morning of November 30, reached the southern outskirts of Franklin that afternoon, concluded that to reach Nashville he had to go through Schofield, and ordered a frontal assault that began at 4 pm. Hood, 33 years old, commanded the Army of the Tennessee at Franklin despite a withered left arm from a Gettysburg wound and most of his left leg having been amputated after Chickamauga, while also bearing the pressure of leading the largest mobile army left in the Confederacy as Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia remained pinned at Richmond and Petersburg. Schofield, also 33 years old at the Battle of Franklin, had hoped to avoid a fight there, but high water on the Harpeth River and problems with the two bridges delayed his movement toward Nashville’s Union forts, and although it appeared at sunset on November 30, 1864, that darkness might prevent battle, the battle came nonetheless.