Winstead Hill

In September 1864, after Union Gen. William T. Sherman defeated Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood at Atlanta, Hood led the Army of Tennessee northwest against Sherman's supply lines and then moved north into Tennessee rather than contest Sherman's "March to the Sea." Gen. John M. Schofield, detached from Sherman's army, delayed Hood at Columbia and Spring Hill before falling back to Franklin, where on November 30 Hood stood on Winstead Hill and studied Schofield's strong defensive position two miles ahead. After Schofield's troops had slipped past Hood's army near Spring Hill the night before, Hood decided that Franklin offered one final chance to destroy the Federal army before it escaped to Nashville, and he ordered a massive frontal assault despite objections from Gen. Benjamin F. "Frank" Cheatham, Patrick R. Cleburne, and Nathan Bedford Forrest, who advised against it, with Forrest favoring a flank attack. Hood replied that the 5,000-man Federal cavalry could impede any flanking movement to the east, and with daylight fading and another Federal escape feared, he ordered his generals to drive the enemy "in to the river at all hazards." Almost 19,000 Confederate troops formed a two-mile battle line with 100 regiments, 18 brigades, and 6 divisions, Cheatham's Corps stretching along both sides of Columbia Pike east and west of Winstead Hill and Gen. A.P. Stewart's Corps extending farther east nearly to the Harpeth River. At 4 P.M., a signal flag on Winstead Hill launched the single largest attack made during the American Civil War, as Confederate troops swept across the fields with their bands playing "Dixie" and "The Bonnie Blue Flag," a spectacle one Union observer remembered with admiration despite the slaughter that crippled the Confederates and preceded Hood's final defeat outside Nashville on December 15-16.

Franklin, Tennessee · United States