Lieutenant General John Bell Hood stood on the high slope of Winstead Hill, just south of Franklin, Tennessee, on the afternoon of 30 November 1864. Hood appeared older than his thirty-three years, as he leaned on a crutch supporting the stump of an amputated leg, while a useless arm hung by his side, the results of wounds at Chickamauga and Gettysburg, respectively. He stood on the approximate site of present-day battlefield map, holding a pair of field glasses to his eyes as he surveyed the Federal line on the southern edge of the little town. Immediately to the front and below Hood, two corps of the Confederate Army of Tennessee were assembled. The general was deciding whether to attack the Union position, where artillery bristled through strong earthworks fronted by abates. Cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest, infantry corps commander General Benjamin F. Cheatham, and probably others, had advised him not to make a frontal assault. But the young general did not accept their advice. Returning the field glasses to a leather case, Hood announced something to the effect that the army would make the fight.
Shortly after 4:00 P.M., on that Indian summer day, the Confederates moved forward, bands playing and regimental flags waving, as they marched across the bluegrass fields toward Franklin, where the Yankee troops waited in their formidable entrenchments. For the attackers the battle would be a terrible defeat â?? in some ways the worst fight in which the Army of Tennessee was ever engaged. Of a total force of about 23,000, there were 1,750 Southern troops killed. Another 5,500 men were wounded or captured. Six generals were killed, five wounded and one captured. Of 100 Confederate regimental commanders, more than 60 were killed or wounded. The Federals, with more than 15,000 engaged, suffered approximately 2,500 casualties, with about 200 of those killed. Clearly, General Hood had made an awful mistake in launching a frontal assault at Franklin.
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