Battle of Franklin a Confederate Disaster

After the fall of Atlanta on September 1, 1864, General John Bell Hood and the 30,000-man Army of Tennessee raced into Tennessee, hoping to divert William T. Sherman's attention from the tender underbelly of the Confederacy by threatening his supply base at Nashville. Sherman did not take the bait, and instead dispatched General John Schofield's Army of the Ohio, 30,000 strong, to protect Nashville while the rest of Sherman's army simply left their supply line behind and marched to the Atlantic coast, forcibly securing whatever they needed to sustain themselves from the Confederate citizens in their path.