On the morning of November 30, 1864, Fountain Branch Carter, a 67-year-old farmer, planter, and Confederate sympathizer, watched as his front yard in Franklin, Tennessee, filled up with Union soldiers pitching tents and starting campfires. Carter had come into contact with blue-clad troops before, but never an entire army. The Columbia Pike, a macadamized road that ran past Carter’s red-brick farmhouse near the southern edge of town, was also crowded with Union soldiers, wagons, horses, and artillery pieces. More were strung out along the pike as far as Carter could see in the direction of Spring Hill and Columbia to the south. Something bad was coming—and it was coming soon.
The blue columns swarming the town belonged to Maj. Gen. John Schofield’s Army of the Ohio, consisting of Schofield’s XXIII Corps and Brig. Gen. David Stanley’s IV Corps. Charged by Schofield with preparing a defense of Franklin and the two vital bridges over the Harpeth River, Brig. Gen. Jacob Cox and his staff had roused the Carter family before dawn, taken possession of the house, and turned the parlor into their field headquarters. By noon well over 20,000 Federals had either marched past on the pike or taken up positions in a crescent-shaped line of breastworks running east to west 100 yards south of Carter’s front door. The Carter home, situated just 50 feet from the pike on the west side of the road, occupied a prominent hill that Cox quickly recognized would be the key to his defensive line.
Federal forces had controlled this region of Tennessee for the past two years and had constructed earthen artillery emplacements on the northern bank of the Harpeth, which they dubbed Fort Granger, where Schofield now made his headquarters. While Cox and Stanley conferred with engineers about how best to get 800 wagons and 23,000 troops across the river and onto the road to Nashville by that evening, Carter had the security of his large family to worry about. Moscow Carter, his oldest living son and a paroled Confederate officer, lived with him—two other sons were serving in the 20th Tennessee Regiment, part of the gray host marching north from Spring Hill that morning—along with four daughters, a widowed daughter-in-law, and nine grandchildren under the age of 12.
