I was just gazing at that last night thinking about it....weather a bit drier and cooler...a break from 4 months of tropical weather
Winstead and Breezy hills block my view to the west but that saddle between them and Lewisburg pike gives me a broad span of view from the Federal guns on the eastern flank overlooking the Harpeth all the over to town center and where the gin woulda been.
and that knoll about 500 yards in front of Carter House where that goofy Federal commander put that brigade out front to run for their lives...can't recall name right this second.
Franklin was a bloodbath....the death rattle...Hood had to have been high and crazy to do it. He could have waited and let them retreat back to Nashville the next morning and prepared for an assault on Nashville but he was still furious over Spring Hill...his fault too..sleeping. Or he coulda let Forrest have the division he wanted to flank them to the west and drive them into the Harpeth rolled up....possible given their weak western flank. Instead he just attacked a fortified position head on and wasted 1000s and 1000s of lives and his best generals.
One of wars bloodiest and least victorious victories I know of. By the way...it was Cox's brilliance for the Yankees not that fellow who got a pistol named after hisself. A mere colonel drew a lot of southern blood that evening due to Hood's irrational endeavor.
/rant
I’ve read an account of the exchange between J.B. Hood and N.B. Forrest in the immediate few minutes after the plans for the Battles of Williamson County were laid out to Hood’s General Staff.
Hood had lost a leg at Chickamauga, and many think he was under the influence of whiskey and laudnum at the time of the plan. Apparently Forrest said to him something along the lines of “Sir, if you were a whole man, I’d kill you now where you stand.”
It sounds like your view is very near to that of Tod Carter when he saw his home for the first time in 3 years. He only made it there to die.... as I recall from the tour, he was mortally wounded in the garden, and his family found him after the battle and brought him to the house, where he died several days later.
I took Jr G to the Carter house after the re-burial of the civil war soldier last Oct. The funeral was wonderful and moving, the tour of the Carter house was probably too graphic for a 10 year old.
Believe Forrest could have flanked, as he said. And an awful shame to lose Patrick Cleburne. Deo Vindice.