A Message from the CEO
Spring 2024
By the spring of 1864, much of Middle Tennessee, and particularly Spring Hill and Franklin, felt oddly out of place. Combat had not scarred the landscape like other areas of the South, but there had been significant troop movements throughout the area for three years. Many young and middle-aged white men were gone. Nat Cheairs had just been captured for a second time. Tod Carter was making his way south to rejoin the Army of Tennessee in Georgia after escaping from his Federal captors. Francis Carter was serving in the 34th Texas Cavalry. Scores of other men, much like them, were also gone, imprisoned, or dead.
Emancipation had been in effect for over a year. Even though Tennessee was exempted from the proclamation, that did not stop the enslaved across the state from seeking freedom, and they took matters into their own hands. Many black men joined the army and became United States Colored Troops.
In the spring of 1864, Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant was called to Washington, D. C. to take command of all United States armed forces. Abraham Lincoln knew he needed someone who could orchestrate grand offensive moments and perhaps end the war – and Grant was his man.
As the leaves emerged from the trees and the flowers bloomed, the massive Federal offensive thrust began. Grant pushed against Gen. R. E. Lee’s Confederate forces in Virginia. Gen. W. T. Sherman engaged Gen. Joseph Johnston’s Southern troops in northwest Georgia. Gen. Nathaniel Banks launched the Red River Campaign.
By the summer, things in the two theaters were not going well. Grant and Lee had bloodied each other, but Grant could not finish Lee off, and Lee could not stop Grant from holding the initiative. Banks’ campaign had sputtered from the start. Only Sherman was making real progress as he shoved Johnston closer and closer to Atlanta.
In the summer of 1864, it seemed as if the war might never end. Lincoln was increasingly worried that he might lose his re-election bid. Opposing him was George B. McClellan, the former General-in-Chief of all U. S. forces, who by 1864 had betrayed the very thing he fought to defend by running against Lincoln on a platform of “peace” with the rebellious states. His version of peace meant dissolution of the country and the perpetuation of African slavery.
The year one thousand eight hundred and sixty-four was perhaps the most important year of the American Civil War. Three years after Fort Sumter, two years after Shiloh, and a full year after Vicksburg and Gettysburg, the fate of things was still very undecided.
In the fall of 1864, the hopes of that year’s spring, which seemed so long ago, bore fruit for the United States and the Lincoln administration. Grant squeezed Lee harder than ever, and Sherman forced Jefferson Davis to fire Johnston. Gen. John Bell Hood took command, but Atlanta fell within six weeks. That November, Lincoln crushed McClellan in the presidential election. The Northern citizenry was split on the election, but the soldiers resoundingly stood with Lincoln, and they rejected McClellan as the worst kind of traitor.
By the time Lincoln was re-elected, Hood was moving the proud, but diminished, Army of Tennessee back into the state for which it was named. It is easy to say Hood should not have done so. But that flies in the face of the realities of late 1864. For men like Hood, and almost all of his soldiers, there was no way they could back down, or stop, at that stage. They intended to fight to the death. Many of them did just that at Spring Hill and Franklin on November 29-30, 1864.
We hope to see you this summer and fall. We have much to remember and commemorate this fall with the 160th anniversary events. But let us also remember how important 1864 was, and is, to all of us. The world we live in would not be the same had things turned out differently. Most importantly, the events of 1864 helped bring an end to the war by the spring of 1865.
We have been reckoning with our past and struggling with it ever since. This year is once again a great time to reflect on the importance of our shared history. We live in a country redefined by war, and one that we proudly call the United States of America. I remain convinced that we have many good days ahead of us.
Eric A. Jacobson
Chief Executive Officer
The Battle of Franklin Trust