Finding my great-grandfather’s battle ground in Franklin, Tennessee

Even if Franklin, Tennessee had been a toxic hellhole, I would’ve visited the town, site of one of the Civil War’s most sadistic and deadly battles.  But just south of Nashville, Franklin was one of the richest communities in the entire country and fastidiously preserved, its village squares and quaint shops giving off an aroma of self-satisfied affluence.

I had to pay homage to my great-grandfather by walking in his footsteps.  Years before, a historian at the National Soldier’s Home and Cemetery in Dayton, Ohio informed me that my great-grandfather had fought for the Ohio Infantry in Franklin.  Austin Hill Patton was a teenage arrival from Ireland who fought for the Union. Since Austin enlisted so young, and since his son did not father my father until late in life, and since my father had me later in life, too, I ended up weirdly close in generational time to this Civil War ghost. I knew nothing more about him than what I learned in Dayton —that Austin entered what was then the Old Soldiers Home still in his forties, dying from a long list of physical ailments. The Dayton historian had told me it was no wonder he was in such terrible shape; my great-grandfather had fought in the “worst of the worst.”

Franklin, Tennessee. Three patchwork Civil War sites were stitched into the town’s development. Pizza joints, boutiques and golf courses covered the graves of generals and cannon fodder with equal disregard. George and I visited Carter House, a central point in the battle that once overwhelmed the entire town. I had a sentimental idea that I would stand in my unknown great-grandfather’s place, draw him closer and somehow dust off a century and a half of oblivion. I had a proprietary feel for this small farm, this set-aside of open land within the town, my own blood claim on Southern real estate. What I ended up learning was bloody, all right, and that I was tied to a much wider swathe of the South.

The battle of Franklin lasted only four or five hours on November 30, 1864. It was nearly suicidal and/or homicidal on both sides, pent-up vengeance seizing the forces for past humiliations and stand-offs. As the short November afternoon melted into darkness, the curtain was raised for “the last great drama of the war.”  In a family’s cotton fields and private gardens, the armies unleashed lunatic violence and hatred. Many scholars describe the battle at Franklin as a psychodrama rather than a strategic maneuver. Some speculate it accomplished nothing and would have resulted in the same outcome—the next battle in Nashville—no matter what happened here at Franklin.

The excruciating Civil War ordeal of the Carter family was detailed with speed, passion, and poetry by our guide Robert Donald Cross, associate historian for the Battle of Franklin Trust. “Don’t call me Johnny Reb, I won’t call you Yank,” Rob said, then led us through the home and the family’s story with vivid detail, in the elevated diction of the era. We ended up in the basement, just as the family did as they waited out the siege, bullets flying ceaselessly above them. Scores of bullet holes still riddling the outbuildings and walls gave silent testimony to what must have been relentless pandemonium overhead.

Rob stressed the battle’s terrible losses.  Over two thousand men were killed within hours, more killed in less time than on any other day in the entire war. Corpses were left standing, propped by other corpses. The Carters’ fields of wheat, corn and cotton, then worked by their twenty-eight slaves, were now cemetery-like green turf. Franklin was built over countless unmarked graves.

As we wandered the site, George said, “Rob’s so intense, but keeping a lid on himself, like a pressure cooker.  History is like a creation he wants us to understand. He’s expressing his art, trying to convey the best interpretation, to take us there.” George stared at a greensward that sloped toward a highway. “I just wonder, how is all this important to me?” Walking on, he wistfully answered his own question: “I guess, because I’m an American. It’s part of our kinship, and so, it must be part of me.”

We came to a slave cabin, cater-corner from the Carter House. Unlike a brick, gabled pump house nearby, the slave residence was a rough-hewn, one-room wooden shack with a dirty mattress thrown on the floor. “Where were the slaves,” George asked, “while the Carter family gathered in the basement?”

Back at the museum, Rob was working historical magic. With no more than my great-grandfather’s name and town, Springfield, Ohio, he had uncovered in-depth information on Austin Hill Patton’s Civil War engagements throughout the South. The vague scraps I’d learned in Dayton became a feast of specific data. Rob had memorized footnote citations and sub-numbers and knew arcane guideways to identify ordinary soldiers.  Austin Hill Patton, 19, enlisted on January 27,1864, and mustered into Company I, 101st Ohio, 1st Brigade, 1st Division, 4th Army Corps. At the Franklin battle, he was probably sent to reinforce the center of main area near Carter house.  My sentimental goal more than attained, I got chills thinking of that Irish kid enduring that carnage. My own great-grandfather shot or dodged some of those bullets still lodged in the walls.

But Rob told me so much more. It turned out that Austin took part in the Atlanta campaign. He served in several battles heading south into Atlanta—Rocky Face, Resaca, Kennesaw Mountain, Atlanta, and Jonesboro; battle grounds I had already seen with no idea of Austin’s presence in them.  After that, presumably while Sherman went on scorching earth through Georgia, Austin was assigned to the Western campaigns, taking him north again, into the heart of Middle Tennessee: Columbia, Spring Hill, Franklin, and finally Nashville.

Weird how blood bonds animate the imagination’s capacity for connection.

Our conversation with Rob turned to his thoughts on certain Southern attitudes. A lifelong Tennessean, Rob felt “Southern xenophobia regarding the Civil War was sickening and idiotic.” He rebelled against the very term “Union” (favoring “Federal”) and the assumption that any Northerner is “just a Yankee.” He studied military history and found his passion for recovering soldiers’ stories after his father told him of his own great-great grandfather’s history in the Franklin battle.

See what I mean about blood bonds?

After closing time, Rob’s conversation got more personal. Inspired to join the service at age twenty-one, after the 9/11/01 attacks, he hoped “to fight on behalf of a “specific victim, to carry their picture with me into battle.”  So Rob was devastated, during training, to be dismissed for heart murmur. He struggled, agonized by a sidelined feeling. At rock-bottom emotionally, he sought his pastor’s counsel. “My pastor told me flat out that I was an idiot. It was obvious, given my education in history: my calling was to educate others on war.”

That’s exactly what Rob devoted his career to, right at home in Franklin. Along with many public presentations and outreach for the Battle of Franklin Trust, Rob also counseled Vietnam veterans, drawing out their funniest stories, then eliciting the worst. “They hunger for their stories to be told truthfully.” Because the vets tell themselves tales of self-delusion in order to cope with atrocity, Rob explained, they struggle to be “truthful even to themselves.”

Another associate joined us and our talk turned to current social topics.. The two young historians thought that our times were “the worst, the most divisive, ever since the Civil War.” As at so many other cultural-historical stopovers on this journey, the staff at Carter House seemed astute and super-informed. The whole place gave the vibe of reverence for the past’s horrible burden and respect for those who sought to learn more, commemoration at its best. This was honoring the past and our ancestors with digging for depth. This was accepting the outcome of the search, no matter how savage or contradictory to some shallow patriotic or nostalgic narrative of our national story—that self-serving slant on history which George and I had come to call “The Pageant.” This wasn’t pageantry at Carter House; it was public truth-telling. Maybe this was the real patriotism.

Taking leave of Rob, full of gratitude, feeling I’d finally discovered my great-grandfather, I also felt the sting of history’s  slap here in Middle Tennessee. Starting with my great-grandfather’s role as a youthful infantryman here, and after Rob’s intense interpretation, I’d felt blindsided by raw injustice and wanton violence, old blood gushing under my feet. I felt revulsion at what ought to have been unnecessary struggles for basic equality. The past was a wretched place. Would it always be?