Battle of Franklin haunts fictional characters

Americans typically associate the Civil War with Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, Sherman’s March to the Sea and Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. A mention of the Confederate disaster at Franklin, Tenn., likely would elicit blank stares. This is because the Battle of Franklin occurred in a remote western area out of the sight and consciousness of the conflict’s chroniclers, who were concentrated primarily in the East.

At Franklin on a cold Nov. 30, 1864, 20,000 Rebel soldiers formed battle lines and marched into a firestorm emanating from Union guns behind breastworks along the Harpeth River. More than 6,000 became casualties, and many would suffer excruciatingly while stacked up in a ditch fronting the Union defenses. In “Embrace an Angry Wind; The Confederacy’s Last Hurrah: Spring Hill, Franklin, and Nashville,” Wiley Sword described these events as “one of the most extraordinary and compelling of human experiences.”

It was no comfort to the souls lost that day that few took notice of their sacrifice then or thereafter. The spirits that haunt the battlefield in the vicinity of the Carter Farm cotton gin at Franklin have had to bear the humiliation of anonymity while their brethren at Antietam, Fredericksburg and Gettysburg have been glorified in song and story.

A decade ago, Winston Groom attempted to remedy this omission with the novel “Shrouds of Glory: From Atlanta to Nashville, the Last Great Campaign of the Civil War,” describing the military aspect of that appalling collision in central Tennessee. Unlike his popular tale “Forrest Gump,” Mr. Groom’s efforts on behalf of those who gave their lives at Franklin went virtually unnoticed. More recently, Robert Hicks’ novel “The Widow of the South” focused on the deeds of Carrie McGavock, an eyewitness to the slaughter at Franklin, who dedicated a cemetery on her plantation for the Confederate dead.

Howard Bahr has crowned these efforts with “The Judas Field,” which portrays the star-crossed lives of soldiers from a small Mississippi town who survived the sanguinary ordeal at Franklin only to live with its effects. In this version, Mr. Bahr concentrates on the heart more than the history of the matter. The title of the book derives from the biblical reference to “the field of blood” Judas Iscariot purchased with his “reward of iniquity.”

This novel evolves from Army of Tennessee commander Gen. John Bell Hood’s decision to attack a strong Union position at Franklin, in part to persuade his men to abandon their ingrained preference for fighting defensively. Hood’s directive ominously called for a head-on charge, causing thousands of his soldiers to meet with the “angel of death” and thereby forfeit any future benefit from the experience gained.

One survivor was Cass Wakefield, a sergeant in the 21st Mississippi, who returned to his Cumberland, Miss., hometown after the war to a life afflicted by what is referred to today as post-traumatic stress disorder. He brought home with him a teenage orphan boy named Lucian who had attached himself to the army and whose experience at Franklin affected him similarly. They both hung on for years after the war, dependent on drugs and alcohol.

Post-traumatic stress during the Civil War has recently received scholarly attention. Although military psychiatry was in its infancy in that era, facilities existed at such places as St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington to study and treat these ailments. Cass Wakefield and Lucian did not benefit from those medical services, however. Cass understood that his fate and those of many fellow soldiers was to “live or die or be broken according to the chance that befell them, but alive or dead or broken, the one thing they would all be was mad.”

In 1885, Cass’ boyhood friend Alison Sansing, who was dying from cancer, decided to visit the place where her father and brother had been killed on the battlefield. She recruited a reluctant Cass to escort her to Franklin. In a traumatizing variation of the Canterbury Tales, Cass and Lucian emotionally relive their fearsome battlefield experiences as this journey unfolds.

Howard Bahr frames this story so the reader vicariously encounters the numbing distress of men in battle. Soldiers transform into wild animals amid mindless slaughter. Men caught up in the agonizing sound, smell and spectacle of war find death preferable to the inescapable nightmare that has them in its grip.

The author contrasts the cacophony of conflict with the calm before-and-after scene that belies what actually occurred. Normalcy is lost, however, for the survivors who are condemned to a perpetual mental image of the Judas Field.

rd Bahr has crafted a novel worthy of attention for its insight into a cataclysmic Civil War event and Howae prose in which it is presented. The author captures the mood of the times and transports the reader to a rural Mississippi town and a community in Tennessee where the mayhem occurs. It is an experience that is at the same time distressing and fascinating and one that makes the Battle of Franklin obscure no longer.

Thomas J. Ryan is president of the Central Delaware Civil War Round Table. He lives in Bethany Beach.

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