Five Tragic Hours: The Battle of Franklin. By James Lee McDonough and Thomas L. Connelly. (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1983. Pp 185.)
McDonough and Connelly’s Five Tragic Hours explores the often forgotten Battle of Franklin. Both authors grew up in Tennessee and visited the battlefield often. Both have written other Civil War works, especially pertaining to the western theater.
The first two chapters examine the careers of several military commanders participating in Battle of Franklin. In particular, they point out that Hood was often an aggressive general, perhaps too aggressive. McDonough and Connelly claim that Hood aspired to be like both Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. They use Grady McWhiney and Perry Jamieson’s questionable Attack and Die to support their theory of Hood’s aggressive nature. Moreover, it appeared that Hood was eager to strike at the Union army and destroy it. However, Hood could not put together a fitting plan. His tactical planning was so erratic that his subordinates did not often know how to respond. In fact, his overall strategic plan was arguably the most outlandish of the war and most likely would not have worked. He planned to beat Thomas’s army in Tennessee, go through Ohio and into Pennsylvania, and attack Grant from behind in Virginia. The authors rightly suggested that his quest for glory had him caught up in the situation. Also, Hood’s poor health, which resulted from amputations of both his arm and leg, may have fatigued and clouded his ability to think properly.
The following chapters describe John Schofield and the Spring Hill affair. Thomas ordered Schofield to delay Hood’s advance to Nashville. He concentrated his defenses at Columbia, a few miles from Franklin. After Hood had deployed his men, Schofield sent some of his men a few miles back to Spring Hill, a vulnerable position that could have been easily swept by Hood’s men. If that had occurred the Rebels would have blocked the Yankees retreat route and potentially destroyed Schofield’s men. Hood got in between Schofield’s men and attacked the left flank on Spring Hill but for whatever reason never blocked the pike. During the night Schofield moved up from Columbia, gathered his forces and was able to fall back to Franklin. It was reported that during the affair Hood was sleeping and never quite really understood the situation. That can explain his ambiguous orders.
On November 30, 1864, Hood decided to make an ill prepared attack on Schofield’s army at Franklin. The Yankees were galvanized to see the Hood’s forces advancing; to them it seemed suicidal. The Confederates pushed back the Union troops that were in front of the works at Franklin. Hood’s men had some success; they initially broke through the line around the Carter house. However, that was short lived. Several Union soldiers made a concerted effort to push back the Confederates. During the evening, Hood sent Lee’s men in but were forced back. During the night, Schofield decided to withdraw to Nashville. Over seven thousand of Hood’s eighteen thousand soldiers became casualties of the battle. The authors stated that this was the death of Hood’s Army of the Tennessee.
Overall, this work is for anyone who has an interest in the Civil War. McDonough and Connelly do not have a bibliography but rather offer a commentary on sources. They use the Official Records and Hood’s Attack and Retreat. On the downside, the work is plagued with grammatical errors, such as the word “armys” on pages 170-172. Moreover, he devotes less than half of the book to the actual battle. However, Five Tragic Hours will satisfy anybody’s interest on the Battle of Franklin.
Shawn Devaney
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Five Tragic Hours: The Battle of Franklin. By James Lee McDonough and Thomas L. Connelly. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1983.
The battle of Franklin was the last desperate gamble of the Confederate Army of Tennessee, the concluding carnage of its ultimately futile attempt to defend the Southern heartland. Until recently, other, more celebrated battles in the Western Theater such as Shiloh, Chickamauga, and Atlanta have overshadowed the violent sacrifice of the 1864 Tennessee campaign. Five Tragic Hours: The Battle of Franklin, written by two well known Civil War scholars James Lee McDonough and Thomas L. Connelly, rectifies this neglect. McDonough and Connelly, who have both authored numerous other volumes related to the Civil War west of the Appalachians, spent their childhoods near the Franklin battlefield in Middle Tennessee and have long been fascinated by the Confederacy’s forlorn hope at Franklin. Five Tragic Hours is a well written narrative study of the final, fatal campaign of the Army of Tennessee, which the authors aptly describe as “the death of an army” (152).
The two historians collected an impressive amount of firsthand accounts and sources of the battle, which due to the time it took place and the high casualties involved, is one of the least documented battles of the Civil War from the Confederate perspective. Even more challenging is the number of conflicting reports from the Army of Tennessee, mostly written after the war in an effort to preserve certain reputations and absolve surviving commanders of responsibility for the disaster. McDonough and Connelly effectively separate fact from fiction and gaze through the eternal fog of war to present one of the most detailed and accurate accounts of the battle, while still maintaining a concise and compelling narrative.
Five Tragic Hours recounts the entire history of the 1864 Tennessee campaign, beginning with the fall of Atlanta and ending with the decisive battle of Nashville, but its primary focus is on Franklin. The authors also investigate the truth behind the infamous Spring Hill fiasco, arguing that while it was indeed a serious tactical blunder on the part of the Army of Tennessee, it was not necessarily such a legendary lost opportunity to completely destroy Union Major General Schofield’s army, and even had such an outcome resulted General George Thomas’s massive Federal army at Nashville would still have remained entrenched within one of the most fortified cities in the nation. In effect, the thesis of Five Tragic Hours argues that Confederate General Hood’s entire Tennessee campaign was doomed to failure from the start due to poor planning, inferior numbers and logistics, low morale and the notorious infighting that plagued the Army of Tennessee from its inception. After reading Five Tragic Hours, one must conclude that had not a devastating deathblow occurred at Franklin, it would surely have happened somewhere else in Tennessee. For the South, the war in the West was essentially over with the fall of Atlanta in September 1864, but the killing tragically continued until well into 1865.
The books only major weakness is a surprising lack of detailed maps, which seriously hinders the comprehension of the narrative. The few maps that are included are less than ideal, creating substantial confusion when the authors attempt to describe the tactical aspects of the battle. On many occasions, locations are described in reference to current streets and landmarks in the town of Franklin, but without firsthand knowledge of the terrain or a contemporary street map, the comprehension of the military situation is lost. The work is well illustrated with photographs of surviving battlefield structures and participants, which makes the omission of the maps all the more perplexing.
In their conclusion, McDonough and Connelly relate what actually happened to the dead and wounded of both sides after the battle, and explain why a national cemetery or battlefield was ultimately never established in Franklin. Five Tragic Hours: The Battle of Franklin, aside from its cartographical flaws, is nonetheless a worthwhile study for any Civil War scholar or student interested in the unfortunate and largely forgotten battle of Franklin.
Than Dossman
Five Tragic Hours: The Battle of Franklin. By James Lee McDonough and Thomas L. Connelly. (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1983. Pp 185.)
On a cold November day in 1864 in Franklin, Tennessee, the Confederate Army of Tennessee pitted itself against a much stronger Federal foe. The events of this day and those leading up to the gory battle are depicted in James Lee McDonough and Thomas L. Connelly’s Five Tragic Hours: The Battle of Franklin. Both authors claim Tennesseean roots, and both are distinctly qualified Civil War experts on the military campaigns in Tennessee and the Western Theater; McDonough is today recognized as a leader in academic Civil War circles and author of numerous books, and Connelly too claims a notable status among historians.
McDonough and Connelly provide astute character assessment of both Confederate General John Bell Hood and Federal General John McAlister Schofield, which grants readers insight into their command leading up to and during the battle. The authors delve especially into the world of Kentucky born West Pointer John Bell Hood, the General responsible for demanding the Confederate charge at four o’clock on November 30th, 1864. By that year, a once-vivacious and well-loved Hood had fallen victim both physically and mentally to the strain of battle—left with a useless arm and amputated leg, Hood wanted desperately to emulate the glory of his idols, General Robert E. Lee and General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. The authors also suggest in the wake of Grady McWhiney’s Celtic thesis that Hood launched the suicidal attack at Franklin because of his Southern Celtic heritage, which is debatable but intriguing. Additionally, four years of war had run its course on the General. Clearly physically, emotionally, and mentally wearied throughout the build-up to the Battle of Franklin, Hood’s daring and aggressive personality was exacerbated by his obsessive quest to obtain glory.
One of the book’s strengths is its detailed and lucid tactical battle narrative. McDonough and Connelly contribute to Civil War historiography by indulging the reader in a lively and informative battle account, though brief. They also examine John Bell Hood’s decisions not to employ a flanking technique that perhaps would have brought his armies more success. Instead, Hood chose a frontal attack that ignored the weak areas of the Union lines and virtually invited the extreme carnage that would result. Beginning late in the afternoon, the Confederates launched a full-scale attack on their strategically well-located counterparts—and continued to fight viciously and valiantly until well after dark fell. Confederate losses proved staggering; Hood recorded a casualty list that contained the names of upwards of 7,000 men, a number when compared to Federal losses of 2,400 drives home the gory reality of the doomed Confederate assault.
Five Tragic Hours is recommended to Civil War enthusiasts and scholars alike for its detailed battle narrative and in-depth character examination of the generals commanding the two forces there at Franklin, Tennessee. Much to the student’s chagrin, however, no footnotes or endnotes accompany the text (although to the authors’ credit, a bibliographical “Commentary on Sources” follows the text), which suggests that the book was not geared toward a scholarly audience. Also in that vein, a seemingly gratuitous number of photographs depicting key characters and locales of the battle as they stood in the early 1980s (the time of the book's publication) are dispersed throughout the book. This factor suggests that Five Tragic Hours may have been geared to a popular audience. Additionally, the text itself is marked with several careless typographical and editorial errors that perhaps may annoy readers but do not detract from the book’s readability or mar the precise scholarship upon which McDonough and Connelly base their study.