THIRD PAPER—NASHVILLE
By John Trotwood Moore
No road is so typical of the Middle Basin as that lying between Franklin and Nashville. For ten miles it winds around in the lowland basins or over the intervening ridges, amid fields as fertile as ever yielded their increase to the husbandman’s plow. On each side the low hill ranges lie, blue or brown, as the sun happens to fall on them. Fertile to their very tops are these hills, green in grain or grasses, or darker green in richer foliage. In this the Middle Basin, through which for nearly a hundred miles from Nashville to Pulaski, this historic road runs, the country is different from any in the South. Sea shells lie on the tops of the hills—sea shells rich in lime and phosphorus. Every foot of this road is rich in history and tradition. Down it rode Jackson, time and again, from his home at The Hermitage, not many miles away. Here, also, rode Polk and Grundy and Sam Houston and Crockett. An old man told me a story about James K. Polk which I have never seen in print. He said that in the memorable campaign for the governorship of Tennessee between James K. Polk and Lean Jimmie Jones, in 1840 (in which campaign it is said that Jones, who was the greatest stump orator of his day, and the father of that style of oratory, almost drove the statesman Polk from the hustings), there was a mutual agreement between the candidates that Polk should speak at Franklin and Jones at Columbia, in the wind-up, the day before the election. Columbia was Polk’s home, and not very solid for him at that. The friends of Polk devised a scheme to give him the advantage by making two speeches in a day. So he made his speech early in Franklin and had saddled and ready a thoroughbred horse, which he mounted after his speech, and galloped to Spring Hill. There he took a fresh horse and rode furiously to Columbia, arriving in time to reply to Jones’ speech. But my informant, who was an old line Whig, informed me that though the future President made record-breaking time in his race down the pike, he lost in votes when it became known that he had broken his agreement and played a trick on Lean Jimmie. Jones defeated him for governor.
But the greatest of all the history made on this pike was made by the two armies of Hood and Schofield, as they swept over it in the early days of December, 1864, and then swept back again. The situations were exactly reversed, making a wave of war which ebbed and flowed, carrying on its crest the foam of wounds and death and woe. Continuing the story from Hood’s invasion from our last issue, Schofield’s army reached Nashville after the battle of Franklin, early in the morning of December 1, 1864, and there united with Thomas. Other detachments had been called in, including Gen. A. J. Smith, aggregating nearly 12,000 men, and later Steedman, with 5,200 more. Milroy and Granger, with 8,000 troops, were ordered to Murfreesboro, and placed under the command of General Rousseau. According to General Cox (The March to the Sea—Franklin and Nashville. Jacob D. Cox, page 100), General Thomas had in Nashville on the morning of November 30, 26,200 men. To these add Schofield’s army of 34,000 men, and it will be seen at a glance what Hood’s disheartened and stricken army had to fight, and Thomas, a Virginian, in command, with the bulldog tenacity of Grant and the courage of Hood.
If Franklin had been desperate, what could Hood do now, with the heart of them dead in his brave men, with sorrow in their hearts for comrades who slept in trenches under the sod of Franklin, and beloved commanders who, now being dust, were but a week before pictured forever between the sky and the bastions of steel as they rode over the breastworks to death? Even in the heart of the starved and the hardened lives memory—and what memory must have been theirs in the sleet and cold of those bitter December nights, while waiting for Thomas to come forth from his warmth and food to give battle. If Franklin had been a desperate case, was not this worse—the combined forces of Thomas and Schofield, Smith and Steedman? Anyone but Hood would have stopped and thought, but Hood never thought.
“In truth,” says Cox, in the history already quoted, “Hood’s situation was a very difficult one, and to go forward or to go back was almost equally unpromising. He followed his natural bent, therefore, which always favored the appearance, at least, of aggression, and he marched after Schofield to Nashville.” Hood put Lee’s corps in the center across the Franklin turnpike; Cheatham took the right, and Stewart the left of the line, while Forrest, with his cavalry, occupied the country between Stewart and the river below Nashville.”
 
General Van Dorn’s headquarters, near Spring Hill, where General Van Dorn was shot to death by one Dr. Peters for an alleged familiarity with the latter’s wife. Peters walked friendly into Van Dorn’s office, obtained a pass from the General to go through the line, shot him, jumped on a horse and escaped to the Federal line.
Here, from the first days of December until the 15th, much of the time in sleet and rain, Hood’s half starved veterans awaited the oncoming of Thomas’ well fed and well seasoned troops. Such a meeting could scarcely be termed a battle, however bravely the long, thin lines might hold out, and however desperately they might fight. Hood grimly made two stands, but his gray lines, outflanked and outfought, melted away into a disorganized rush, back through mud and slush and freezing rain to the Tennessee. And now, back again, over the same highway, rush the two armies. Truly this historic highway was baptized in blood. The weather was cold now, sleeting. When it thawed there was slush, and when it froze, needles of ice for bare and bloody feet. No army since Valley Forge suffered as did Hood’s brave men. Truly, the men who could follow Hood back to the Tennessee, in the biting cold and hunger of those days, in the numbness which knows that all was lost, and the sorrow for those who marched no more, truly, the stock of that kind who fought it to a finish, might well survive that their heroic tribe might be given as a future pledge for the perpetuity of the Republic.
Two things alone saved Hood from annihilation: The lack of real generalship in his pursuers, who failed to push their advantage to a finish, and the intrepid genius of Forrest, who covered Hood’s retreat. Had Johnston got Sherman, had Lee got McClellan in the fix Hood was now in, the map of the union would be painted to-day in two colors.
Of Forrest’s skill in saving Hood’s army, General Cox pays tribute in the following paragraph, when he says: “At Columbia, Forrest rejoined Hood, and his cavalry, with an infantry rear guard, under command of General Walthall, covered the retreat to the Tennessee.... This force was able to present so strong a front that ... our advance guard was not able to break through.” But the freezing, pitiless retreat of a brave, broken army, who had gone into this Pike of Battles fit to fight for a kingdom, who had done more than any similar body of men had ever done before, in facing snow and sleet and hunger and bastions of steel and the entrenched thousands of a well-fed city’s troops, and now went out under the fatal inefficiency of him who led them, is one of the great tragic stories of the Lost Cause.
Forever will this historic highway run between sloping hills and sinking valleys, from the Basin’s Rim to the Tennessee; forever will it girdle with protecting arms the swelling glories of its maiden hills. The sentinel rows of corn land, the massed squadrons of wheat, forever will follow the line of its march, helmeted in tassle-caps, sheathed in scabbard sheafs, with meshes of gold and gilt, while from the forts of its over-towering hills orchards of apples will drop their balls of gold where once contending cannon hurled theirs of steel. Forever and forever, a tribute and a lesson to all time that brother no more shall kill brother in the dawning glory of a new age and a new union. But never again will it see the equal of that desperate courage, that sacrifice for conscience, that valor for home and country as each saw it, as shown by these two armies which swept north and south in glory and in gloom.
Trotwood does not like to end anything in gloom and sorrow, and so will end this sketch of this historical highway with some cavalry yarns he has picked up from the old survivors of this and other battles.
Several years ago, at a Confederate reunion, he found himself among a group of interesting talkers—men who had been makers of history in this great struggle. All of them have now joined their comrades who had gone before—and right worthily they went, as their life’s record will show. Among that number was Gen. W. H. Jackson, the owner of Belle Meade, then the most famous thoroughbred nursery in America.
Some Cavalry Yarns.
On his left was the State’s chief executive, Governor Turney, or “Old Pete,” as the big brained and big framed fellow under the slouch hat was familiarly called by every schoolboy in the State. Other congenial spirits were around, high in social and political circles, drawn by the annual reunion of Confederate veterans. Some war yarns had passed around and General Jackson, who was a brilliant cavalry leader himself, was explaining how efficient the cavalry service was. The General himself fought through the war and thought that the best horses in the world for cavalry purposes were those with a good dash of thoroughbred in them. Jackson himself rode thoroughbreds all through the war. So did Fitz-Hugh Lee, of Virginia; John H. Morgan, the famous raider, and many others.
“I remember the time I longed for one mighty bad,” quietly remarked an Alabama colonel present, as he knocked the ashes off his cigar and smile............