ROAD OF HOPE AND HORROR
In the late fall and early winter of 1864, soldiers in Lt. Gen. John Bell Hood’s Army of Tennessee endured wild swings of emotion as they traveled along a 30-mile thoroughfare between Columbia and Franklin, Tenn.
came first on November 29 at Columbia, where the Confederates had Maj. Gen. John Schofield’s Army of the Ohio on the run toward the Tennessee capital, Nashville. Then at Spring Hill, where on the night of November 29 and morning of November 30 most of Schofield’s soldiers somehow slipped past Hood’s army to reach Franklin. “I have never seen more intense rage and profound disgust,” a Mississippi soldier recalled, “than was expressed by the weary, foot-sore, battle-torn Confederate soldiers when they discovered that their
