At Mrs. Overton's,
Six Miles from Nashville,
On Columbia Turnpike,
Dec. 5th, 1864.
I wrote you a short note from the other side of Franklin the
morning after the battle. I have not written oftener because I have been
unwilling to trust letters to the mail, as I suppose communication has been
interrupted between Macon and Augusta. We left Florence, Alabama, on the 21st
of November; we reached Columbia and after remaining in front of the place two
or three days it was evacuated by the enemy who then took position on the north
bank of Duck River, immediately opposite the town. There was some artillery
firing and sharp shooting across the river and it was in this on the 28th that
Col. Beckham was wounded. I have not heard from him since the morning of the
1st, when he was doing well, but the wound is so severe (the skull fractured)
that I fear he will not recover. In fact the surgeon said there was a bare
possibility of his surviving. His loss will be very severely felt. It is hard
enough to be killed at all, but to be killed in such an insignificant affair
makes it doubly bad.
The fight at Franklin was very severe — while it lasted, and
though our loss was heavy, everybody is in the finest humor — and ready for the
fight again whenever Gen. “John B.” gives the word. Col. Cofer, Provost
Marshall Gen. of the Army, told me the other day that he had taken particular
pains to find out by enquiring the feelings of the men and that the morale of
the army was very much improved by the fight, and that the men would go into
the next with double vim and impetuosity.
Our men fought with the utmost determinal and if we had had
three hours more of daylight I feel as confident as possible that we should
have been to-day in Nashville. The Yankees are now in their works around the
city and our main line is at one point only twelve hundred yards from theirs.
We have captured three engines and about twenty cars and I hope before long to
hear the shriek of the locomotive once more. The country we have marched
through for the past fifty miles is one of the gardens of the world. The lands
are very fertile, the plantations well improved and the people before the war
were in the possession of every comfort and luxury. The destruction, too,
caused by the Yankees, is not to be compared to that in other sections occupied
by them. There has been no part of the Confederacy that I have seen which has
been in their possession and has suffered so little.
Our Army, in leaving Tennessee, on both occasions
previously, passed to the East of this portion of the state, so that an Army
has never before marched over it. The Yankees too have held it a long time and
I imagine considered it permanently in their possession. We reached this place
on the night of the 2nd. There are several young ladies from Nashville here who
are very pretty and agreeable and the most intense Southerners. The enemy was
forced from his position north of Duck River by a flank movement which placed
the whole army except, two Divisions, near his communications. He fell back to
Franklin that night and the next day, the 30th November, was the battle of
Franklin.
SOURCE: Louise Wigfall Wright, A Southern Girl in
’61, p. 211-3
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