Franklin video: In front of Union lines, 'rebel dead lay in heaps'

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In the aftermath of brutal fighting at Franklin, Tenn., on Nov. 30, 1864, the ground in front of the 6th Ohio Light Artillery battery and 104th Ohio Infantry was strewn with Confederate dead for “60 rods” — about 100 yards — according to Nelson A. Pinney, a private in the 104th.

"It was with great difficulty we could move about without trampling them under foot," Pinney recalled about enemy dead in The National Tribune, a newspaper for veterans, in March 1887. "I was a witness of the terrible work of Benjamin's battery and the 79th K. Y. at Fort Sanders, where the ground was soaked with rebel gore; and I was over the ground where Leggett's men 'piled the ground with rebel slain' before Atlanta; yet neither of them bore any comparison to the ground in front of the 100th, 104th and 112th Ill. and Bradley's [Baldwin's] 6th Ohio battery at Franklin, where the rebel dead lay in heaps, their bodies, legs and arms crossed and tangled in inextricable confusion."

Largely open plain in 1864, this area is mostly residential today.

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