They wore raggedy homespun and crumpled felt slouch hats, and they were so skinny that no one-not even the Federals-blamed them for looting the dead of their food. These were the Confederates, come to smash the Federals. The locals later remembered that the thump of boots and bare feet upon the macadam rattled the windows of their houses.
Bright metal flashed from within each column, like the glistening of a snake's scales.
But the fields looked healthy, and the houses weren't burned to the ground, and the barns weren't stripped of their joists and planking, and the nearby rail line, the Nashville & Decatur Railroad, still had all the pieces of its track.Įarly that morning, long and twisting columns of butternut gray moved slowly up the three pikes that cut their way toward Franklin, Tennessee. Most of it sat stacked near the gins, in warehouses, and in barns around town. The cotton, which lay white on the fields in early fall like the crashed remains of an exhausted wave, had been gathered and ginned and baled and shipped off for when it could be transported in safety, which was practically never. There had been a frost already, and the land lay fallow.
That day in 1864 was unseasonably mild for late November.
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