In roughly five hours, the Confederates lost on the order of six to seven thousand men killed, wounded, captured, and missing: about 6,250 by the most-cited count, though Lieutenant General John Bell Hood (South) himself reported a far lower figure and the total is genuinely contested. Around 1,750 of those men were killed outright. Major General John M. Schofield’s (North) Union loss came to about 2,300. Hood lost roughly three times what his enemy did, while failing to take the position, and the men he lost were exactly the ones his army could least afford. The Army of Tennessee, the sources say, had shattered itself beyond any possibility of doing so again.

The human core of it sat on a back porch the next morning. On December 1, 1864, the bodies of four Confederate generals (Major General Patrick R. Cleburne (South), Hiram Granbury (South), John Adams (South), and Otho Strahl (South)) were laid out together on the rear porch of Carnton, the McGavock plantation that had become the largest Confederate field hospital in the area. Hundreds of wounded men were carried into that house during the battle and all the night after; when the rooms filled, the yard was used until it too filled with the wounded and the dead. Carnton’s wooden floors are still stained from it. Cleburne, Irish-born, the army’s most respected combat general, the man they called “the Stonewall of the West,” had reportedly told one of his brigadiers before the charge that if they were to die, they should die like men. He went forward on foot after his horse was killed and never came back.

A few hundred yards away, the Carter House gave the battle its most unbearable image. Captain Theodrick “Tod” Carter (South) was a Confederate officer and the son of the very family whose house anchored the Union center. Captured the year before, he had escaped Federal captivity and made his way back; Franklin was his first time home in about three years. His duties did not require him to charge, but he rode forward with the attack, by tradition calling out that he was almost home, and was shot down a few hundred yards from his own front yard. While the bloodiest fighting of the war raged through their yard and around their outbuildings, his family had spent the night of the battle sheltering in the cellar of the house, and not only the family. The people huddled in that basement included the men, women, and children the Carters held as slaves, sheltering from the same fire in the same dark, in the literal center of the line. The family found Tod on the field afterward, carried him into the house, and there he died two days later, inside the home he had been trying to reach. The Carter outbuildings still carry hundreds of bullet holes, among the most battle-scarred structures of the entire war.

These men died to preserve slavery. Hood’s army had marched into Tennessee on behalf of a Confederacy whose reason for existing was the ownership of human beings, and the proof of that stands on this battlefield, in the person of its most famous dead man.

Eleven months before he was killed at the cotton gin, in January 1864, Cleburne circulated a written proposal to the Army of Tennessee’s commanders arguing that the Confederacy should arm enslaved men as soldiers and promise freedom to those who fought for the South. He named slavery, bluntly, as a military liability, calling it, in a military point of view, one of the South’s chief sources of weakness. The reaction is the entire argument of the war in miniature. The proposal was met with fury; one of the generals who would die beside him at Franklin, States Rights Gist (South), reportedly called it monstrous; it was protested up the chain of command; and President Jefferson Davis ordered the whole matter suppressed and the copies of the document destroyed. The Confederate leadership would sooner bury the idea than win the war by freeing the enslaved. A Confederate general suggested trading slavery for survival, and his own government chose slavery. He was still a division commander, never promoted past it, when they sent him to die at the cotton gin.

The cause was not abstract on this ground, either. The people sheltering in the Carter cellar were held as property by the family whose dooryard the battle was fought across, and more than forty enslaved people were held at Carnton, the very plantation that became the death-house field hospital where Cleburne’s body was laid out. The men who bled in the ditch charged for a government built on that property line.

Two weeks after Franklin, Hood’s wrecked army limped on to Nashville, where it was destroyed in battle on December 15 and 16, 1864. Fighting in the Union army that finished it were roughly thirteen thousand U.S. Colored Troops, Black soldiers, the largest such force yet assembled on any Civil War battlefield, many of them formerly enslaved men from Middle Tennessee itself. People who had been held as property put on Union blue and helped annihilate the army that had marched north to keep them enslaved. The same Army of Tennessee that bled to death at the cotton gin was put out of its misery, in part, by the very people its existence depended on owning.

In early 1866, John and Carrie McGavock set aside about two acres beside their family plot at Carnton and reburied nearly 1,500 Confederate soldiers killed at Franklin, the largest privately owned military cemetery in the United States. Hood’s whole Tennessee gamble (Spring Hill, Franklin, Nashville) failed catastrophically, costing the Confederacy one of its two great field armies for nothing. Cleburne had tried to make his own side hear it before they sent him to die: the South had bet its army, and these men’s lives, on keeping human beings in chains, and it lost both.