Ladies and gentlemen, this time the battle of Tennessee is in the town of Franklin. This is part 3 in the series, following Part 1 – The Battle of Fort Sanders and Part 2 – Elizabethton. If you like these videos please read on and be sure to subscribe and check out more videos on my YouTube page.
So, let’s begin. Using the same synthetic narrator named Adam, same AI-made synth track (third tour, still not asking for a raise), and a fresh pile of code that believes very hard that it is a map. Tonight’s act: the Battle of Franklin, November 30, 1864. It’s in Tennessee, so nobody has to write in this time.
The setup
The night before, Union troops under General John Schofield slipped past the Confederate army at Spring Hill. By morning they were digging in on the south edge of Franklin, with the Harpeth River behind them. Two miles south, Confederate General John Bell Hood formed the Army of Tennessee on Winstead Hill and ordered a frontal attack. His officers objected. He ordered it anyway.
Two miles
The attack stepped off around four in the afternoon, a battle line about three miles wide, across open ground. Sunset that day came at about 4:34. At the Carter House on the Columbia Pike, Confederate troops broke through the Union line. Union reserves under Colonel Emerson Opdycke rushed in and closed the gap.
The Carter family spent the battle in their basement. One of their sons, Captain Tod Carter, was fighting on the Confederate side. He was badly wounded, carried into his family’s house, and died there.
The fighting went on hand to hand, past sunset, by torchlight. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says that in the outer ditch the dead lay “sometimes five or six deep.”
6,252Confederate losses: 1,750 killed, 3,800 wounded, 702 missing or captured
2,326Union losses: 189 killed, 1,033 wounded, 1,104 missing or captured
Figures from the American Battlefield Trust. Hood’s own report gave 4,500 Confederate casualties, and the Tennessee Encyclopedia says about 7,000, so treat these as estimates.
Six Confederate generals were killed or mortally wounded: Patrick Cleburne, John Adams, Hiram Granbury, States Rights Gist, Otho Strahl, and John C. Carter, who died on December 10. On the morning of December 1, the bodies of four of them lay on the back porch at Carnton, the McGavock family home, which was serving as the largest Confederate field hospital. That night, Schofield withdrew to Nashville.
The Pizza Hut part
For years, the spot where Cleburne fell was a Pizza Hut. In 2005 it was torn down, and preservation groups have since removed a strip mall, a flower shop, and a run of houses, lot by lot. The American Battlefield Trust counts more than 182 acres saved at Franklin, including the 110-acre Eastern Flank Battlefield Park near Carnton. And the Carter House outbuildings still carry bullet holes from that afternoon.
Behind the curtain
Here’s how the trick works. Claude did the research and wrote the script. Dave read the first draft and called it “very basic,” which was fair, so the second draft added Winstead Hill, the three-mile line, Opdycke, Tod Carter, the torchlight, and the ditch. That pushed the Short to about 1:14, which still fits under YouTube’s three-minute limit.
Dave also rewrote the last line to sound better. His version read as if the Pizza Hut were still sitting on the battlefield, which is the exact opposite of the happy ending, so we kept his rhythm and flipped the facts back. The recorded line says the Pizza Hut and strip mall are gone.
Adam’s take ran 1:23. We trimmed the longest pauses and sped the read up five percent, then lined up every word against the script to time the animation and the captions. The field map, the Carter House, the cross-section of the ditch, and the casualty bars are all React code rendered in Remotion. The music is the house band’s usual number, cut so the drop lands on “More than six thousand Confederates.”
What we flagged: Casualty totals vary a lot by source (4,500 to 7,000 Confederate). Army sizes vary even more, from 20,000 to 33,000 Confederates depending on who you read, so the video doesn’t give a headcount. The start time is 4:00 in some sources and 4:30 in others. John C. Carter died ten days after the battle, which is why the video says “killed or mortally wounded.” Maps and diagrams are schematic and not to scale.
Sources
- American Battlefield Trust: Franklin
- American Battlefield Trust: Franklin article
- American Battlefield Trust: The Miracle of Franklin
- American Battlefield Trust: Reclaiming the Franklin Battlefield
- American Battlefield Trust: McGavock Confederate Cemetery
- Tennessee Encyclopedia: Battle of Franklin
- Tennessee Encyclopedia: Carter House
- House Divided (Dickinson College): Six Confederate generals die at Franklin
Narration voice: ElevenLabs. Music: Suno. Research, script support, and animation code: Claude, with a human holding the whip.
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