Confederate Soldier Captain James Theodore 'Tod' Carter

Notes:

At the Battle of Franklin, (Nov 30, 1864) resident Tod Carter was mortally wounded five hundred feet from his boyhood home.
When the Army of Tennessee crossed the Georgia-Tennessee border, the soldiers were heartened by a sign on the side of the road that read ?Tennessee, A Grave or A Free Home.? Those words must have had special meaning for Tod Carter, the middle child in the Carter family, who had enlisted in the Confederate army in 1861. By 1864, he was the assistant quartermaster to Brigadier General Thomas Benton Smith in the Army of Tennessee.
On the eve of the Battle of Franklin, a friend described Carter as ?in a perfect ecstasy of joy? to be seeing his family the next day. As part of Bates?s division, Smith?s brigade launched their attack at Franklin from the far left of the Confederate line. Although Tod Carter?s quartermaster duties did not require him to fight, he would not hear of it. He mounted his horse and rode ahead of the brigade, shouting ?Follow me boys, I?m almost home!? About five hundred feet from his front yard, Tod Carter was struck by a Union bullet and tumbled into the blood-soaked grass.
After the day?s carnage had ended, the Carter family emerged from their cellar only to be greeted by General Smith with the news of Tod?s wounding. By lantern-light, Smith and the Carters spent hours searching the corpse-strewn battlefield for the young captain. His sisters? screams announced to the party that the search was over. Dying and insensible, Tod was carried back to the Carter House near dawn and set down in his sister Annie?s room. He died the next day, just one of the nearly ten thousand family tragedies that the battle wrought.
Learn more facts about the battle here: http://www.civilwar.org/battlefields/franklin/ten-facts/ten-facts-about-the-battle-of.html