John Franklin Jameson

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Franklin, Sir John (1786–1847), British naval officer and Arctic explorer, who was born at Spilsby, Lincolnshire. He experienced warfare at sea at the battles of Copenhagen in 1801 and Trafalgar in 1805. In between he served under his cousin Matthew Flinders in the Investigator where he showed his ability as a surveyor. In 1818 he was chosen to command the Trent in which Captain David Buchan tried to reach the North Pole. Between 1819 and 1827 he led two overland expeditions to the far north of the American continent which gained new knowledge of the coastline. During this time he was promoted post-captain and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and in 1829 he was knighted. He served as governor of Tasmania between 1836 and 1843 and on 19 May 1845, in command of the 372-ton bomb ketch Erebus, he set out with another bomb ketch, Terror, to discover a North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. After being sighted on 26 July at the head of Baffin Bay, the two ships were never heard of again.

In 1850 the Admiralty launched a search for the missing ships. The camp where the expedition overwintered in 1845–6 was found on a small island, as were the graves of three sailors. Modern autopsies on the bodies revealed a high level of lead in them which almost certainly came from the expedition's tinned food and would have had a disastrous effect on the entire crew. In 1859 the expedition sent in the steam yacht Fox, which had been purchased by Lady Franklin to discover the fate of her husband, found a cairn on the island. This contained the expedition's diaries, the log book, and a letter which established the date of Franklin's death as June 1847. The cache also revealed that just as the ships were on the point of discovering a passage through Peel Sound in September 1846 they became fast in the ice. In April 1848, the last entry in the expedition's diary, the ships were abandoned and their crews tried to march to safety, but none survived.

Later expeditions—and there were many of them—learnt from the local Inuit that Franklin and his men died on or near King William Island, probably from starvation. A number of articles were recovered from the Inuit who also mentioned cannibalism, and this was supported by a modern autopsy on some of the bodies found later. More bodies, some of them in the remains of the ships' boats, were recovered by further expeditions in the 19th century and by ones mounted by archaeologists during the last half of the 20th century. Scientific investigations into the tragedy were still ongoing in 2004.

Bibliography

Beattie, O. , ‘Franklin Expedition Graves’, in James P. Delgado (ed.), The British Museum Encyclopedia of Underwater and Marine Archaeology (1997).
—— and Geiger, J. , Frozen in Time (1993).
Lamb, G. F. , Franklin (1956).
McClintock, F. , The Voyage of the Fox (1859).

Franklin, Battle of (1864).After Union General William Tecumseh Sherman had captured the capital of Georgia in the Battle of Atlanta, he cut loose from his supply lines and set out with 62,000 of his troops in mid‐November 1864 on Sherman's march to the sea to cripple southern resources and demonstrate the hopelessness of the Confederate cause. But, while Sherman headed east, Confederate Gen. John B. Hood headed into Tennessee behind Sherman.

To guard against this move, Sherman had left George H. Thomas in Tennessee. Once Thomas could gather the numerous garrison troops there, he would have an army of ample size to deal with Hood. Meanwhile, Thomas assigned Gen. John M. Schofield with 34,000 men to watch Hood. Hood advanced rapidly from northern Alabama, outmaneuvered Schofield, and nearly captured his force at Spring Hill, Tennessee, 29 November 1864. Something went wrong—just what did remains controversial—in the Confederate army's command structure, and Schofield's army was able to escape from the trap.

The next morning, an enraged Hood put his army in pursuit. He caught Schofield at Franklin, Tennessee. The Federals' backs were to the unbridged Harpeth River, but in front of them were powerful entrenchments and an open plain two miles wide. Though two of his divisions and nearly all his artillery had not yet arrived, Hood hurled his 30,000 available men against the Union fortifications in a series of bloody and futile charges. Six of Hood's generals were killed, and 6,245 other Confederates became casualties. Union casualties numbered only 2,326.

After the battle, Schofield withdrew at his leisure, joining Thomas in Nashville. Hood followed. The slaughter at Franklin substantially weakened Hood's army and made easier and more complete Thomas's devastating victory at the Battle of Nashville a fortnight later.

Bibliography

Richard M. McMurry , John Bell Hood and the War for Southern Independence, 1982.
James Lee McDonough and and Thomas L. Connelly , Five Tragic Hours: The Battle of Franklin, 1983.

Steven E. Woodworth

Franklin, Sir John (1786–1847). After a distinguished naval career in the wars against Napoleon, Franklin became the most famous British Arctic explorer of his day. Then, like Livingstone, at the end of his life, he became even more of a national figure by disappearing into the unknown. Although a naval officer trained in 1818 in using large ships to force a way through the ice of the Canadian north to find the North-West Passage and arguably a victim of that policy, Franklin made his greatest discoveries on two overland journeys of 1818–22 and 1825–7 when he explored vast areas of northern mainland Canada and traced the northern coast. After a spell as governor of Tasmania from 1834 to 1843, he was chosen to take the Antarctic ships Erebus and Terror, which Ross had used, to the Arctic to force the North-West Passage. It was later learned that, having got through sea passages to the west side of King William Island, the ships had frozen in. Franklin died, but his men survived to perish later of scurvy, starvation, and lead poisoning from their tinned foods. No fewer than 40 official and unofficial expeditions searched for Franklin (and in the process, ironically, showed there was a North-West Passage) but not until 1859 was the nature of the disaster fully established.

Roy C. Bridges

Franklin, Sir John (1786–1847). After a distinguished naval career in the wars against Napoleon, Franklin became the most famous British Arctic explorer of his day. Then he became even more of a national figure by disappearing into the unknown. Franklin made his greatest discoveries on two overland journeys of 1818–22 and 1825–7 when he explored vast areas of northern mainland Canada. After a spell as governor of Tasmania from 1834 to 1843, he was chosen to take the Antarctic ships Erebus and Terror to the Arctic to force the North‐West Passage. Having got through sea passages to the west side of King William Island, the ships were frozen in. Franklin died, but his men survived to perish later of scurvy, starvation, and lead poisoning from their tinned foods. Not until 1859 was the nature of the disaster fully established.

John Franklin Jameson 1859–1937, American historian, b. Somerville, Mass. After teaching at Johns Hopkins, Brown, and the Univ. of Chicago he was director (1905–28) of the department of historical research of the Carnegie Institution, Washington, D.C., and from 1928 to his death he was chief of the division of manuscripts in the Library of Congress. As chairman of the committee of management of the Dictionary of American Biography he was largely responsible for the inauguration and completion of that monumental work. In these and other undertakings, Jameson exercised much influence in American historical scholarship. He wrote The History of Historical Writing in America (1891) and The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement (1926) and edited Correspondence of John C. Calhoun (1900, repr. 1969).

Franklin, Battle of a Civil War battle in November 1864 between Union forces under Maj. Gen. John M. Schofield and Confederates under Gen. John B. Hood in Franklin, Tennessee. It was a major Union victory, with casualties in the thousands on the Confederate side.