by Robert Hicks
Carrie McGavock, a transformed woman herself, remained at Carnton in those years. That she would stay there with her cemetery, marking its depth and breadth with her daily walks and her constant care, was, ironically, a counter to the transformation. From her little grove radiated another web, only this one offered the possibility of relief, that at least some things, some people, would not be forgotten, that all was not a race to an anonymous vanishing. Who has not witnessed the businessman, the politician, or the artist in their occasional moments of melancholy, wracked by desire for something solid to stand on, something they suspect they might have known were they living in a distant time, one they might not have ever known? Carrie McGavock witnessed it, thousands of times, every time someone came to visit her cemetery and realized that, at least for some, the sacrifice of living meant a sort of immortality so long as the handsome woman in the long, well-worn black bombazine kept her eye on her boys.
In death we are cleansed of our sins and our willfulness and the full complication of our life. Carrie knew this. She had read the letters of the families year after year and watched as their memories of the dead shifted and changed, becoming more wistful and simple as those memories receded in time, until all the dead were heroes. This would happen to her in time; she knew this and she dreaded it. Simple heroes are already forgotten, barely recognizable as flesh and blood. The thing she wanted most was to be remembered as she was. No hope for that, I suppose, Mariah.
A few years after she had reburied her dead, a family from Georgia arrived at Carnton, coming from Liberty County, where they lived with few neighbors in the country west of Hinesville, along a stream full of bass where they grew corn and kept to themselves. A man, his wife, his adult son, and his son’s teenage boys. They were called the Winns, and they arrived in a wagon. Months earlier, they had asked the man at the store if he would write a letter for them to the woman they’d heard about in Franklin, Tennessee. We are farmers, and all we gots corn to pay you for your time, but we would be awful obliged if you could tell us what come of our son, James Wilson Winn. Carrie consulted her book, found their son, who was known in the cemetery as only JWW, and wrote to tell them that he had been found and that he lay in her cemetery among men he had known, that his story had ended but he was remembered. She didn’t hear from them again, and she folded the letter in with the others. There had been so many letters during all those years.
Almost a year later they arrived at Carnton. They were thin and dusty and big-eyed, looking at her standing on her porch wrapped in honeysuckle and clematis and creeper vines, intimidating in her black but welcoming, in the way she stood and smiled at them. They told her they’d been traveling for more than a month, that they had been lost, and that they had almost turned home two days before, but they had taken the harvest moon that night as a sign. They wished to see their son, James, and to take him home to be buried at their place, in the soil that had held him up and fed him so many years before. Carrie wondered when they had last eaten a real meal. She also wondered what they were doing traveling in the summer away from their farm and their crops and garden, but she had heard of the drought and knew better than to ask. She asked if they would like to eat, and they said no.
She took them out to the cemetery, down the grassy aisle that separated one side from the other, state from state, until she arrived at Georgia. In the middle of one of the aisles, with his initials now carved upon the stone above his head, lay their son. JWW.
One of the boys turned and headed back to the cart for the shovels they’d brought with them, but Mr. Winn held him back. He held on to his grandson’s arm and looked around the cemetery, all the while gripping the boy’s arm tighter. He was not a terribly old man, but he seemed so from the dirt and dryness and days that had not varied for decades. He was bald and brown, and his forehead was carved through with lines that arched in the center and tailed off at the ends. Stoop-shouldered and ropy strong, he held on to his grandson, who could look and know exactly how he would look when he was old, and his grandson made no sound of protest. The man’s eyes registered row upon row of young men who had been lost but were finally found, and the neatly clipped grass, and the iron fence that now kept them all in and separate from a world that had gone on without them, and he saw the beauty of the Tennessee hills that stretched away into the remains of the grove and beyond, toward the river. He looked down where James lay, the son he had not watched grow older, the son who had not married or had children, the son who had liked to fish in that bass stream, unlike his brother. Mr. Winn had fished alone for so long he had forgotten that. His son had died for something he had not understood, something that his father had known to be yet another of man’s trespasses against paradise, man’s unwillingness to leave things be. And yet his son was at rest among those he had known and with whom he had left the world behind.
He let go of his grandson. He shook his head and held his chin hard against his chest, not looking up. Carrie almost stepped forward to comfort him, but the man’s wife had already done that. They didn’t need her, she knew, and she stepped back. The man whispered to his family, and then they walked back to their wagon. Carrie caught up with them just as they were about to leave.
“Please, have supper with me. And you’re welcome to stay.”
Mr. Winn looked down at her, the reins limp in his hands, and smiled sadly.
“You done all you needed to do, Mrs. McGavock. We got to get back.”
He ignored her pleading, but Mrs. Winn reached down and held her hand for a moment before the wagon lurched off.
Almost exactly a year later the Winns returned, this time with their wagon full of dirt. Again Carrie met them at the edge of her porch, and again she led them out to their son.
Mr. Winn looked over the cemetery again. His grandsons were just a little bigger, but he had become just a little smaller. He nodded his head.
“I’d like to rebury my son, if you don’t mind, Mrs. McGavock.”
Carrie was momentarily confused.
“Where do you wish to take him?”
“Don’t want to take him anywhere. We want to bury him right there, but with his dirt we brung from the farm. Seems right, to end up in the soil you were supposed to end up in. It ain’t been much good to us down in the field, thought James might use it better.”
Then the man’s whole family went to get their shovels and to pull the dirt wagon around to the grave.
While they worked, Carrie went down to Theopolis’s old toolshed, down by the cabin where she had hid Cashwell, and inside among the spiders and the secretive crickets, she found an old rusty shovel. She used the shovel as a cane to brace her on the long trip back up the hill, trying to hold her skirt up so she wouldn’t trip, past the kitchen where she could see Mariah bent over the stove like she’d never ever left it, into the cemetery, and to the side of James’s grave.
This time, she thought to herself as she took her place graveside and dug deep, they’re not leaving without supper.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
If God was watching that Indian summer afternoon of November 30, 1864 (and some have argued that He was not, another explanation of events), He would have been looking here: on the continent of North America; in the southeastern section of what had once been and would again be called the United States; in the central part of a state they called Tennessee; between the mountains and the great river; among the burial mounds of an ancient Stone Age culture that had known nothing of firearms and artillery; in the bend of a small river at the convergence of three bright white macadam roads, where brilliant streaks of light rose and fell along a gentle undulation of hills washed in the dun and yellow and red of autumn.
At that place there was a town called Franklin. And in this town, if He did have the power of foreknowledge, as we have been taught, He would have known that in a few hours 9,200 men would fall dead, or mangled so badly they would sometimes wish they were dead. He would have known that a fragile young woman with cares of her own would w
atch her house be invaded by a horror she would never forget, that Franklin boys would watch their families disappear, that old men would watch their sons die for something they could not understand, and that the events of the day would rattle around Franklin as memories or ghosts for years and decades and centuries to come. It might have occurred to Him to wonder at the vagary of His own Creation, that this would happen in Franklin by virtue of nothing other than its misfortune in being on the route between Atlanta and Nashville. But that is war.
Many consider the battle to be the bloodiest five hours of the Civil War. In the waning afternoon light, a crimson cast fell over Franklin. The smoke from the guns—so thick that troops couldn’t tell enemy from ally—glowed a thick, dull red. Running toward it, many soldiers later remembered the light as an ominous sign, but still they kept running. It was one of the greatest massed-infantry assaults ever seen in North America—more than double Pickett’s similarly ill-fated charge at Gettysburg a year earlier.
Federal troops had already occupied Franklin for almost two years before Major General John Schofield and his Union army arrived on the morning of Wednesday, November 30. By then the entire town had been fortified, encircled by a series of trenches, breastworks, and forts. That fatal afternoon, Confederate General John Bell Hood—over the protests of Generals Cleburne, Cheatham, and Forrest—marched his Army of Tennessee down Winstead Hill, just to the south of Franklin, and assaulted up the next hill through nearly two miles of open fields toward the well-fortified Union lines. Wave after wave of Confederate soldiers sprinted down Columbia and Lewisburg Pikes, converging past a plantation house called Carnton, and up toward the fortified town—only to be struck down, again and again.
Through the late afternoon and into the evening, there were more casualties those five hours at Franklin than in the nineteen hours of D-Day—and more than twice as many casualties as at Pearl Harbor. There were moments so bloody and overwhelming that even the enemy wept. When a fourteen-year-old Missouri drummer boy—a mascot of Cockrell’s Brigade—charged up to a loaded and primed Ohio cannon and shoved a fence rail into its mouth, witnesses said the child turned into what was described as the “mist of a ripe tomato.”
Most of the fighting was over by nine o’clock, both sides depleted. That night—or very early in the morning—as General Hood prepared to resume battle the following day, General Schofield withdrew his Federal troops to the Union stronghold of Nashville.
Those who were left—the ragged rebel army and the townspeople—had to wait until the early morning light before they could see and begin to understand the horror of the battle. The dead covered the ground. Rivulets of blood ran across the fields and pooled shoe-deep in the trenches, where men were stacked like cordwood: The body of Col. F.S.S. Stafford, of the 31st Tennessee, was found dead standing upright, wedged up to his waist in corpses.
The Battle of Franklin occurred on the edge of a small, isolated town of 2,500. Think of it: 2,500 men and women, trying to bury or heal more than three times their number in dead, dying, and wounded men, on one of the smallest battlefields in the United States. The Union had suffered 2,500 and the Confederates almost 6,700 casualties in “Bloody Franklin,” as it came to be called. A full third of the Confederate infantry had disappeared in the smoke of the battle. Generals Patrick Cleburne, John Adams, “States Rights” Gist, Otho F. Strahl, Hiram B. Granbury, and John C. Carter were all killed, eight others were wounded, and one captured: the largest number of American generals ever lost in battle. Eleven enlisted men received the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Not long after, General Hood resigned, and the negotiations at Appomattox Courthouse brought an end to the war, but its outcome had already been decided. As General Issac R. Sherwood, a lieutenant colonel in the 111th Ohio Infantry who was himself wounded at Franklin and was one of the last veterans of the war to serve in Congress, put it in his Memories of the War:
The battle of Franklin . . . was the most destructive of human life, in proportion to the number engaged, of any battle in the four years war. Franklin dug the grave of the Confederacy. . . . When the true story of the war is written, the valley of the Harpeth River and the Brentwood Hills, south of Nashville, will become the valor-crowned fields where the destiny of the Southern Confederacy was settled. The final day was Appomattox, four months after Franklin; but Appomattox was not a battle. It was an event, surrender. Four months before Appomattox the black curtain of destiny had fallen on the vast stage of human grief and woe amid the lurid lights of flashing guns. The epochal date was April 1865, but the forces that made that day possible were marshaled on the green hills around the Harpeth River. At midnight on the battlefield of Franklin, the finger of destiny was lifted, pointing the open road to Appomattox.
The “Big House” at Carnton stood at the edge of the eastern flank of the battlefield. Some fighting took place within a few hundred yards of the house itself, while many more men fought each other on the plantation fields, stretching away toward the town of Franklin.
The name “Carnton” derives from an old Gaelic word, cairn, which is sometimes translated as “city of the dead.” Randal McGavock, John’s father, had named the property after his father’s birthplace, “Carntown,” a house built on top of an ancient cemetery near Glenarm Bay in County Antrim, Ireland. The wealthy McGavock family owned between twenty and forty slaves, who worked a diverse farming operation: a large orchard; fields of corn, beans, sweet potatoes, wheat, oats, hay, and potatoes; and herds of fine thoroughbred horses, sheep, cattle, and hogs. The plantation produced nearly everything the family needed. Blacksmiths, coopers, weavers, carpenters, and tanners all lived on the property, providing all essentials except for luxury items for the house and family.
The Battle of Franklin transformed Carnton into a makeshift field hospital for the hundreds of wounded and dying soldiers brought from the battlefield along the Columbia Pike south of Franklin. They filled up the house, the outbuildings, and the grounds.
Colonel W.D. Gale, from General Stewart’s staff, wrote in a letter to his wife:
[Mrs. McGavock’s] house . . . was the rear of our line. The house is one of the large old-fashioned houses of the better class in Tennessee, two stories high, with many rooms. . . . This was taken as a hospital, and the wounded, in hundreds, were brought to it during the battle, and all the night after. Every room was filled, every bed had two poor, bleeding fellows, every spare space, niche, and corner under the stairs, in the hall, everywhere—but one room for her own family. And when the noble old house could hold no more, the yard was appropriated until the wounded and the dead filled that, and all were not yet provided for.
Our doctors were deficient in bandages, and [Mrs. McGavock] began by giving her old linen, then her towels and napkins, then her sheets and tablecloths, then her husband’s shirts and her own undergarments. During all this time the surgeons plied their dreadful work amid the sighs and moans and death rattles. Yet, amid it all, the noble woman . . . was very active and constantly at work. During all the night neither she nor any of the household slept, but dispensed tea and coffee and such stimulants as she had, and that, too, with her own hands.
Following the war, in 1866, the McGavocks designated nearly two acres of land abutting their family cemetery for the reburial of close to 1,500 Confederates. The original shallow graves, dug immediately after the battle, had been difficult to protect, and the family that owned the land decided to plow it over and put it into cultivation. Carrie McGavock’s rescue of the dead was an extraordinary feat. Today the cemetery serves as the final resting place for 1,481 Confederate soldiers killed at Franklin, plus fifteen veterans of the battle and one civilian who died while helping the McGavocks to rebury the dead. The cemetery is today maintained by the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
In the mid-1980s, the nonprofit organization founded to restore Carnton asked me to join their board. As I learned more about the story of Carnton and met the McGavock descendants, I realized there was a reaso
n one of the largest private military cemeteries was in the backyard. I began to ask questions. Eventually, as some of the descendants let me look at the scrapbooks they’d saved of articles and obituaries, I came to realize the extraordinary history of this place. From the Battle of Franklin—in the present day so often forgotten, even in Franklin—to Carrie McGavock herself, I knew there was an important, bigger story that needed to be told and remembered.
To understand what happened, I have tried to fill in the blanks and empty spaces, always studying the historical details to help create a novel, not a history. My hope was to use the tools of fiction to divine a greater truth about the war, about the sacrifices of women like Carrie, and about the world she inhabited. There are far better historians of both this battle and the Civil War generally, and I’ve included their work in the bibliography. I hope you’ll read them.
My one true interest as a writer has always been in Carrie, and in the people who moved in her orbit. Why Carrie, particularly? As William Thackeray once wrote, “Good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now.” But I believe that some remain more equal than others, and that some are more deserving of our praise and our remembrance. If I’ve accomplished nothing else with this novel, I hope I’ve remained faithful to Carrie’s memory—and that she lives on these pages as someone worth remembering.