The Widow of the South

by Robert Hicks

  Caroline Elizabeth Winder was born near Natchez, Mississippi, on September 9, 1829. Her mother, Martha Anne Grundy, was the daughter of the Hon. Felix Grundy, the great lawyer and senator from Tennessee. Her father, Van P. Winder, owned a plantation southwest of New Orleans among the bayous. This is where Carrie—she hated to be called “Caroline”—grew up. As The Confederate Veteran wrote in her obituary, “She received the best intellectual and moral training according to the ideals and standards of the Presbyterian Church, of which the family were members.” Although she has left little surviving written testimony of her life, there are a few stories that have been passed down over the years.

  One of my favorites deals with her portrait by Washington Bogart Cooper, the leading society painter in Nashville during the two decades before the war. As a teenager, she was sent from her home in Louisiana to spend the summer with her mother’s parents in Tennessee—probably to reconnect with her cousin and future husband, John McGavock. While Carrie was there, an argument arose over the color of the dress she intended to wear for her portrait. Cooper wrote to Carrie’s mother, in Louisiana, for guidance: Carrie was insisting on being painted in black, which was completely inappropriate for a young unmarried girl. Mrs. Winder’s response was both brief and to the point: “I have tried to guide my oldest child in appropriate and godly behavior all her days. I sent her to Nashville with fourteen dresses. Good luck, Mr. Cooper.”

  Carrie and John were married on December 8, 1848. The couple had five children, three of whom had died before the Battle of Franklin: Martha W. (1849-1862), Mary E. (1851-1858), and John Randal (June-September 1854). She had a portrait painted of these three “angels,” as she called them, and hung it on the wall across from her bed. Two children, Harriet “Hattie” Young (1855-1932) and Winder (1857-1909), grew into adulthood and survived their mother.

  Caroline (Carrie) Elizabeth Winder at nineteen, by Washington Bogart Cooper.

  Colonel John McGavock, by Washington Bogart Cooper.

  The Lost Children, by William Browning Cooper:

  (left to right) Mary Elizabeth, Martha, and John Randal.

  Daguerreotype of Martha (left) and Mary Elizabeth McGavock.

  After the war, Carrie devoted herself to tending her cemetery and caring for orphans, as the Reverend Robert Gray wrote in his privately printed The McGavock Family:

  It has been her habit for years to take to her house from two to three orphans, generally from the asylum in New Orleans, to act as household servants; at the same time educating them, giving special attention to their religious training, and when they are of age paying the outfit agreed upon, and finding them suitable homes and employment. We have seen the fatherless and motherless little ones as happy as larks, and as gentlemanly and ladylike in their deportment as the most fastidious could desire.

  In time, Carrie McGavock was transformed into a living martyr and curiosity. The story is often told that when Oscar Wilde made his infamous tour of America in 1882, he told his hosts that his itinerary should include a visit to “sunny Tennessee to meet the Widow McGavock, the high priestess of the temple of dead boys.” She became famous without ever leaving her farm, renowned for her daily wanderings in the cemetery, for her mourning clothing, for her letters to the families of the bereaved, and, most of all, for her constancy. From the day the last of the dead was buried in her backyard, she rarely left her post in the cemetery, continuously checking her book of the dead.

  This is not speculation. Carrie McGavock became a national embodiment of the grief that civil war had laid upon the whole nation. Cemeteries grew and sprouted as if a plague had swept the country. So many cemeteries were built by governments and laid out in perfect regimentation, with much pomp and ornament; it was modesty that distinguished the cemetery at Carnton, which for years didn’t even have stone markers or a fence. All that the cemetery at Carnton had was Carrie, who had not shrunk from the war, who had not ignored it, who carefully preserved the inscriptions on the grave markers in her Cemetery Record Book. She had brought the war home, and she grieved every day of her life for the row upon row of men she had never known. As we might take comfort to know that there are mothers and monks and nuns praying around the clock for the relief of our sins, men and women of this country took comfort and even pride from knowing that Carrie was there at her post, day after day. She was a Southerner who had become an American by her persistent sacrifice. Her genius was that she had known all along that this would happen to her, that this was her purpose.

  So much changed in the aftermath of war. The plantation class grew old and died, as John did in 1893, and it was unclear who would take their place. Violence and lawlessness marked those years following the war, and still Carrie stayed put. By the thousands, as country people became town folks and her house became an old pile—older, grayer, and more rickety—still Carrie would not move. The world changed around her, but she remained a rock in the stream, letting the flow of time rush past.

  Carrie McGavock, c. 1894, the Widow of the South.

  When she died twelve years after her husband, her obituaries—which appeared in Franklin and Nashville, Richmond and Jackson, Chicago and New York—sought again and again to describe her. A paper in Mississippi compared her to Boadicea, queen of the ancient Britons, and another to Joan of Arc. My favorite begins simply: “The last Rebel was buried at Carnton yesterday.” Her little patch of dirt had become so famous that there needed to be no explanation of what or where Carnton was. Her story was now part of our story. “Those of us who recall how she ceased to care for herself as she cared for the dying and how she spent her remaining years caring over the dead, we and all generations after us will rise up and call her blessed,” the Reverend John Hanna said at her funeral. But Hanna and the rest of the eulogizers were wrong: Generations did not rise up and call her blessed; most soon forgot her name, and the memory of all she had done began to fade into nothingness.

  Winder and his heirs made “good marriages.” His descendants have become educators, doctors, adventurers, businessmen, and public servants; Hattie married the Irish immigrant George Cowan, who had ridden with Nathan Bedford Forrest.

  John and Carrie McGavock were buried in the McGavock family cemetery, next to their three lost children—and within feet of the 1,500 soldiers whom Carrie watched over for so long.

  While I make no claim that I know any of the real characters who populate this book, I have concluded that Mariah may well have been the most complete human of them all. Rarely does she seem altered by her circumstance. Mariah had been given to Carrie when both were girls, and the two remained together, whether living at Carnton or in town, throughout Carrie’s life. Of Carrie, Mariah was reported to have said that “no woman ever had a better friend.” She died on December 16, 1922, at ninety years old. She retained, her obituary says, “her mental faculties and her devotion to her friends until the last.” I would have expected nothing less.

  Mariah Otey Reddick, with Carrie’s granddaughter

  and namesake, Carrie Winder Cowan, January 6, 1885.

  I submit my sincerest apologies, to those who require it, for meandering from the history in the interest of telling a story. Other than Carrie and her immediate family and slaves, most of the other characters are either composites of historical figures from Franklin’s past or were born in my imagination.

  There remains so much that I do not know, which I now realize I will never know. All I can know for sure is that there was once a battle here, and it forever changed everything.

  — ROBERT HICKS

  Franklin, Tennessee

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

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sh, W.J., The Mind of the South (1941)

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  Hurst, Jack, Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography (1993)

  Jaynes, Gerald D., Branches Without Roots: Genesis of the Black Working Class in the American South, 1862-1882 (1986)

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  Logsdon, David, ed., Eyewitnesses at the Battle of Franklin (1988)

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  Lytle, Andrew Nelson, Bedford Forrest and His Critter Company (1931)

  McDonough, James Lee, Five Tragic Hours: The Battle of Franklin (1983)

  McKitrick, Eric L., Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction (1960)

  McPherson, James M., Battle Cry of Freedom (1988)

  Milton, George F., The Age of Hate: Andrew Johnson and the Radicals (1930)

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  Osofsky, Gilbert, ed., Puttin’ on Ole Massa: Slave Narratives of Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown and Solomon Northrop (1969)

  Ownby, Ted. Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865-1920 (1990)

  Rable, George, Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism (1989)

  Roark, James L., Masters Without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction (1977)

  Robateau, Albert, Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South (1978)

  Saxon, Lyle, Fabulous New Orleans (1928)

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  Sword, Wiley, The Confederacy’s Last Hurrah: Spring Hill, Franklin and Nashville (1992)

  Sword, Wiley, Southern Invincibility (1999)

  Trelease, Allen W., White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (1971)

  Warwick, Rick, ed., Williamson County: In Black and White (2000)

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  WITH GRATITUDE

  While my list of acknowledgments is long, it will never be complete. There are so many folks who told me stories and opened windows to the past; who supported, rallied, and encouraged me through this process. That said, I would truly be amiss if I didn’t thank the following:

  My parents, both gone now, are the foundation of it all. My dad was filled with stories—about growing up in the South a century ago, a place with one foot in the past and one foot in the present. Though the Civil War had been over for forty years when he arrived, so much of it, both good and bad, permeated the world in which he grew up. That fading world was passed on to us with his stories. I will forever remember my mother, while not near the storyteller, for her overwhelming capacity to love, and for her wisdom and the belief—which she shared with my dad—that all things are possible.

  Then there is my brother, Marcus Sanders, and his wife, Candy Allen, who continue to remind me, through their own passion for life, how very lucky I am to call them my family.

  That first conversation with Jeff Kleinman, my agent, was probably the single most important event in the process that led me here. Under his care, every step of the way, a story came to life as he reeled me in again and again.

  I was fortunate to find an extraordinary freelance editor in Duncan Murrell, without whose creativity and vision this idea would never have gone very far, and without whose hard work and insight this book would never have been finished. What he does is an art, and as I and many other authors will attest, he is one of that art’s finest practitioners. He gave me the confidence that I really could be a writer.

  Then there are the amazing folks at Warner Books, who believed in this book when it was little more than a handful of pages and a very big dream. First and foremost Amy Einhorn, editor extraordinaire, for working so very hard with such amazing sensitivity, honesty, and care. Any author would be so lucky to have her bringing all the pieces together. I feel as if I won the lottery with Amy. Todd Doughty is simply, without a doubt, the very best publicist anyone could ever ask for. And thanks are of course due to Jamie Raab, Larry Kirshbaum, Maureen Egen, Emi Battaglia, Ivan Held, Martha Otis, Karen Torres, Bob Castillo, Rebecca Oliver, Nancy Wiese, Bruce Paonessa, Anne Twomey, Tom Whatley, Harvey-Jane Kowal, Ann Schwartz, Huy Duong, Toni Marotta, Blanca Aulet, Flamur Tonuzi, Oscar Stern, Janice Wilkins, Brad Negbaur, and, last but not least, Jim Schiff. Special thanks are also extended to Giorgetta and Leo McRee, who designed the book.

  Hunter Kay, my business partner on the project, amazingly, against all odds and despite the pitfalls of any working partnership, has remained my friend through the years.

  Kay and Curt Jones and Caroline and George Ducas literally supported me toward the end as I pushed to the finish. Without their help, I would have been lost.

  Justin Stelter—a sounding board, my hardest critic, a good friend, a supporter of all good things, a young writer in the making.

  Mary Springs and Stephane Couteaud, Hazel Smith, Constance and Gordon Gee.

  Pete Donaldson and Jay Sanders.

  My good friend Rick Warwick and all the other real historians and scholars who tried their darnedest to keep me on track. I would be completely amiss if I didn’t mention our beloved county historian, Virginia McDaniel Bowman; James Redford, Gail Winkler and Roger Moss, Angela Calhoun, Margie Thessin, Lee Miller, and all the folks at Carnton, Paul McCoy, David Fraley, Ed Bearss, Wiley Sword, Carroll Van West, and James Lee McDonough, who first told me the story of the Battle of Franklin some thirty-five years ago.

  Then there is Thomas Cartwright. With regard to the Battle of Franklin, there has never been anyone who has ever touched me with more passion than Thomas. He has been my resource for understanding and detail, again and again. Luckily for me, he is a friend.

  The McGavock family—Kay and Roderick Heller, Mary and Winder Heller, and Patty and Hanes Heller, friend
s and encouragers of the book, battlefield recoverers at Franklin, Carnton, and so much more—and all the rest of their tribe.

  My fellow travelers in Franklin’s Charge, some of whom have been with me from that very first spring day on the back porch at Carnton when I laid out a pipe dream of preserving those last fragments of the battlefield. Through your tireless efforts, that pipe dream has been given life: Danny Anderson, Ernie Bacon, Warner Bass, Julian Bibb, Dorie Bolze, Mary and Hank Brockman, Angela Calhoun, Jim Campi, Thomas Cartwright, Amy Grant and Vince Gill, Sam Huffman, Rudy and Peter Jordan, Jim Lighthizer and everyone at CWPT, Stacey McRight, Tommy Murdic, Jeanie Nelson, George Patton, Mary Pearce, Damon Rogers, Cindy Sargent, and Joe Smyth. Future generations may well forget all that you have done for them, but your good work will go before you. If we really are eternal, as we’ve been taught, please know that you have my eternal thanks.

  The loved ones who were ignored and stood by as I ate up their time with Jeff (Pete Verloop and Corinne), Duncan (Sherri and Caroline), and Amy (Matt, Ashley Rae, and Tess).

  And, finally, there are Catherine Anderson, Michel Arnaud, Michael Balliet, Bo Bills, John Bohlinger, Gertrude and Ben Caldwell, Dub Cornet, P.J. Dempsey, L.D., Steve Emley, Diana and Gary Fisketjon, Valerie Ellis Fleming, Andrew Glasgow, Rob Hodge, Linda and Doug Howard, Chad Huie, Monte Isom, Jay Jones, Eric Levin, Evan Lowenstein, Mary Ruth Martin, Matt McGregor, T.M., Dave Pelton, Tommy Peters, Ellen Pryor, Charles Salzberg, Tamara Saviano, Michael Sherrill, Toby Standefer, Lynn and Ghislain Vander Elst, and Tim Young. Your care, wisdom, and encouragement over the years are not forgotten.