The Carnton Plantation house in Franklin, Tennesseet, as seen here from the McGavock Cemetery, was witness to one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. Photo by Gene Korte
In the waning light of a November 1864 evening, it’s said that the Union soldiers sang hymns while Confederate bands played “Dixie.” Over five hours amidst the cannon booms and cavalry advances, the firing of tens of thousands of muskets and bloody hand-to-hand combat, 9,200 soldiers would lay wounded.
During the last months of the war, the Battle of Franklin, located 16 miles from Nashville, was not the largest fought, but it was the bloodiest. Nearly 50,000 soldiers from 17 states both North and South – three of these contributed soldiers to both sides – met on the battlefield.
As casualties mounted, nearby Carnton Plantation was commandeered as a field hospital. Four of the six Confederate generals who died in this conflict spent their last moments on the porch. The wounded were mostly soldiers from the South, but both they and Union soldiers ended up side by side on the floors of every room, where surgeries and amputations went on nearly round the clock. Carnton Plantation, which has been open to visitors since 1978, still has blood permanently staining the wooden floors.
Carrie McGavock was the mistress of Carnton Plantation at the time of the battle. She and her husband, John, reburied nearly 1,500 of the dead a few years later on their own property, once the owner of the original gravesite announced plans to plow under the burial place of the war dead.
Carrie devoted much of her life to tending these graves, often accompanied by her lifelong friend, Mariah, once a slave and later a free woman. Carrie, who had buried three of her own young children in nearby graves, walked through the cemetery daily, carrying her Book of the Dead. In it was a list of the names, regiments and home states of most of the soldiers who are still buried in the cemetery at Carnton Plantation, known now as the McGavock Confederate Cemetery. To this day, it’s still the largest Confederate cemetery anywhere. A solemn place, the cemetery remains living history, lest we forget, and the gate is always open.
Local Franklin author Robert Hicks memorialized Carrie McGavock and the Carnton Plantation in his novel, “The Widow of the South. ” Go here for our interview with the author, http://www.prx.org/p/95379.
According to Hicks, Carrie was always known as the Widow of the South in the years after the Civil War. And many newspapers, the New York Times among them, published her obituary in 1905 when she died at age 76. Long a supporter of Carnton Plantation and a member of its board of directors, Hicks works with Franklin’s Charge, www.franklinscharge.com, a group dedicated to reclaiming this Civil War battlefield in its entirety. The American Battlefield Protection Program has called this endeavor “the largest battlefield reclamation in North American history.”
Carnton Plantation, http://www.carnton.org, and the Carter House, http://www.carter-house.org, a farmhouse at the time of the Battle of Franklin, are both open year-round. The “Battle of Franklin: Five Hours in the Valley of Death” is a 70-minute documentary, http://www.wideawakefilms.com.
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© 2012-2014 Diana and Gene Korte
