The Widow of the South (39 page)
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.
— R
OBERT
H
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