Women and the Battle of Franklin

There is no portrait of a lady to share this week. The women who herded their children down these stairs while a fierce battle waged around them are barely mentioned in this place. They are, as I said last week, more of a footnote to the story of the Battle of Franklin, wherein eighteen thousand mostly barefoot and starving Confederate soldiers engaged the Federal army.Hay bales literally yards from this back door mark the line of battle, but the battle doesn’t stop at those hay bales. It surges past it until

men fight in the yard while sisters and mothers and children huddle in a stone-lined basement room, and two non-combatants do their best to keep soldiers

in search of respite from breaking in.

One of the men in that basement room, Moscow Carter, has already been a prisoner of war. His wife is dead and he has signed the oath of allegiance to the union so he can get home to help care for his four children. Moscow’s father, Fountain Branch, is also a widower. When Fountain Branch and his wife Polly moved into this lovely

brick home, it was at the edge of town on Columbia Pike, the main road to Nashville. It takes more than a little effort to imagine farmland and isolation today, as our tour guide tells us that the

cotton gin was across the two-lane paved road near the Dominos Pizza.

But in the basement, with the saw-marks still evident on the undersides of the floorboards above your head and the faint aroma of “basement,” it gets easier to imagine the four women living here in what must have sounded like hell.

One woman, Fountain Branch’s daughter-in-law, has come north from Mississippi with her two children … to be safer. What must she be thinking as she huddles in the basement? Can she hear the bullets peppering the side of the house? Can sh

e hear the screams?

When the battle is over, Squire Carter and his two daughters light lanterns and go looking for their brother, Todd. He’s been off at war for a long while; a courier and aide to one of the generals fighting here. He’s out there … somewhere. They find him, only 175 yar

ds from the house. He’s been lying on the battlefield through the long, frigid night. While an 8-year-old and an 11-year-old hold lanterns, a doctor operates on Todd’s head wound and moves on to others. He will use the parlor for a surgical theatre. Forty hours later, resting in the room pictured on the right. wounded in what was left of the family’s vegetable garden, Todd will die just a few yards from the room where he was born.

In two days, when the Confederate army leaves the area for Nashville and another ill-fated battle, the women of Franklin will be called on to nurse the wounded left behind. Thousands of wounded. The nurse’s photographs do not hang on the walls of the Carter House museum alongside those of the men they cared for. [Photos aren't allowed there.]

The women of Franklin remain mostly nameless, represented in the museum only by an ammunitions chest that Moscow Carter found on the battlefield and the family (presumably the women) later used “to hold quilts,” and in the fine running stitches that hold white stars on the blue ground of a hand-pieced flag “presented to the men of Company D, First Tennessee Regiment … by the ladies of Franklin.”

Who were they? What were they names? What did they look like? How did they feel about … anything?

The museum doesn’t tell us. The tour guide doesn’t say. And the walls of Carter House keep those secrets.

Carnton Plantation and The Widow of the South

Carrie McGavock of Tennessee stood on her back porch one sunny November Day and watched an army of half-starved, mostly barefoot men march towards a battle that would forever change the landscape around her beloved home.

As part of a recent trip to Nashville, Tennessee, I stood on that same porch and tried to imagine what it was like for Carrie that day and in the days that followed. By four o-clock that afternoon she would have been listening to the horrific sounds of the battle taking place to the north. The battle continued into the night, and by midnight the carpet on the floors of her home would have been visible only when a wounded, dead, or dying, Confederate soldier moved or was moved by care-givers. The wide hallway furnished so elegantly to receive visitors, the family parlor where she sat in the evenings to do needlework ... the formal dining room with the table that could seat over twenty for dinner ... had disappeared beneath a sea of bleeding, stinking, filthy, bodies. Survivors who looked back on that day would remember Carrie's dress changing over the course of the candle-lit night as the sleeves and hem of her dress became more and more stained with the evidence of her nursing.

As I stand in Carrie's house and look up at the portrait above the fireplace, I try to imagine that lovely woman changed by what had happened just a few miles north. The battle would not be remembered in the nation's collective memory as were Shiloh, Antietam, and Gettysburg. And yet the casualties would be greater in a narrow span of time than at any of those other battles. Franklin Tennessee's population in 1864 was only a few hundred. The battle left the earth strewn with over six thousand casualties.

At some point my imagination breaks down. Even as I look at the blood stains still evident on the floors of Carrie McGavock's home, visit the graves of the thousand-plus soldiers buried within view of the house. Horror in Carrie McGavock's life happened at home.

Where does the story that appears on the pages of the best-selling novel The Widow of the South depart from what really happened? One of the members of our tour group asked that very question. The tactful docent said that they were grateful for the visitors who came to Carnton Plantation because of Richard Hicks's historical novel.

Fiction captures imaginations and carries us away to another time and place. In so doing, it can gently teach the past and send us on journeys to learn the truth behind the story. In the case of Carrie McGavock of Carnton Plantation, visitors are introduced to a woman who, one November Day, had history arrive on her literal doorstep and did what she could to mend it.

As I stand on her back porch on a November day nearly 150 years after that event, I wonder what it was like to step out this doorway the morning after the battle, look to my left, and watch as defeated soldiers filed by to pay their respects to the four Generals whose bodies lay just a few feet away. I wonder what it was like to have my children staying in a room off the kitchen because their bedrooms upstairs are operating rooms. Will they ever be able to forget the cries and moans of the patients ... or the thud above their heads as another addition to the "limb pile" lands by the fireplace? Putting my self in Carrie McGavock's place, I know that, as a mother, I'll make certain the carpet is replaced so they don't have to see the blood stains. I'll hope they never have to live through anything like this again. I'll hope they live ... because disease is surely coming in the aftermath of today's nightmare.

Carrie McGavock is better known in 2010 thanks to a novelist. I don't know what she would think of what he said about her, but as a woman I'm grateful that people know her name. Other women in other famous Tennessee places are barely a footnote. More about them in my next post.

--stephanie g.