The Widow of the South

Franklin, Tennessee, 30 November 1864. Carrie McGavock’s home at Carnton is taken over as a Confederate field hospital when John Bell Hood sends the Army of Tennessee against entrenched Union troops. Rooms, galleries and grounds fill with wounded men, and Carrie finds purpose in organising care amid the destruction. Her encounter with the badly injured fictional soldier Zachariah Cashwell gives the battle’s suffering an intimate focus.

After the war, Carrie and her husband John help create a cemetery for Confederate soldiers whose scattered battlefield graves are threatened by neglect. The novel draws on Carrie McGavock’s historical role while also examining grief, slavery, wartime medicine and the making of Civil War memory. Her compassion for the dead does not erase the plantation system that structured Carnton or the unequal labour on which the household depended.