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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Confederate heroine honored in ‘Widow’

Kathleen Krog The Miami Herald

There are many ways to promote choice causes – hire an airplane to fly a banner, pay for commercial advertising, think up a gimmick that attracts media attention.

Nashville music publisher Robert Hicks took a more ambitious approach. He wrote a dramatized historical novel about the real-life genesis of the Confederate cemetery at Carnton Plantation at Franklin, Tenn.

Thirty miles south of Nashville, Franklin trades on its history, much of it centered on the Civil War and the Battle of Franklin, fought Nov. 30, 1864. Hicks, a Franklin resident, wants to raise the profile of the cemetery, where about 1,500 rebel soldiers who died in a fierce, five-hour losing battle are buried.

The plantation house, now a museum, served as a field hospital. Traces of blood remain on its floors. A list of the soldiers’ names, outfits and hometowns, recorded by then-plantation mistress Carrie McGavock, is on display.

Carrie is the narrator in Hicks’ first novel, which begins slowly. Gradually, though, the story picks up and grabs hold of the reader until its poignant ending.

Depressed by the deaths of three of her five children, Carrie lives in a miasma of grief laced with self-pity – “willing myself to travel the border between the living and wherever my children had gone.” She has little thought of the great struggle being waged between the North and South and leaves the running of the plantation to her slave/companion Mariah and her husband, John McGavock.

Then one day Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest arrives to inform her that he is using her home for the hospital for the looming battle at Franklin.

The carnage that shortly overtakes her home snaps Carrie out of her miasma, in Hicks’ version of events. We don’t really know that this cataclysmic event had that effect on Carrie, or even that her children’s deaths overly depressed her (it was not uncommon for families to lose several children to disease in the 19th century). Historical truth only tells us that she did lose three children and owned a slave named Mariah, who grew up with her in New Orleans and came with her to Tennessee upon her marriage to John.

But naturally Hicks had to dramatize the story, and, while his dialogue can be windy and wooden, he’s done a fairly good job of putting imaginary flesh on the bare bones of this bit of history.

He gives Carrie, who in her grief has “no use for a husband,” a romantic interest in the fictional Zachariah Cashwell, a wounded Confederate soldier with a murky past. The villain, in a refreshing twist, isn’t the Yankee army, but a local banker with the proverbial cash-driven hard heart.

A recovered Carrie retains a metaphysical interest in death and its meaning. When she learns that Cashwell dropped his weapons to pick up his regiment’s colors and carried them to the federal line during the battle, a sure death wish, she wants to know why he was willing to die. They eventually develop a mutual respect and a lifelong, if chaste, attraction.

After the war, the hard-hearted banker wants to till the land where 1,500 soldiers were buried on the battlefield. Carrie mounts a campaign to turn it into a cemetery. When the banker refuses, she garners local help to re-inter the soldiers’ bodies in her family cemetery.

Her advocacy to honor the buried soldiers is true; Carrie, who died in 1905, became well-known as the woman who grieved for the Confederate soldiers laid to rest on her plantation.

One interviewer asked Hicks if this book was his version of “Gone With The Wind.” It isn’t as compelling as Margaret Mitchell’s masterpiece, not by a long shot.

But its imaginative account of a handful of people caught up in one of history’s momentous events will certainly spark interest in Franklin and the Carnton cemetery. Mission accomplished.