The Battle of Franklin took place in November, 1864 in a small isolated Tennessee town of 2,500. There 20, 000 Union soldiers and 20,000 Confederates fought a short battle of 5 hours which has been called the the bloodiest battle of the Civil War. 9,300 boys died that day, more casualties than at D-Day and twice as many as at Pearl Harbor. Rivers of blood ran across the fields; six generals were lost in battle (the largest number of American generals ever lost in war.) Then there were the people of the tiny town trying to heal and bury all of them. Many were buried in shallow graves surrounding the town. Others were sent home. A few months later, the family who owned the ground on which most of the soldiers were buried decided to plow the land over and cultivate it. What to do with all those bodies and bones?
Up step John and Carrie McGavock whose plantation home had been used as a hospital during the battle. They offered to move the bodies to a plot adjoining their family
cemetery at their home Carnton just north of town. So that is how the largest private Civil War Cemetery came to be. 1,500 soldiers are buried there; some with names on their markers and some in the "unknown" plot. Carrie continued to tend the cemetery until her death in 1905. The cemetery is now owned and maintained by the Frankin Chapter of Daughters of the Confederacy.
Widow of the South by Robert Hicks tells this fascinating story--I highly recommend it.
As a new Tenessean, it seems to me that the Battle and all the casualties lie on the shoulders of a crazy Confederate general named John Bell Hood who marched his men across a flat field toward the entrenched Union forces and to certain death. Sorry if some of his relatives are readers.
As I have often stated before, all war is craziness. They do give occasions for heroes to arise and Carrie McGavock was certainly one of the most giving women of any war.
What a fascinating story.
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