Photo By Herman Estevez

Robert Hicks' The Widow of the South goes beyond the conventional Civil War novel.

On Nov. 30, 1865, 9,200 men -- 6,700 of them Confederate soldiers -- were killed or wounded in the Battle of Franklin, Tenn., that effectively led to General Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox Courthouse the following April. A nearby plantation known as Carnton was commandeered as a field hospital where the owners Carrie McGavock, her husband John and a slave named Mariah tended the wounded and buried the dead.

That was hardly unusual -- virtually every home in Franklin (population 2,500) took in casualties. It was Carrie's actions after the war ended that made her an icon and brought her unprecedented celebrity.

Most of the dead were buried in a neighbor's field that had been the battle site. When the neighbors planned to cultivate the field two years later, the McGavocks dug up 1,500 bodies themselves and reburied them in their back yard. It became the nation's only private Confederate cemetery.

Carrie maintained meticulous records, created areas for each state and raised money for grave markers. Her "book of the dead" recorded the location of each soldier's burial site.

Always garbed in black, she became known as "the widow of the South."

Oscar Wilde wanted to see her on his visit to the United States in 1882 and, when she died in 1905, no fewer than 17 obituaries appeared in newspapers throughout the United States.

Yet within a generation she was barely a memory, although the cemetery continued to be maintained. Ken Burns and Shelby Foote passed her by without so much as a footnote.

She was a legend in her own time but, until Robert Hicks came along, little was known about her, even in Franklin, where her house and cemetery still stand.

Hicks -- a music publisher, artist manager, passionate collector and preservationist -- was captivated by Carrie's life and her work. In the mid-'80s, the nonprofit organization restoring Carnton invited him to join their board.

"As I learned more about Carnton and the McGavock descendants, I realized there was a reason one of the largest private military cemeteries was in the backyard," he says. "I began to ask questions."

The questions led to three McGavock great-grandchildren, whose scrapbooks and memorabilia further intrigued Hicks.

"This is virtually a lost person in history," he says.

When Hicks met with Foote shortly before the historian's death, "he encouraged me to write a novel about the Battle of Franklin."

But the novel would be about Carrie McGavock and the part that she -- and others -- played. Last week, The Widow of the South made its first appearance in bookstores.

"If I were to write a non-fiction book, it would just be a large pamphlet," says Hicks. "I don't know anything about her motivations. That's why I started reading Russian novels. I wanted to put flesh back on her bones."

Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky as inspirations for an American Civil War story?

"I wanted to write about how people are tossed and turned by events," he says, "and I found it in every Russian novel I could get my hands on."

Hicks creates many fictional characters, but just as many are based in fact: Carrie and John McGavock, Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest and Mariah Reddick, a slave who had been given to Carrie as a girl and who remained with the McGavock family until her death at the age of 90.

With so many voices telling their stories, The Widow of the South goes beyond a conventional Civil War novel, and its author hopes that it will reach a wider audience.

"I believe in my heart of hearts that this is our collective history," he says. "It is rich, it is rewarding. If you're going to throw your weight with this nation, it becomes part of your heritage. We are very wrong to think we can exclude anyone from history."

---

Robert Hicks signs and discusses The Widow of the South at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Joseph-Beth Booksellers.