Book Review:
The McGavock Confederate Cemetery: A Revised and Updated Compilation
by Eric A. Jacobson

If the Battle of Franklin could be described as a brave effort in a lost cause, so too could this new work from Eric Jacobson. Author of For Cause & For Country which covered the Battle of Franklin itself, he now ventures into the terrain of the aftermath of battle in its most basic, practical form: the burial of the dead. The burials, though, turned out to be the easy part. The difficulties would come in the subsequent years as the task turned to identifying those who had fallen.

The story is told in the first 40-some pages. The battle had begun in late afternoon and continued until well after dark, a rarity in Civil War times. This was unavoidable given the circumstances. Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood's chase of Union commander Gen. John Schofield's forces had been intended to bring him to battle before he could regain the protection of the major Union base in Nashville. Hood had held off fighting the night before in Spring Hill and Schofield had escaped in a daring night march. This could not be allowed to happen again.

And on Nov. 30 nightfall comes early. Most estimates put the time of the battle, as best as could be measured in those days before standard time and watches, as lasting from around 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. The few hours lead that the night march had gained had given the Union men time to throw together remarkably effective defensive fortifications. Hood's Confederates undertook a charge to make Pickett's at Gettysburg look like a stroll in the park, across two miles of open farm fields. It was a slaughter.

As soon as fighting stopped the Union forces picked up those of their wounded capable of travel and set out northward. Nashville was just one long march away. Hood's desperate chase was over.

The Union dead intermingled with Confederate on the grim morning of December first. The remaining wounded who had made it through the cold of night were taken to such shelter as could be found. The dead then had to be dealt with:

Milton Ryan, a soldier from the 14th Mississippi Infantry...in a post-war reminiscence...explained with great detail how he and his comrades "dug trenches two and one half feet deep and wide enough for two to lay side by side." He said that..."Every one that could be identified, a small piece of plank was placed on their head with their names on it. Thus we left them until the Resurrection Morn."

Their repose, with each man buried where he fell in the cotton fields and outskirts of Franklin town, fell a good bit short of eternity. By spring the wounded had mostly either recovered or joined their comrades under the ground, and the fighting had moved far away from middle Tennessee. The residents of battered Franklin had damage still to repair as well as the normal needs of life and sustenance. The fields which had once seen battle and blood needed to be planted for the year's crops of grain and cotton.

The first year's farming tried to work around the graves, but this was already challenging. The wooden markers had begun vanishing just weeks after the battle--sentimentality does not fare well against the needs of the living in a brutally cold winter and a need for firewood.

By the winter of 1865-66 the war was over. The Union dead had been removed to a national cemetery at Stones River in nearby Murfreesboro. The remaining, Confederate, dead also needed a proper graveyard, but a Federal government struggling with other issues had no interest in the project.

At this point the McGavocks stepped up. Readers of last year's bestseller The Widow of the South by Robert Hicks--who provides an introduction to this work which could almost be called a sequel to his own--know what comes next. The McGavocks donated a two-acre plot adjacent to their existing family cemetery to which the bodies could be moved. And Carrie McGavock began to record the burials in a book.

This book is possibly the most treasured, and certainly the most carefully guarded, relic at Carnton Plantation today. Carrie at one point wrote in it, "This Book is a correct list of the Confederate McGavock Cemetery and belongs to Mrs. John McGavock, Franklin, Tenn.," but most often it is just called The Cemetery Book. That inscription, though, helped to verify the appearance of her handwriting. When compared to other, later, entries it was immediately apparent that they had been written by someone else.

The problem has come over the years as this book, so faithfully tended by Carrie, has come under the custody of others who, while well-meaning, did not always share her devotion to strict accuracy. As decades passed and relatives came looking for the resting places of men who might have died in Franklin, a marker labeled "Unknown" did little to ease their pain.

So someone--Jacobson's research suggests it was George Cowan, husband of the McGavock's surviving daughter Hattie--started to attach names to those "Unknown" markers. Over time, repeated reprints in newspapers, booklets and other sources have cited these gentle lies as true facts, and it is largely in an effort to return to the standards of accuracy Carrie McGavock first held to which motivated Jacobson's efforts.

The remainder of the book is in essence an erasure of those fibs, combined with painstaking research through rosters of regiments known to have fought at Franklin. Each section of the cemetery, which is organized by state, is listed. Each grave, designated by number, and its occupant is identified by name, regiment, company and brigade where each element can be confirmed.

Short of that "Resurrection Morn" that Milton Ryan invoked, no one will ever know who all died at Franklin on that cold November night or the weeks and months that followed. But with this book, it can at last be said that we know who is buried there, and who is not.