"In 1894 Carrie McGavock is an old woman who has only her former slave to keep her company...and the almost 1,500 soldiers buried in her backyard. Years before, rather than let anyone plow over her field where these young men had been buried, Carrie dug them up and reburied them in her own personal cemetery. Now, as she walks the rows of the dead, an old soldier appears. It is the man she met on the day of the battle that changed everything. The man who came to her house as a wounded soldier and left with her heart. He asks if the cemetery has room for one more." "The novels flashes back thirty years to the afternoon of the Battle of Franklin, five of the bloodiest hours of the Civil War. There were 9,200 casualties that fateful day. Carrie's home - the Carnton plantation - was taken over by the Confederate army and turned into a hospital; four generals lay dead on her back porch; the pile of amputated limbs rose as tall as the smoke house. And when a wounded soldier named Zachariah Cashwell arrived and awakened feelings she had thought long dead, Carrie found herself inexplicably drawn to him despite the boundaries of class and decorum." "The Widow of the South is a novel that captures the end of an era, the vast madness of war, and the courage of a remarkable woman to claim life from the grasp of death itself."--BOOK JACKET.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [419]-421).