I’ve been revisiting the Civil War of late. This isn’t a common activity for me. I’m not one of those military buffs who make pilgrimages to battlefields like Gettysburg to visualize the conflict, ponder the flawed strategy of Pickett’s Charge and wonder “what if?”

Nor am I a Lost Cause fantasist, ready to argue about the roots and merits of the war and suggest it hinged on the noble cause of states’ rights.

“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery,” Mississippi stated in its declaration of secession. Not much room for dispute there.

Several events occasioned my revisiting. First, my wife and I visited Carnton, the historic home in Williamson County associated with the Nov. 30, 1864, Battle of Franklin. That prompted me to locate and read our household copy of “Widow of the South,” the 2005 novel based on the Carnton mistress Carrie McGavock’s efforts to provide a permanent resting place for most of the battle’s Confederate dead.

And then, as if to add an element of timeliness to the whole pursuit, Robert Hicks, the book’s author, died.

I confess to near total ignorance about the Battle of Franklin before all of this, matched by equal indifference. How important could it have been, I reasoned, taking place more than two years after Nashville yielded to Federal occupation with scarcely a whimper?

I know now how wrong I was. Of the roughly 8,500 casualties that day, more than 6,200 were Confederates, with about 1,750 killed, including six generals. As described on the Essential Civil War Curriculum website:

“Franklin, as the epitome of the South’s ‘Last Hurrah,’ was a battle whose full meaning few could comprehend. One of the most destructive of major Civil War conflicts, Franklin was perhaps both an ultimate display of Southern valor, and yet abject martial insanity.”

“Widow of the South” doesn’t attempt to make sense of the insanity. But its fictional tale, populated by some real-life personages, does offer a look at the toll the battle and war exacted, even among survivors.

As much as I enjoyed the book – it drew some withering reviews that left me puzzled – it was walking among the 1,500 or so graves curated at Carnton by Carrie and her husband, John McGavock, that had the most impact on me.

Among the first things I noticed was the Mississippi contingent: 424 dead, almost twice the number of Tennessee, second with 230.

None of my Mississippi relatives are among them, so far as I know, though two bore the name Rogers. But I found myself feeling a certain geographic kinship nonetheless, and couldn’t help imagining what circumstances led them, and the many others, to their violent ends far from home.

It can be easy for those whose family histories lie outside the South to condemn the Confederacy as nothing more than a treasonable rebellion in defense of an economic system based on human chattel.

I understand that sentiment and don’t dispute the basic facts.

But for those of us descended from the men – and in some cases, boys – who wore gray, it goes deeper. They weren’t just nameless participants in a long-ago event. They were our great-grandfathers, our uncles, our cousins. Are we to think of them only as traitors?

That said, I don’t support the public monuments to Confederate leaders or soldiers that have become so contentious in our country today. There is no honor in dying or fighting for the right to enslave other human beings, a profoundly dishonorable concept.

I couldn’t help wondering, though, in a graveyard filled with them, whether rank-and-file rebel troops took that view of their purpose. Or did they fight simply because there was a fight to be had?

Whatever the answer, the result was a tragedy whose toll is still being felt.

Joe Rogers is a former writer for The Tennessean and editor for The New York Times. He is retired and living in Nashville. He can be reached at [email protected]