Colonel Carter of Cartersville
Summary
A clandestine antebellum marriage, poisoned by bourbon and pride, detonates in a candlelit Virginia parlor when Robert Gill, wild-eyed and reeking of repentance, announces to horrified guests that Nancy Carter is already his wife; the next dawn, beneath her lace-curtained balcony, he presses a silver derringer to his breast and paints the dust with crimson contrition. Years later the Civil War’s death-rattle echoes across the same hills: Colonel Carter—nephew to the widowed Nancy—abandons his tattered regiment to defend the ancestral manse from Union scavengers. From the boxwoods he watches Union Lieutenant Tom Klutchem—blue coat unbuttoned, saber sheathed—spare the pillared home after one pleading glance from Laura, Nancy’s sixteen-year-old daughter whose eyes hold both the grief of the South and the hunger of spring. Bullets scar the horizon, but love, brazen and improbable, threads faster than Minié balls; Laura steals through makeshift hospitals to change the dressings on Tom’s shoulder, her fingertips rewriting loyalties. Appomattox surrenders, yet profit’s drum beats on: the Colonel, equal parts cavalier and carpetbagger, bullies Tom’s industrialist father into bankrolling a railroad spur only after a volcanic quarrel, while Nancy gifts the family tract of anthracite-rich earth like a dowry. Wedding bells clang over burnt trestles, and the locomotive’s first whistle becomes a requiem for the Old South and a birth-cry for the Gilded Age.
Synopsis
Before the Civil War, two young people contract a secret marriage. They are Nancy Carter and Robert Gill. Nancy's father has objected to Robert because of his drinking habits. Robert pledges Nancy to drink no more. While their marriage is still a secret he forces his way into the Carter drawing room at a time when it is crowded with guests and blurts out the secret that Nancy is his wife, insisting that she go with him. The next day in a repentant state of mind, Robert rides his horse beneath the window of Nancy's room and pleads for her forgiveness. She cannot forgive. He draws a pistol, fires a bullet into his own heart and drops from his horse, dead. Years later, Nancy Gill and her daughter Laura, now 16, are living at the home of Col. Carter, in Virginia, at a time when the Civil War is in its final stages. Col. Carter is in command of a Confederate regiment. He is the nephew of Nancy Gill. The two armies are forming their lines for a battle near Col. Carter's home. He leaves his command and goes home to protect it against a raiding party, which has been sent out by the northern army. The raiding party arrives before he leaves. He hides in the shrubbery near the house. The raiding party is commanded by Lieut. Tom Klutchem. Laura appeals to him to spare their home. These two young people fall in love at first sight. The home is not destroyed. Col. Carter had witnessed what has taken place between them. In the war, Lieut. Klutchem is wounded and Laura nurses him. At the end of the war. Col. Carter endeavors to persuade Mr. Klutchem, Sr., to finance a railroad scheme, and only succeeds in doing so after quarreling with him. Laura and Tom Klutchem become engaged and are married, and Col. Carter is made happy by the presentation to him by Aunt Nancy of land upon which there is coal. Then Mr. Klutchem agrees to finance the railroad.
