Susan  Brownlow, daughter of the parson the Confederacy hated, was a young widow (Sawyers) with a five-year-old child at the time of the novel, though she often left the child with one of the family’s house slaves.

She was a heroine in the North, although, for some reason, her admirers got her first name wrong, dubbing her Martha in a pamphlet and, later, a book. After the war she remarried and had several more children. She is buried in Old Gray Cemetery in Knoxville.