Sarah Ewing Sims Carter Gaut

Sarah Ann Ewing Sims Carter Gaut (July 12, 1826 – August 21, 1912), usually known as Sarah Ewing Carter, was an American socialite, secessionist, and Confederate spy. She is purported to have hung the first Confederate flag in Franklin, Tennessee and became famous during the American Civil War for assisting her cousin, Adelicia Acklen, in smuggling cotton out of the country to sell in Europe. She entertained both Confederate and Union Army officers and soldiers in her home, gathering information to provide to Confederate troops. Gaut was the founder of the Franklin and South Pittsburg chapters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

Early life Gaut was born Sarah Ann Ewing on July 12, 1826, to Alexander C. Ewing, a descendant of Clan Ewing, and Chloe Saunders Ewing. She was known as "Sallie" by her family. The family home, on the Murfreesboro Pike in Nashville, had been given to her grandfather, Colonel Alexander Ewing, in 1787 for his services during the American Revolution. After her parents died, she was raised by a relative, Sallie McGavock. At her home, she enslaved multiple people who had been left to her in her father's will, including Millie Simpkins and Andrew Ewing, the latter of whom would later serve as a 1st Sergeant of the 12th United States Colored Infantry Regiment. Simpkins later stated in an interview that her "misses was very rich" and had "two slave women to dress her every morning". Simpkins also said that she would serve Gaut every morning with breakfast on a silver waiter. Gaut took the cotton down the Mississippi River to New Orleans and sold it in Liverpool for $0.75 per pound, for a total of $960,000 in gold. While in Louisiana, she also purchased fourteen bales of cotton from a farmer who worried about his crop being burned by the troops, and sold it for $1,500 in Liverpool. According to Confederate veteran Joe Smith, she was connected to the secret letters of Sam Davis, who was later tried and hanged as a Confederate spy. Gaut smuggled notes detailing Union plans to Confederate officers in a whiskey bottle concealed under her petticoats.

Later life In 1875, after nineteen years of widowhood, she married a third time to the Unionist judge and lawyer John M. Gaut. After her third husband's death in 1895, she returned to her home in Franklin to live with her daughter and son-in-law, Robert Newton Richardson.

Gaut was a member of the Campbell Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Ladies Aid Society, and the Ladies Hermitage Association. On October 28, 1895, Gaut organized Franklin Chapter Number 14 of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in the front room of her house.

Death and legacy Gaut died in Franklin on August 21, 1912.

An oil portrait of Gaut, painted by William Edward West, hangs at the Belmont Mansion in Nashville.