Doc Holliday

by Gary L Roberts

  The election of 1856 had come and gone. The Democrat James Buchanan gave Georgians little reason for optimism. They found hope in the Dred Scott decision, but were soon disillusioned by open defiance of its precepts. They were more disturbed by the growing strength of the new Republican Party in the congressional elections in 1858. They saw the Fugitive Slave Law declared unconstitutional in Ableman v. Booth and recoiled at news of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in October 1859.

  Robert Kennedy Holliday, brother of Henry Holliday and father of Martha Anne “Mattie” Holliday, with whom John Henry had a close relationship.

  Senator Robert Toombs, known as Georgia’s “Son of Thunder” and considered a moderate in Congress by most observers, became convinced that further compromise was impossible, the Georgia legislature passed resolutions condemning John Brown’s “aggressions,” and Joseph E. Brown, Georgia’s fiery governor, set up factories for the production of weapons and gunpowder and ordered the Georgia militia to make preparations for the “inevitable conflict” to come. There were still Georgia voices, like that of Alexander H. Stephens, who urged caution and restraint, but the martial spirit was gaining momentum in Georgia as it was in other Southern states.60

  The crazy-quilt election of 1860 found Georgia in turmoil. The Democratic Party had divided into Northern and Southern factions, meeting in Baltimore, Maryland, and Richmond, Virginia, respectively, and a splinter group calling itself the Constitutional Union Party added more confusion. The nomination of Abraham Lincoln by the Republicans did not factor into Georgia’s election, but still the vote was so close among the other three candidates that the legislature had to decide where Georgia’s electoral votes would go. Lincoln was elected president without Georgia’s votes so that the exercise was perfunctory at best, so much so that Governor Brown urged the legislature not to bother. Then on December 20, 1860, South Carolina formally repealed its ratification of the U.S. Constitution and seceded from the Union. In Griffin, Fayetteville, and Jonesboro, the Hollidays, McKeys, Johnsons, and Fitzgeralds were caught up in the anger against the North and the debate over what Georgia should do.61

  In the end, despite the eloquence of men like Stephens, Benjamin H. Hill, and Hershel V. Johnson, who urged moderation and caution, a referendum was held, and the people voted 50,000 to 37,000 to follow South Carolina’s example and defend Georgia’s honor in the only manner left to it. On January 19, 1861, Georgia declared itself an independent state.62 It was not immediately apparent what course Georgia would take, but in February Georgians played prominent roles in the convention that convened in Montgomery, Alabama, to draft a constitution for the Confederate States of America. On March 16, Georgia formally adopted the new constitution and became a state in the new Confederacy.63

  John Henry Holliday’s world was about to change forever.

  Chapter 2

  THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

  Defend yourselves, the enemy is at your door!

  —Senator Robert Toombs, January 20, 1860

  Georgians celebrated. Across the length and breadth of the state, men and women saw secession as liberation from an oppressive central government. They might not have understood all the complexities of sectional politics or even stood united on the issue of slavery, but they responded to the mantra of Southern rights with undeniable fervor. They were confident, too, that the South would have no trouble defending its new independence. When war became certain after Fort Sumter, former senator Robert Toombs, now secretary of state for the Confederacy, told a cheering assembly of recruits at Milledgeville, Georgia’s capital, that they would be home within six months and that any good Southern boy could whip six pasty-faced Yankee clerks. “Why,” he proclaimed, “we could lick the Yankees with cornstalks!”1

  That was the sense of the times for Georgians. Theirs was a fight to protect home and honor, and they had no doubts that they were equal to the task. What they lacked in training and understanding of what was to come was covered up with a brash confidence and fierce loyalty as old as the battles of Sterling and Bannockburn. There was no thought that they could be beaten. So they came to Georgia’s colors— planters, dandies, clerks, middling farmers, and crackers, young men and old—ready to defend their state’s honor and their liberty.

  Griffin shared the excitement. The mobilization and the pomp and circumstance that went with it could not have done anything except stir the imagination of an impressionable ten-year-old boy like John Henry Holliday, watching as he surely did the troops moving in and out of town by road and by rail, crowding the train station, and creating an air of excitement on city streets. Camp Wilder became a training center for Georgia soldiers at Griffin, and the need was great enough that Henry Holliday sold 136 acres of his 147-acre farm for the establishment of another training facility.2 Joseph E. Brown, Georgia’s governor, wrote to Alexander H. Stephens, Georgia’s former moderate congressman and the new vice president of the Confederacy, that two regiments had gone into training “at Camp Stephens, near Griffin, which I had called in honor of yourself.”3 The war fever had come to John Henry’s doorstep.

  He saw his hero, Uncle Thomas Sylvester McKey, who was now twenty-one, don the uniform of the Fifth Georgia Volunteers. There were the comings and goings of other Holliday and McKey relatives—his uncles, Robert Kennedy Holliday, John Stiles Holliday, James Taylor McKey, and William Harrison McKey—cousins, and Francisco E’Dalgo besides—as one by one they enlisted to support the cause. They all looked fine in their fresh new uniforms of Confederate gray surrounded by the womenfolk and children as they prepared to leave for the war. Even his cousin George Holliday, only five years his senior, was at the Georgia Military Institute in Marietta preparing for the day he would be a soldier, too. There were tears and good-byes, and then, one after the other, they were gone.4

  Henry was the last to go. He bought 278 acres south of his property and made provisions for his family as best he could. Finally, on September 2, 1861, Henry Holliday was commissioned a major in the Twenty-seventh Georgia Infantry, and on October 31 he left as well, bound for Virginia with his regiment as a quartermaster officer, arriving in time for the first battle of Manassas.5 Alice Jane was left to manage family affairs like other Southern women, and the slaves were still there to produce the necessary crops to sustain John Henry and her sisters.6

  The excitement soon faded into the anxious anticipation of news about the war, and John Henry found himself alone in a house full of women at precisely the age at which Southern boys began their apprenticeship as men. By then he would, if he was typical, have acquired the masculine skills so critical to male identity in Southern society. He surely knew the rudiments of hunting, fishing, wrestling, dexterity with firearms, and horsemanship. Now was the time to hone the basics into expertise. The absence of male role models was doubtlessly compensated in some measure by the martial air that permeated Griffin. So he likely took to the woods not only to hunt and explore but also to imagine himself in battle along with his kith and kin, holding back the Yankee hordes. Doubtless, too, he watched at the fringes of Camp Stephens as recruits trained or stole away to listen to the gossip about the war around the depot and on the streets of the town.

  Of the menfolk, only John Stiles Holliday remained close to home. As a medical officer for Company E (the Fayette Dragoons), Second Georgia Cavalry, which was part of Georgia’s home guard, he was close enough to watch over the various relatives to some degree. There were, periodically, family gatherings at which John Henry could play with his cousin Robert, but the visits were less frequent. For the most part, he lived in a strangely feminine world in the midst of that most masculine of human enterprises: war.7

  Southern women, especially those of Alice Jane’s class, were controlled and proper and bore their sacrifices stoically, even proudly. The genteel tradition marked them with manners, abstinence, and social restraint. Their honor was linked to marital loyalty and social purity, but they also shared a pride in their menfolk and a surprisingly
militant patriotism. Southern women experienced the loneliness of protracted absences by their husbands without complaint, but they had expectations for the development of their sons as men.8 For young boys like John Henry, the missing fathers were a special burden, and women often overcompensated, either by spoiling their sons or by giving them too much freedom.

  John Henry grew close to and protective of his mother, and she strove to make him a gentleman. It’s worth mentioning again that in Southern society, there was a certain tolerance of childish aggression among boys to avoid feminizing them or stifling their independent spirit. Alice Jane doubtless did the best she could, but she and her sisters pampered and spoiled the boy. Perhaps it was then, in the absence of Henry’s stern demands, that young John Henry first began to show a certain rebelliousness and resentment of his father. To make matters worse, John Henry’s mother fell ill. She was confined to bed more and more, apparently the victim of chronic pulmonary tuberculosis, although that is by no means certain.

  Tuberculosis was known as consumption or phthisis in the mid-nineteenth century. It was the leading cause of death at the time, accounting for 20 percent of all deaths in the United States. Doctors considered consumption to be noncontagious and believed that it ran in families. Curiously, too, treatment varied according to the gender of the victim of the disease. Women were encouraged to remain within the home and pursue domestic responsibilities as much as possible. They retained their responsibilities for their children and did their best to maintain a cheerful and calm demeanor. They followed a simple diet, but the only regimen prescribed for women in most cases was to continue traditional female roles.

  As the disease worsened, the burden fell on female relatives and friends to assume the responsibilities of the household. Yet despite what one contemporary called “the hideous physical symptoms” of consumption, it was a disease that inspired more admiration than revulsion. It was seen as “the most spiritual, the most ennobling, a purger of base qualities and a distiller of lofty ones.”9 These general practices and images blend well with the anecdotal recollections of Alice Jane Holliday, who was seen as a particularly pious and gentle soul who bore her illness with a memorable forbearance. In practical terms, however, Alice Jane’s sisters had to grow up fast, and young John Henry’s responsibilities increased as well. He was now “the man of the house” in more than just name.

  News trickled home in occasional letters from his father, his uncles, Francisco, and other relatives and neighbors. His uncle William H. McKey, serving with the Thirteenth Georgia Volunteers of General John B. Gordon’s division in Virginia, was wounded at Malvern Hill and given furlough to recuperate before returning to action. He was back with his unit in time to be elected captain in September 1862.10 Henry was with the Twenty-seventh Georgia through the Peninsular campaign and spent his spring and early summer at places like Williamsburg, Seven Pines, Mechanicsville, Cold Harbor, White Oak Swamp, and Malvern Hill, where the Twenty-seventh left more than a third of its 1,151 men as casualties. Besides the reports of battles and lists of dead filtering back, the letters of relatives were not encouraging. William continued to be so troubled by his wounds that his recovery seemed doubtful, and he was again absent from duty until March 1863. Henry did not fare well, either. Like many on both sides, he suffered so severely from “chronic diarrhea and general disability” that he resigned his commission in July 1862, and on August 24, 1862, he was discharged.11

  William Harrison McKey, brother of Alice Jane McKey Holliday, who served with the Thirteenth Georgia Volunteers in General John Brown Gordon’s division in Virginia. He survived the war and moved to south Georgia, where he developed the Banner Plantation on the Georgia-Florida line where John Henry visited as a teenager.

  Major Holliday came home to a different situation from the one he had left. The war had already taken a heavy toll on commerce. Goods were scarce, crops were thin, and food was in short supply. His wife, Alice Jane, was virtually bedridden. He scarcely had time to recuperate or to adjust to his wife’s worsening condition before his own father, Robert, the patriarch of the Hollidays, died in Fayetteville in November. As the eldest son, Henry made arrangements for his father’s funeral and oversaw the settling of his father’s estate, dividing it among his brothers and sisters.12 As he shouldered these responsibilities, he also faced another harsh reality.

  With the Union victory at Gettysburg and the fall of Vicksburg in July 1863, the momentum of the war shifted dramatically. General William S. Rosecrans, who was commanding Union operations in Tennessee, finally began to take the offensive, and by September 9 he had maneuvered the Confederate forces under General Braxton Bragg out of Chattanooga. Bragg’s incompetence was so great that General Robert E. Lee took the unprecedented step of sending eleven thousand badly needed troops from Virginia under the command of General James Longstreet to reinforce the lethargic Bragg. On September 19–20, 1863, the armies met at Chickamauga in northern Georgia just south of the Tennessee line.13

  Longstreet’s forces broke through, drove two Union corps off the field, and sent a significant portion of Rosecrans’s forces in full retreat toward Chattanooga, while General George Thomas, the “Rock of Chickamauga,” stood firm on the Union right, preventing a total disaster. With the Union army virtually besieged in Chattanooga and the Confederates holding the high ground of Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain overlooking the city, Bragg seemed to have secured the Confederate position. President Jefferson Davis left Bragg in command over the protests of his officers, however, and a series of bad decisions afterward dangerously divided the Confederate forces.14

  General Ulysses S. Grant was now commanding the army of the West, and he and General Thomas unified the federal armies before Chattanooga. On November 23, following spirited resistance by Confederates who were greatly outnumbered, General Joseph Hooker took Lookout Mountain. Bragg’s forces held Missionary Ridge, but two days later Union troops, in a brash display that panicked Southern troops, took the field. It was, in the words of one Southern official, an “incalculable disaster.”15 The doorway to Georgia was now open.

  Confederate forces consolidated at Dalton, Georgia, not far from the Chickamauga battlefield, now commanded by General Joseph E. Johnston, who had been manhandled by Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman in the West because of his predilection for defensive tactics. Now he faced a Union force in Tennessee more than twice the size of his own army, which reinforced his conservative tendencies. Johnston dug in, waiting for General Sherman to make the first move. The mood was somber. One Georgian wrote that “gloom and unspoken despondency hang like a pall everywhere.”16

  It was then that Major, as Henry Holliday was now almost universally called, concluded that he needed to get his invalid wife and his son and young sisters-in-law out of harm’s way to a safer place. He recognized that because of the railroads Atlanta would be the Union’s primary target in Georgia. He began to sell property in Spalding County to prepare for the move. Between August 1863 and April 1864 Henry raised $23,700 in Confederate currency from the sale of real estate in Griffin and in Spalding County. He also decided to move his family to the little town of Valdosta in southern Georgia. How he decided on Valdosta as a refuge is not clear from the record, except that contemporary papers referred to it as a “safe retreat.”17

  Valdosta was about as far away from the war as his family could get in Georgia, near the end of the rail line deep in the piney woods and wiregrass of an area still largely undeveloped in 1863. When Major first saw it, Valdosta was a dismal place. The town had been founded in 1859 with high expectations, when the Atlantic & Gulf Railroad missed Troupville by several miles, and several of the prominent citizens of that place decided to move their businesses to the railroad tracks. Believing it unlucky to transfer the name, but not wanting to insult former governor George M. Troup, for whom Troupville was named, they named the new settlement after the former governor’s plantation, Val d’Aosta.18

  Valdosta was “just cropping up out
from the woods when the war began,” as the South Georgia Times explained it a few years later, but “the impetus which the railroad gave was suddenly checked by war, and buildings, half finished were left to rot.”19 The Union blockade and two bad crop years threatened to finish off the town. By the time Major first saw the place, both the Methodist and the Baptist churches had blown down, and the town seemed anything but prosperous. Growth had stopped, and what was there seemed to be falling apart. The only thing the town had to recommend it was that it was distant from the war.

  In fact, though, the gathering refugees made the place even less attractive. The local population made room for the newcomers as best it could. Most crowded into the only hotel in town, “a long, rambling building, two stories high,” on Central Avenue, with narrow hallways and a dark interior. The “furriners” gathered at the courthouse to talk about land and more permanent lodging. Some of the locals expressed their concern about the invasion of newcomers. “I would like to know what so many of you ‘furriners’ is a’coming here fur,” one of them asked a slaveowner looking for land to buy. “You is gwine to hem us in and ruint our ranges.”20 To outsiders, that did not seem likely, and Major must have seen something there, because on February 9, 1864, he purchased 2,450 acres from the estate of James D. Shanks on Cat Creek northeast of the town for $31,500.21

  Henry may have had second thoughts almost at once, because that month troops from Charleston and Savannah were ordered into Florida to stop reported Union advances west from Jacksonville toward Pensacola. The Thirty-second Georgia Volunteers traveled by train to Valdosta and camped briefly south of the railroad before marching into Florida. On February 20, 1864, the Confederates stopped the Yankee incursion in a bloody fight at Olustee (or Ocean Pond) near Lake City, Florida, which was just south of the Georgia line. It was as close to Valdosta as the war ever came. Union forces at Jacksonville never ventured west again, and Major Holliday was reassured that he had made a wise choice.22