Doc Holliday

by Gary L Roberts

  Major returned to Griffin, settled his affairs, closed his house, gathered his family and slaves, and took what personal belongings he could when he boarded the train south with other refugees. It was a hard trip to Macon on the Macon & Western Railroad, then east to Savannah on the Central of Georgia. From Savannah, the family moved briefly on the Savannah, Albany & Gulf Railroad, before taking the Atlantic & Gulf into Valdosta. In due course, however, the Hollidays, their McKey wards, and their slaves arrived at what must have seemed a foreign land. Their new neighbors sought as much news as they could get from the refugees, and, for all their misgivings about the newcomers, did their best to make them welcome.

  In April 1864 young John Henry found himself in a place completely unlike the red-clay country of his childhood. It must have seemed like a wilderness to him. The pine and oak forests stretched over the rolling countryside for miles with little besides wiregrass under the canopy of trees. The absence of undergrowth gave an openness to the terrain that was compelling in its parklike beauty and yet conveyed a great sense of emptiness. Farther south, lime sinks, lakes, and cypress swamps gave a different look to the land. Rivers and creeks were also abundant.

  The population was a mixed group. Many of the locals were free grazers running livestock over the wiregrass as their forebears had done, but there were farmers as well, some of them slaveholders. A few of the local slaveholders owned large farms on sandy loam that was ideal for Sea Island cotton, and they held substantial numbers of slaves. The dirt was black and rich, and newcomers, like Henry Holliday, recognized at once the potential for agriculture. Many of the refugees, like Henry, also brought slaves with them. Those slaves who came from coastal Georgia, with their “geechie” accent that the locals could not understand, troubled whites, and they organized patrols to “keep them under control.”23

  As Henry’s family settled in, legitimate news filtered south slowly, mixed liberally with all manner of rumor, little of it good. Alice Jane received a letter from her brother William, who had returned to duty, describing the battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse in May 1864. But his health was still bad, and Captain McKey was honorably discharged on June 17, 1864. William remained in Virginia, however, trying to get back into the fighting. Tom McKey was in north Georgia with Joe Johnston maneuvering against Sherman’s forces. On May 10, 1864, the cadet battalion at the Georgia Military Institute was pressed into service, and by May 14 it saw action near Resaca at the very heart of Johnston’s efforts to stall Sherman’s advance. George Holliday, though almost eighteen, had received his baptism of fire and gave his relatives one more person to worry about.24

  Sherman was increasingly the primary concern. “Nearly the whole Population is moving off,” one Georgian wrote, “taking their negroes south.”25 Robert Kennedy Holliday, serving as an assistant brigade quartermaster with the Seventh Georgia Regiment, had come home to Jonesboro on furlough in February 1864, and before he returned to his unit, he had taken his daughters, Mattie and Lucy, to Savannah, where he enrolled them at St. Vincent’s Academy, removing them as much as he could from harm’s way.26

  Johnston’s cautious strategy allowed Sherman to advance deeper and deeper into Georgia and siphon off Confederate confidence. On June 27, the two armies clashed at Kennesaw Mountain. Sherman was repulsed, and Confederate morale was rejuvenated temporarily. On July 20, while Sherman and John Bell Hood, the Texas commander who replaced Johnston, probed each other’s lines inconclusively, Howell Cobb wrote to his wife from Macon that the “crisis of Atlanta is evidently at hand.” He added, “At present every effort to cut off all railroad communication with the place are succeeding pretty well, as the Macon & Western road is the only one now running, and I am just informed that the train that left here this morning has stopped in Griffin in consequence of the telegraphic lines being cut between there and Atlanta.”27

  On August 30, 1864, Hood’s troops were badly mauled at Jonesboro, and the following day Sherman hit the rebels hard again. Hood evacuated Atlanta on September 1, destroying everything of military value in the process, and on September 2 Sherman wired Washington, “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.”28 Far away, Major Holliday and his family had no idea that the war had come so close to their kin at Jonesboro or that George was part of the evacuating forces, but each day brought more news.

  Robert Holliday’s wife, Mary Anne, called “Mollie” by her husband, was caught in the battle of Jonesboro. In its aftermath, she saw to the burial of Father Emerson Bliemel and Colonel William Grace in her own backyard. Father Bliemel had been killed while giving last rites to Colonel Grace, and Mary Anne saw that they were properly interred before moving her family to her uncle Philip Fitzgerald’s farm. She returned home before Union troops set up a temporary headquarters at the Fitzgerald place and destroyed everything in sight. At Jonesboro, she found her house destroyed and the property occupied. She decided then to flee south with her children.29

  On September 15, 1864, Henry Holliday, who was in Macon at the time, wrote to his brother Robert at Petersburg, Virginia, that he had just received word that Mary Anne and the children had fled Jonesboro and were safe at Gordon, below Macon. Henry also wrote to Mary Anne that he would be back in the area within a week and that he wanted to take her home with him. “Mollie,” Robert wrote to his wife on September 24, “you don’t know how glad I was to hear that you had left Jonesboro, for I was perfectly miserable thinking how you and our little children could live inside of the yankee lines or even where our own army are [sic], for there is not as much difference in them as there ought to be, but when I heard you had got away I was happy Indeed.”30

  Mary Anne and her children had spent two weeks in a boxcar on the Macon & Western Railroad en route to Gordon. After two more weeks there, she moved on to Savannah and eventually to Valdosta. Apparently, Major was unable to return as planned, but one day early in October, while he was tying his horse to a hitching post near the train station at Valdosta, he looked up to see his sister-in-law and her children standing on the platform. Mattie Holliday would later recall, “He did not know of her coming. She had no means of communication, but God in whom she trusted, arranged for her here as in every other circumstance of that eventful journey.” Mary Anne and the children enjoyed the reunion, and Henry “gave them a house on his farm and provided for them.”31

  After the fall of Atlanta, General Hood moved north, hoping to cut Sherman off from his source of supply by striking the rail lines. Eventually, Sherman was able to force Hood’s army northwest into Alabama, but he complained that holding “Hood, Forrest, and Wheeler, and the whole batch of devils” at bay would be costly and produce no result. Instead, he proposed a march to the sea. “I can make the march,” he assured Grant, “and make Georgia howl.”32 On November 15, 1864, Sherman burned Atlanta and began “marchin’ through Georgia.” His columns moved swiftly with only Georgia militia and 3,500 cavalry under “Fighting” Joe Wheeler in his way.

  Governor Brown wisely decided not to take a stand at the state capitol in Milledgeville, and on November 19 a force consisting of prisoners paroled from the state penitentiary, factory and penitentiary guards, one artillery battery, two militia companies, and the cadet battalion from the Georgia Military Institute, including young George, withdrew from the city by rail toward Gordon. The cadets would continue to be a part of the force attempting to slow the Union advance, but by early December Sherman was approaching Savannah.

  Mattie and Lucy escaped from the city during the general evacuation not knowing that Cousin George was part of the force covering the withdrawal. They joined the rest of the family on Major’s farm in time for Christmas.33 It almost seemed a blessing, shortly afterward, when Sherman’s forces destroyed the Atlantic & Gulf Railroad tracks near Savannah and further isolated Valdosta. Then Sherman turned north into South Carolina, and southern Georgia was seemingly forgotten.

  John Henry was nineteen months younger than his sixteen-year-old cousin Mattie when she and her sister arrived in Valdosta
, but he grew closer to her in the months that followed. He was discovering the mysteries of puberty, and Mattie was charming in the tradition of Southern womanhood. She was a bewitching distraction during a desperate time in which he needed some relief from its realities. Although Georgia seemed to have been abandoned by federal troops, Valdosta was feeling the aftermath of Sherman’s destruction. John Henry’s mother was virtually an invalid, and his father, by his nature, was distant and understandably preoccupied with providing for a house full of relatives. Work was also a part of John Henry’s life; there were no slackers in Major’s household. Mattie made things bearable.

  Practical man that he was, Henry could see that the Union would prevail, and he was already trying to make sure that his family would survive the trauma. With the devaluation of Confederate currency, security seemed to lay in the land. He paid $3,150 in Confederate money for an additional 980 acres from the Shanks estate on January 24, 1865.34 Beyond that, all he could do was wait for the fortunes of war to be played out.

  Southern Georgians did not immediately hear of General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox and the end of the war in April 1865. In May, the last of Georgia’s troops surrendered to General James H. Wilson, and gradually the soldiers began to return home. Tom McKey had been hospitalized at Macon during the late summer of 1864 in time to miss the fall of Atlanta. When he recovered, he was made ward master over ten wards in the hospital. At year’s end, he was once more a patient. Fearing that Sherman might move against Macon, the hospital had been moved southwest, first to Smithville and then to Cuthbert, where Tom was again working as ward master when the war ended.35 One story claimed that John Henry armed himself, took an extra horse, and went looking for Tom.36 With the countryside full of desperate men, it was a bold move for a youth not yet fifteen, but, according to the story, he found his uncle on the road and led him to Cat Creek.

  Although ordered to retire in June 1864, William H. McKey had managed to stay with the army in Virginia. He was paroled at Gordonville, Virginia, after the surrender and began his journey back to his family. James McKey had served as a field surgeon throughout the war, but he also came home safely. Francisco E’Dalgo was with the Army of Tennessee when it surrendered on April 16, 1865, at Greensboro, North Carolina. It was the same for the Hollidays. John Stiles Holliday, having served throughout the war as a surgeon in Georgia’s military hospitals, was never distant from his family or Fayetteville except during the bloody summer and fall of 1864. He was now with his family again. His son, George, a battle-hardened veteran despite his youth, came home as well. When Robert Kennedy Holliday showed up at Henry’s place to rejoin Mary Anne and his children, after being released from a Union prisoner-of-war camp, he clearly was a broken man, but he was alive.37

  Thomas Sylvester McKey, John Henry Holliday’s favorite uncle, who lived in the Holliday household after his own parents died. He became John Henry’s boyhood hero.

  As tough and uncertain as times were, the Hollidays and the McKeys had reason to rejoice. All came home. Eventually, Robert took his family back to Jonesboro to begin the rebuilding process, even though everything he owned had been destroyed. Other members of the Holliday family also returned to their homes in the area of John Henry’s childhood. But Major Holliday had found a permanent home in Valdosta. The McKeys were reunited at Valdosta and settled there as well. Young Tom was now a man full-grown after four years of war. William and James were there as well, happy to be with the rest of their family once again. For the moment, the Hollidays and the McKeys enjoyed the time together, glad the war was over. They gave little thought to the hard times ahead.

  For a while, Valdosta was spared the humiliation of occupation, and the people did their best to get on with their lives. When Sherman drove into South Carolina early in 1865, he left General J. G. Foster in command at Savannah. Foster supervised a difficult occupation, although he faced little military threat. His was, in many ways, the first Reconstruction experiment in Georgia. After the final surrender of Georgia troops, federal troops were stationed in Milledgeville, Atlanta, and Augusta. Governor Brown was arrested, sent to Washington, D.C., and held for nine days before being paroled. No civil authority existed in Georgia, except for whatever local government had survived. Through all of this, Georgia existed in what one historian called “a position of suspended political animation” that left places like Valdosta pretty much on their own.38

  That state of affairs did not last long, however. In the summer of 1865, General Q. A. Gillmore began to distribute forces along communication and transportation routes. A detachment of soldiers moved into the Lowndes County courthouse in Valdosta. On September 27, 1865, Captain C. C. Richardson arrived in Troupville as an agent for the recently organized Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands to protect the interests of the former slaves and provide them with services. The 103rd Regiment of U.S. Colored Infantry was headquartered at Thomasville, and units were distributed in towns like Quitman, Doctortown, Homerville, and Valdosta. Company G of the 103rd replaced the white troops in Valdosta and set up their more substantial encampment between Patterson and Toombs streets.39

  Friction was not long in coming. Richardson was conscientious in his efforts to deal with the needs of the freedmen and set about trying to provide jobs, education, and food. Local whites cooperated reasonably well, considering the food situation and the need for labor, but there were problems arising from white attitudes, the shortage of cash for wages, and the belief among some freedmen that emancipation meant that they no longer had to work. Whites were somewhat more recalcitrant when freedmen were put in positions of authority. They objected to the appointment of a black postmaster and armed black policemen.

  Black soldiers caused the most concern. The troops encouraged former slaves to bring charges against their former masters. They intimidated whites on the streets. They arrested people on flimsy charges. One farmer was strung up by his thumbs in a stock car and left there for hours. Townspeople also resented the white officers’ attention to local girls. To make matters worse, Captain Andrew W. Leonard, a twenty-one-year-old commander, was frequently out of town searching for deserters, and Lieutenant Alberto Marochetti, a former hospital steward, who commanded during Leonard’s absences, had little experience and was not respected by locals. Command control was loose at best, and one officer, probably Marochetti, was detested by the townspeople as “the black Dutchman.”40 Trouble was on the way.

  In January 1866, a young freedman complained that a nineteen-year-old ex-Confederate soldier named Richard Force had choked him. Force was a newcomer to Valdosta, but he was a veteran who had gone to war at the age of fourteen and was wounded at Gettysburg. He was arrested and confined in a small building near Griffin’s store that was used as a headquarters by the troops. When one of the young women of the town attempted to see him, she was ordered to move on at bayonet point. After a few tense days, Force escaped through the back door and returned home, where he saddled his horse, Rex, and rode away. Later, the young people of the town threw a party at Force’s home. He made the mistake of slipping back into town for the occasion. While the party was in full swing, soldiers arrived, and, following an argument in the front yard, Force was shot. He received prompt treatment, but despite the efforts of his doctors, Force never recovered. He died five months later, on May 15, 1866, of blood poisoning.41

  Dick Force became a hero to Valdosta’s young people, a symbol of resistance to Yankee oppression, and there were threats of retaliation. Several older men, however, including Henry Holliday, worked publicly and behind the scenes to keep the situation in hand. When Force died, there were further rumors of a violent response, but by then the troops had already left, and again, prominent locals spoke out strongly and managed to calm matters. But Force had left an impression on the youthful and the hotheaded that would not soon disappear in the face of Yankee occupation.

  Among those influenced by Force was John Henry Holliday. Tucked away on Cat Creek, John Henry did not
have the daily contact with black soldiers and the new order that some townsmen did, but he shared the resentment of his father and neighbors, particularly their contempt for the black soldiers as emblems of their distress. John Henry hated the occupation the way his neighbors did, but he was restless in those days for other reasons, too. Tom McKey, his favorite uncle, and Tom’s brothers, Will and James, had purchased the Banner Plantation in Hamilton County, Florida, and moved away.42 His mother’s illness was worse. His father was distant. There was little to temper the growing resentment and rebelliousness in this young man.

  There was some progress for the town, though. On March 13, 1866, rail service was restored when the first train arrived from Savannah since Sherman’s forces cut the line in 1864. The town’s population turned out to welcome it. “Those folks hadn’t been so happy since the war broke out,” remembered one old-timer.43 Thannie Smith Wisenbaker remembered, “New improvements were being seen in all parts of town. Lawyers and doctors hung out their signs. The stores were opening and new goods were on display.”44 A new mill was built and with it more and more cabins for the mill workers. In spite of the galling bitterness of Reconstruction, change was coming.

  Change was also seen in educational opportunity. Since moving to Valdosta, John Henry had attended school. A Professor Newton, a stern disciplinarian, had conducted classes from sunup to sundown in the courthouse through 1863. In 1864, a Professor Mathis arrived and began holding classes at the renovated Valdosta Institute. Those years had been tough because of the scarcity of paper and textbooks, but things took a turn for the better when Samuel McWhir Varnedoe settled in Valdosta in November 1865. Varnedoe would become something of a local legend. He was himself a model of discipline, learning, and industry. He eschewed the switch for disciplinary purposes and instilled a pride in his students that fostered achievement. The students admired him, and he rewarded them with devoted attention to their needs. He also gave them ample opportunity to show off their newly acquired learning to parents and neighbors. There were outings, too, and, in the coeducational environment, opportunities to improve social skills.45