John Henry fit in well. Already well mannered and charming as the result of his mother’s instruction and the experience of a large, well-educated family, he learned quickly both in the classroom and in the social arena. He was popular with the girls at dances and was considered a strong-minded, even cocky, young man by his neighbors. He was not quite fifteen when Dick Force was shot, and that event marked a momentous year for him. On May 30, 1866, scarcely two weeks after Force died, Henry Holliday accepted an appointment as an agent for the Freedman’s Bureau. The appointment did not sit well with his neighbors, least of all with his rebellious son. Major, ever the independent spirit, soon found himself denounced regularly as a “worthless scalawag.”46 It was an added burden John Henry found hard to bear.
Then, on September 16, 1866, Alice Jane McKey died. Reverend N. B. Ousley, the local Methodist minister, paid this glowing tribute to her:
She was confined to her bed for a number of years, and was indeed a greater sufferer. She bore her afflictions with Christian fortitude. It has never fallen to my lot to know a more cheerful Christian. It was a great pleasure to visit her to see the triumph of religion over the ills of life. She was deeply solicitous about the welfare of all she loved. She fully committed them into the hands of a merciful God with the full awareness that God would hear and answer her prayers, and that her instructions and Christian example would still speak. She was deeply anxious about the faith of her only child. She had her faith written so her boy might know what his mother believed. She was for a time a member of the Presbyterian Church and never subscribing in heart to their article on election she determined to change her Church relation as she was not willing to die and leave on record for her boy, that she subscribed to said faith. She therefore joined the M. E. Church whose doctrines she heartily accepted. I visited her a few days before her death; she was calm, cheerful, joyful. She said to me that there was not a dimming veil between her and her God. She thus passed away from the Church militant to the Church triumphant, leaving her friends to mourn not as those who have no hope, knowing their loved one is not dead but sleepeth.47
The tribute not only honored Alice Jane; it was also a classic statement of the best in Southern womanhood. The effects of her absence were quickly felt. Alice Jane had been the major restraining force on John Henry. She had taught him and perhaps pampered him to the point of vanity on his part. What is certain is that he took her death hard. The community acknowledged her piety and gentility in glowing acknowledgments of her life, but John Henry struggled with the loss. By custom, the period of mourning was one year. Husbands and sons wore black for nine months and gray for three more. During that time, mourners severely limited their social activities. Anything less was considered to be seriously disrespectful of the deceased.
The town was stunned, then, when a mere three months after his wife was laid to rest in Sunset Hill Cemetery, Major married his neighbor’s daughter, twenty-three-year-old Rachel Martin. The marriage was performed by Reverend Ousley, the same Reverend Ousley who had spoken so glowingly about Alice Jane only weeks earlier. He might have overlooked the affront to tradition, but the town did not. There had been no time for a courtship, which raised questions about when the relationship between Henry and Rachel began and suggested a greater impropriety.48
More important than town gossip, though, was the impact of Henry’s action on the family. John Henry was angry over the disrespect his father had paid to his mother’s memory, and he resented his new stepmother, who was only a few years older than he. To make matters even worse, Major left his farm at Cat Creek and moved with his family into a house on Savannah Avenue owned by his new in-laws. The townspeople soon moved on to new scandals, but the relationship between John Henry and his father was cooled forever. Living in town with constant reminders of what had happened, John Henry was an angry young man.
Rachel Martin Holliday, Henry Holliday’s second wife and John Henry’s stepmother.
The removal of Alice Jane’s influence and the resentment against Major soon materialized in John Henry’s conduct. Bertram Wyatt-Brown observed that the socialization of Southern boys included expected experimentation with “fighting, gambling, swearing, drinking, and wenching…all activities that tested the school boy’s honor among his peers.” At school one day, John Henry got into an argument with a classmate over some matter that was not recorded. The way Tom McKey recalled the incident years later, it could have had tragic results:
John’s opponent in the quarrel challenged him to a duel with pistols. Willingly, John accepted the challenge. The two youths met with their seconds on the edge of town and two pistols were set out before them. When he was offered his choice of the pistols, John replied that he had his own pistol and that it was well loaded with balls.
His opponent and the seconds were very much disconcerted over this statement by young Holliday. It was supposed to have been a “mock” duel [that is, the pistols were only loaded with powder charges that would not inflict a wound] and here was Holliday with a loaded pistol meaning business! They urged him to use one of the powder-loaded pistols but to no avail. He had his own gun and that was the one he was going to use in this affair.
John Henry Holliday’s home in Valdosta at 405 East Savannah Street, originally owned by Rachel Martin Holliday’s father, where Henry Holliday and his son moved after Henry’s marriage to Rachel. John Henry would live here with his father and stepmother until he left for dental school.
Seeing that they could not persuade Holliday to use one of the harmless guns, the seconds and his opponent had to explain to him that the duel was a kind of joke. But John was satisfied that “the joke wasn’t on him.” There was no duel, and an amicable settlement was made between the two young men.49
An earlier Georgia writer seems to confirm the incident with these remarks, “As a boy and a play-fellow, John was aggressive and nervy, but upon the whole generous. One who was at school with him for several years can recall but one scrap that he had with another boy.”50 Though a single incident, this episode was enough to affirm something of John Henry’s spirit, and it may be assumed that he did not miss the pleasures of cards, drinking, horsemanship, swearing, womanizing, and the other tests of manhood of adolescent boys of his time and place, perhaps exaggerated by resentment toward his father that could not be expressed directly.
Alice Jane’s brothers and sisters were also upset by Henry’s disrespect for their sister. One of the McKey girls had already married, and the rest moved to the Banner Plantation with their brothers. The brothers openly questioned whether Major had been faithful to their sister, given the circumstances of his quick marriage to his closest neighbor’s young daughter. Not long after the December 18, 1866, wedding, the rift became public when Tom McKey filed a lawsuit against his brother-in-law to recover his sister’s property, which otherwise would have gone to Major as the widowed husband. One of the pieces of property in question was the Iron Front Building in downtown Griffin, Georgia. Playing the role of Solomon, the Lowndes County judge eventually divided the building into two parts, awarding half to the McKeys and half to Henry Holliday as guardian for John Henry. The building was split by a partition running down the center. The judge’s wisdom settled the legal issues, but healing family divisions took longer.51
John Henry’s relationship with his father was further damaged by Major’s role as the Freedman’s Bureau agent. Thannie Wisenbaker recalled, “The Freedman’s Bureau was an institution established in the courthouse and became the headquarters for carpet baggers. The Southern men were tried here and all kinds of lawlessness was heaped upon a peaceful people.”52 Henry was associated in the public mind with Yankee excesses, and his neighbors denounced him as “a deceitful scalawag,” a “wicked spy,” an “ignorant ass,” and a “moral leper” while he served.53 In fact, his term seemed unexceptional, except to the extent he tried to do his job well. He acted on behalf of a number of freedmen as he was charged without any hint of misconduct or unfairness. Hen
ry did not resign, but on May 2, 1867, he was relieved of his duties.54
Overall, resistance to Reconstruction, black codes enacted by Southern states to control former slaves, and the failure of all the Southern states except Tennessee to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment caused Congress, now controlled by Radical Republicans, to move into a second phase of Reconstruction. The South was divided into military districts, and military commanders took charge of the Reconstruction process. General John Pope, commanding the Third Military District, arrived in Georgia on April 1, 1867, to assume command. One of the first actions under the new system was the reorganization of the Freedman’s Bureau.
Because so many of the civilian agents were former Confederates who were unable to take the test oath, they were relieved, and districts were consolidated to include more than one county. After Major was removed, Lowndes was combined with other counties under the jurisdiction of the agent at Quitman. Major was replaced by Alvin B. Clark, who used a more aggressive style that caused many of Henry’s neighbors to rethink their earlier criticism of him. In retrospect, his management did not seem so bad.55
Georgians now watched as their constitutional forms were rewritten. The state constitutional convention convened on December 9, 1867, and continued into March 1868. Georgia’s conservative whites were able to limit the changes, and while black voting rights were guaranteed, white suffrage was not limited as it was in some other states. The new district commander, General George F. Meade, ordered an election for April 20, 1868, to ratify the constitution and choose officials under it. What followed was a bitter campaign in which white Georgians worked very hard to keep the state from falling into the hands of carpetbaggers, scalawags, and blacks.56
The political rancor was felt in Valdosta as deeply as anywhere in the state. J. W. Clift (called “booby” by the press) was a Republican candidate for the U.S. Congress. He arrived in Valdosta to make a campaign speech on April 4, 1868. Clift disregarded local ordinances and made no effort to get permission to hold a rally, but a meeting was called at the courthouse nonetheless. A substantial crowd gathered for the event, composed largely of freedmen, though including local dignitaries and curious whites. During Clift’s speech in front of the courthouse, an explosion interrupted the occasion. No one was injured, but the crowd was scattered. An investigation by local authorities revealed that a group of young men had placed “a modicum of powder” in a keg under the building. The evidence suggested that the incident was more a prank than a serious threat, designed to break up the meeting with no real damage to anyone while putting a scare into Clift and the freedmen. The South Georgia Times argued, “It is idle to suppose there was any intention on the part of the boys, if they did it, to blow up their friends and relations.”57
Community leaders promptly denounced what had happened, and a committee of five was chosen to draft a statement condemning the incident. One of the members of the committee was Henry Holliday. The committee moved quickly, pointing out that Clift had scheduled the rally “without giving to the civil authorities the notice required by military orders—so as to enable said authorities to have a police in readiness to preserve order.” The committee’s report deplored the actions of those who had set off the explosion and expressed “our condemnation and disapproval of said riotous conduct.” The resolutions applauded local authorities for arresting the lawbreakers, but they also called on Mayor M. J. Griffin to replace the city’s colored policemen with white officers.58
Federal officers took a dimmer view of what had happened. The new Freedman’s Bureau agent at Quitman quickly reported to military headquarters at Thomasville that a riot had occurred and that local authorities were “powerless” to do anything about it. On April 6, Corporal John Murray and two soldiers were sent to Valdosta. By then, A. H. Darnell, Iverson Griffin, John Calhoun, Ben Smith, and John Rambo, all sons of locally prominent citizens, had been arrested and released on bond. That did not satisfy the army. On the night of April 13, the three soldiers descended on the homes of the five young men, rousted them from their beds, and started them for Savannah as prisoners in chains before morning.59
Local citizens were enraged. T. B. Griffin was sent to Savannah to look out for the “boys,” and Mayor Griffin demanded to know by what authority they had been taken. He was advised that they had been arrested on General Meade’s order “and will be held for trial by Military Commission.”60 In May, well after the state election, the prisoners were released on $10,000 bond each, raised by the sympathetic citizens of Savannah. The boys received a heroes’ welcome when they returned to Valdosta. On the docket for the May term of the Lowndes County Superior Court, the five men originally arrested, five more whites, and thirteen blacks (including one named Henry Holliday) were charged with rioting. Nothing ever came of any of the charges, local or federal, and the case was eventually disposed of in 1873.61
In a possibly related episode, the South Georgia Times publicly chided the male students at the Valdosta Institute for their recent bad behavior. Local tradition always had it that not all the participants in the plot were arrested or publicly identified because they were so young. John Henry Holliday was said to have been one of them. It certainly would not have been out of character for him to have participated. He was angry and rebellious enough. While no contemporary evidence connecting him to the incident survived (beyond reminiscences), the furor coincided with John Henry’s sudden departure from Valdosta for an extended stay with Robert Kennedy Holliday’s family in Jonesboro.62
Professor Varnedoe’s Valdosta Institute, where John Henry Holliday attended school as a boy.
John Henry’s “summer of discontent” under the same roof with his cousin Mattie, now eighteen and more tempting than ever, formed the basis for what some members of the family saw as a budding romance between them. Her father was struggling to salvage something out of the war’s losses. He had taken a position as baggage master on the Macon & Western Railroad, and it is likely that John Henry worked around the station as well. Doubtless, too, he had opportunity to visit with his other Holliday relatives in the area, including Cousin Robert and the rest of Uncle John’s family.63 How long he stayed or what transpired unfortunately escaped documentation, but in due course, he returned to Valdosta.
That summer of 1868 Georgia was readmitted to the Union and federal troops withdrew. But the friction of Reconstruction was not entirely over. The adjustment to civil and political rights for blacks was galling for most whites, and there were episodes like the riot at Camilla, Georgia, in September, which left nine freedmen dead and close to thirty wounded. The following year, 1869, would be memorable in Georgia for its political chaos, which was so extreme that in response to Governor Rufus Bullock’s request, Congress, on December 22, 1869, sent the army back into Georgia.64
Throughout all of this, John Henry’s life was more concerned with mathematics, history, literature, science, composition, Latin, and the rest of Varnedoe’s rigorous curriculum, as he worked to complete his education. He took a job in 1869 working at the station for the Atlantic & Gulf Railroad in Valdosta. In April of that year, William and Tom McKey bought some land near Troupville, which, happily for John Henry, meant Uncle Tom was spending a little more time with him.65 By then, another fateful connection had arrived in Valdosta.
Dr. Lucian F. Frink was a Floridian and ex-Confederate soldier who had served with an artillery unit during the war. He had surrendered with Confederate forces in Alabama in 1865. While awaiting parole, Frink made friends with a Union soldier, and the two of them agreed to attend the dental college in Philadelphia once the war was over. He entered the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery in 1867 as planned, and on completion of his training moved to Valdosta in 1868. How and when he and young John Henry met escaped the record, but the decision to attend dental school and where was made in Dr. Frink’s office. Frink was only five years older than John Henry and probably knew him on a social level as well as a professional one.66
In late October
1869, John Henry and his father and stepmother may have traveled to Atlanta, where John Stiles Holliday had moved after the war, to attend the wedding of George Holliday to Mary Elizabeth Wright. Aside from the family reunion and a chance to see the recovering young city of Atlanta, the trip would have given John Henry an opportunity to talk with his uncle about his plans. Apparently, Dr. Holliday encouraged him, because when John Henry returned to Valdosta he began making plans for admission to dental school the next fall.67 In September 1870, John Henry Holliday, with Dr. Frink’s endorsement as preceptor, arrived in Philadelphia to begin his education as a dentist.
The Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery was one of the best dental schools in the country. Housed in an imposing building at the corner of Twelfth and Filbert streets, it was the outgrowth of the Philadelphia College of Dental Surgery, originally chartered in 1850, which had opened its doors in 1852. The Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery was chartered in 1856, after a dispute between the trustees and the faculty of the Philadelphia college led to the mass resignation of the faculty and the creation of the new institution. The college had an average enrollment of fifty to sixty students. Students faced a rigorous curriculum in chemistry, mechanical dentistry, metallurgy, dental pathology and therapeutics, dental histology, operative dentistry, physiology, anatomy and microscopic anatomy, and surgery, as well as clinical instruction in operative and mechanical dentistry.68
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