by Alan Huffman
When he reported back to General Sherman, Kilpatrick exaggerated the accomplishments of his raid, claiming he had destroyed the Macon & Western railroad—though even as he spoke, a Rebel locomotive could be heard chugging into Atlanta along the line. The raids did have the effect of preoccupying Confederate forces, who might otherwise have helped defend Atlanta against the Union infantry and artillery. The former included the 22nd Indiana, in which Tolbert’s brothers Silas and Daniel fought. Notably, the officer commanding the 22nd fired off a dispatch requesting that several of his men be cited for bravery and heroic conduct, including one whom he identified only as “Tolbert.”
On September 2, the isolated and besieged Rebel garrison in Atlanta surrendered, and the largest Confederate industrial and rail center in the deep South fell into Union hands. The aggressively amoral William Blufton Miller observed, “It was a grand sight from our camp to look down on the burning city.” At that point, Silas Tolbert was camped just outside Atlanta with the 22nd Indiana. Daniel Tolbert had been hospitalized with a gunshot wound to his left hand, which would result in the loss of three fingers and his discharge from the army.
Though the news of Atlanta’s fall caused elation in the Union ranks, it was not as if Romulus Tolbert, Maddox, Summerville, and the rest of the cavalrymen in the area could let down their guard. There were plenty of Rebels still out there, and they were more desperate now. About forty-five hundred Confederate troops under the command of Nathan Bedford Forrest continued to assail the Union supply lines after the fall of Atlanta, and occasionally they overtook Union outposts and captured Union soldiers on patrol. Most of General Hood’s army had escaped, leaving an estimated forty thousand Rebels at large.
Jones and his men continued to roam the countryside, building a succession of barricades along rural roads and camping behind them at night. When they again arrived at the Owl Rock Church, they were relieved to find that the baggage and camp equipment they had left behind two months before had been shipped south and caught up with them, though for Tolbert, his possessions would be of only temporary use.
The Owl Rock Church was to be the last stop of Tolbert’s military career. On September 10, he departed the church in his newly issued uniform on a patrol of fifty 8th Indiana cavalrymen led by Major Graham, headed toward Campbellton. As they rounded the blind curve about a mile east of Campbellton they came face to face with Rebel cavalry. Before any of them had time to think, they were being fired upon. Tolbert wheeled to escape, glancing over his shoulder, and took one bullet in the back and another in the neck. Blood splattered his new uniform and ran from the corners of his mouth. The first bullet, a ball from a Navy revolver, entered behind his left ear, passed through his mouth, and lodged in the opposite side of his jaw. The second passed cleanly through his shoulder. About half of his patrol managed to get away and raced back toward the Owl Rock Church. Three of the men, including James Taylor, Tolbert’s boyhood friend from Saluda, were killed. Twenty-two others were captured, eight of whom were wounded.
Tolbert was now gravely wounded and depended for his survival on a group of highly agitated enemy soldiers, sweating in their wool uniforms on a hot September day, who moments before had wanted him dead. He had also lost his horse.
When Graham delivered the news to the men back at the Owl Rock Church, Maddox was no doubt particularly disheartened. He was now separated for the first time from the friend who had accompanied him into the army, through his sickness, and along hundreds of miles of inscrutable, dangerous roads. He had no way of knowing whether or when he would see him again.
Chapter Five
SOMEWHERE, THE LITTLE BROTHER
SAMUEL TOLBERT WAS THIRTEEN, SMALL FOR HIS AGE and “fleshy,” as one of his officers described him, when he enlisted in the 22nd Indiana Infantry in March 1864. Samuel was the last of the six Tolbert brothers to join, and his father was dead. The argument could be made that despite his age he had no real choice but to go. He had to contribute, to prove his worth before the war was over. At the time he was living with his sister’s family, and for whatever reason his mother acquiesced.
He mustered in at Indianapolis, as his brothers had, and followed the same route to the war, through Nashville. His troubles began along the way when he came down with measles. He was hospitalized in Nashville, got better, relapsed, and was sent to a convalescent camp—basically quarantine. He caught up with the 22nd near Atlanta in September 1864, about a week after his brother Daniel had been shot in the hand at Jonesboro and subsequently discharged, and a day before Romulus was captured near Campbellton.
Underaged boys were often allowed to join the army as drummers or fifers, but Samuel enlisted as a regular soldier and so had to lug the heavy and cumbersome accoutrement of war: A gun, forty rounds of ammunition, a haversack, a knapsack, and a canteen. By the time it became apparent that he was not up to the task, it was too late to turn back. Whether from general weakness as a result of the measles or the weight of his cartridge belt, or some combination, he developed a hernia in his left side and suffered what appears to have been a growth deformity in his still-developing ribs, also on his left side. Some of his ribs subsequently fused together, and he was unable to expand his chest cavity on that side and so had trouble breathing.
The problem would grow continually worse during Sherman’s March to the Sea. As he later wrote, his side became inflamed and “these pains and hurting grew worse day by day. After we traveled back from Savannah Ga.—Feb. 65—my hurting in side grew worse, so great was the paining that I could not stand to have my belt around my body, and my comrades, as also did my captain—A.C. Graves—carried my belt and other things for me.” His physical condition deteriorated as the 22nd marched north through the Carolinas toward Washington, D.C., where he was put on “light duty.”
“I remember that this boy gave out on march somewhere between Raleigh N.C. & Richmond Va. and my attention was called to him by finding him by the road side crying like a child,” Joseph Stillwell, a surgeon with the 22nd, recalled. “He then told me that he was given out, said he could not carry his things; that they hurt him, and that his feet were sore. He seemed to feel that he was disgraced by giving out and having to report to Surgeon. I remember that I, appreciating his feelings, did not put him in Ambulance but got down off my horse and let him ride.” In hindsight, Stillwell would conclude something that should have been obvious to others all along: “This soldier was too young, and should not have been put in service.” On the other hand, “He was very gritty and was ready to do his part.”
W.H. Snodgrass, who served with Samuel Tolbert in the 22nd, saw him as “a tenacious fellow, and disposed to do what he could and what was right.” In fact, according to Snodgrass, “All of said Tolbert boys were ready soldiers.” Another soldier called him “the baby of the company”—a description that could cut both ways.
Before joining, Samuel was “a stout healthy boy,” according to his friend and uncle, George Dickinson. “He was a heavy, square made fellow.” An acquaintance, a musician in the 22nd named Thomas Sample, said that Samuel first showed signs of serious physical distress during a forty-mile march immediately before the March to the Sea, when he struggled to keep up with the command and often straggled behind. He was “a mere boy,” Sample said, “not old enough to perform the duties and endure the hardships of soldiering at that time.”
Graves later remarked, “I had no idea when I saw Tolbert in the Comp’y that he was the mere child that he was.” But, Graves added, “I noticed that he looked as though he had just come from a sick bed; he was thin and emaciated, and I thought, at the time, that his place was at home; and I said so to him, when he first joined the Company: ‘You had better staid at home with your mammy.’” Graves said Samuel “was an ambitious boy and was proud of the privilege he enjoyed. He was always prompt in the performance of every duty imposed.” But he also observed that when loaded down with his gear, “the little fellow would sink under it.” Sometimes he would unbuckle his cartri
dge belt and let it swing from the end of his bayonet, to take the pressure off his side, “and march wearily, but pluckily, along with us.”
During the March to the Sea, Graves often carried Samuel’s gun and other equipment. “He would come to me, to the head of the line, and complain that his side and breast hurt him, that his cartridge box hurt him, and he would ask that I let him have them hauled in a wagon,” Graves remembered. “I used to say to him: ‘Sammie, I will carry your gun and accouterments, and you carry my sword. And I have carried the little fellow’s gun all day long. I used to pity Sammie, on account of his youth, and the claimant’s brothers—He had three brothers in my company—complained very much because the Recruiting Officer had accepted him.” That recruiting officer, James Benham, who later commanded the company, said he had known Samuel “since he was a babe.” A local resident recalled that after hearing that Samuel and another boy had joined, “it was remarked by someone that the recruiting officer ought to take a cow along to give these boys milk.”
Graves wrote, “I have seen and known him to have been exhausted from the fatigue of the march, and I often wondered what kept the boy up, and used to encourage him by telling him that he had more courage and grit than half of the big men of the company,” adding that Samuel “was generally very fond of being where I was; and, like a child would do, he usually confided to me his troubles.”
Samuel would make it to the end of the war, but would never get over the physical damage it caused.
Chapter Six
CAPTURED
THE WAGON AND ITS UNWANTED CARGO BUMPED ALONG the road, flexing and bouncing through the ruts like a crude float in a parade of tired and dusty horsemen. Romulus Tolbert lay among the wounded prisoners in the crowded wooden bed. By then someone had stanched the bleeding; otherwise—with two gunshot wounds, one to his neck—he would have bled to death. Field treatment of wounds during the Civil War was simple: You stuffed the wound with a rag.
The Rebel entourage, encumbered by its twenty-three insolent despoilers, was headed for Fairburn, Georgia. After driving away the rest of the 8th Indiana patrol, the Rebels had loaded their prisoners and loot, including thirty rifles (some of which were the coveted repeating Spencers), in the wagons and hastened away, leading a pack of captured mules as they passed through Campbellton. Little of importance was left in the town now, other than the ferry crossing on the Chattahoochee River. Campbellton had been in decline since before the war as the result of a local vote to prevent the Atlanta & West Point Railroad from passing through on account of the expected noise. Only a scattering of empty houses, barns, and stores remained, along with a gutted brick courthouse. Campbellton was an empty stage set in a hotly contested war zone—a place no one wanted to be for long. The railroad had been routed to the south, through Fairburn, which boomed as a result. Though the Union cavalry spent much of the summer tearing up the tracks, Fairburn was still securely enough in Confederate hands that later in the month Confederate President Jefferson Davis would visit to try to boost the morale of the troops, who were discouraged by the fall of Atlanta.
In saving Tolbert and the other gravely wounded men, the Rebels followed the rules of war, though soldiers on both sides were known to occasionally shoot prisoners. Perhaps their anger had been muted by Tolbert’s helplessness and misery. It is one thing to take pride in being able to bring down an enemy, and another to disregard someone’s suffering, even if that someone had been trying to kill you a few minutes before.
Confederate General L.S. Ross, who had been fighting the Yankees in the area for much of the summer, was now in charge at Fairburn. One of his officers, J.M. Taylor, had led the ambush in which Tolbert and the others were captured. Upon their arrival in Fairburn, the Rebels unloaded their captives as soon as they could, and Tolbert, who was too badly injured to travel farther, was placed in a private home. There were no real hospitals nearby, and it would have been apparent to anyone that his chances of survival were slim. He was now essentially alone. Everyone who knew him, who thought the way he did or understood why he thought the way he did, was gone. His blood-soaked shirt, his knapsack, his gun, his saber, his horse—all were gone. He could not eat.
Tolbert left no account of his stay in Fairburn, so there is no way to know whether he awoke in a stranger’s bed and wondered where he was, with his head and shoulder bandaged and throbbing with pain; whether the women were compassionate or resentful or the doctors attentive or uninterested. But he likely drifted in and out of consciousness for days, his mind floating to the surface like a fish in a stream, then sinking back into the depths. Severe trauma frequently leads to shock, and during the Civil War a soldier who survived his wounds almost inevitably faced some degree of infection, usually accompanied by fever and delirium. Jesse Hawes, a private from Illinois who went through a period of disorientation after being similarly shot and captured, observed that “the fever that follows a gun-shot wound fills the mind with the wildest fancies.” Hawes, who was also shot in the neck near his ear, recalled that he was placed in a Confederate ambulance with three other injured men who had difficulty not getting in each other’s way and aggravating each other’s wounds. “But I was soon oblivious to all around me,” he wrote. “That awful faintness over-powered me, and I unconsciously went to sleep.”
A person in such a state typically becomes confused, unsure whether it is day or night, alternately fearful, suspicious, and angry, not unlike someone with dementia. There is always a degree of hubris involved in going into battle, but once a bullet penetrates flesh, the hubris bleeds out. The dynamic changes. A captive soldier in such a state has few survival tools other than the ability to enlist sympathy. As his body struggles with trauma and perhaps infection, he may feel the urge to give up one moment and fight the next, then to escape, then to acquiesce. Tolbert’s trials had suddenly escalated. He had endured the energy-sapping marches only to be ambushed. He had survived the ambush only to face the potential for death from his wounds or from infection. Each time he survived, but each time he faced a new and different challenge. Given the level of medical care a Civil War soldier usually received, the struggle that followed would be just as easy to lose. Infected arms and legs could be amputated—and often were, even unnecessarily, but amputation was not an option for someone who was wounded in his trunk and in the head, as Tolbert was.
In his condition, he was certainly a source of consternation for his hosts, and perhaps a curiosity. Patience James, a Fairburn resident who was compelled to care for a wounded Yankee at another time (when the Rebels were away), recalled that the local women were accustomed to keeping plenty of food on hand for their own soldiers, for marauding Union troops, or for men whom they were compelled to nurse. As James told her granddaughter, who wrote it all down, she had been pressed into nursing service after a nearby battle, when Fairburn was in Union hands, and, “the Yankees took an old empty house across the street from me for a hospital. They placed straw over the floor and it was where they placed their wounded. The women had to care for them. I did not wait to have one sent to me, but went to select mine. There was a large German soldier shot in the stomach who died soon afterwards. There was a young soldier who claimed to have a broken back whom I selected. He said he couldn’t walk. I believe there were only five men left in Fairburn at that time, so I had to get a little negro boy to help me carry him to my house.”
Once she got her injured soldier home, James placed him in a bed and, she said, “I made the little negro boy, Mont, a pallet by the side of the bed, telling the soldier that if he needed anything during the night to call Mont.” She did not say whether she was relieved when the injured soldier turned up missing the next day, along with Mont’s coat and shoes. She assumed he had lied about his broken back and escaped. Perhaps he became a straggler—what would one day be referred to as AWOL.
Jesse Hawes, whose injuries during his capture were similar to Tolbert’s, was also treated in a private home. After his capture, the Rebels temporarily left hi
m in a wagon with other wounded captives, and he escaped and made his way to a log cabin, where two women helped him inside and put him in bed after laying his rubber blanket across it so as not to soil the linens. The women then brewed coffee for him on the fire. The elderly woman who took charge of his care treated his wound, though as Hawes recalled she mostly just picked at it, rubbed some herbal remedy into the parts that were not violently tender, and talked to him. When Rebel soldiers arrived at the cabin, Hawes officially became an enemy captive again.
Tolbert’s captor-caregivers managed to keep him alive long enough to get free of him, too. After a week in the private home, he was sent to a Confederate military hospital in Montgomery, where he remained for six weeks. Along the way, someone dug the ball out of his jaw. That was necessary, though it amplified the risk of infection, the chief cause of death during recovery from a gunshot wound. Gunshot wounds are uniformly nasty, and during the Civil War they were typically contaminated, such as by a dirty hand raked across them or a rag used to stanch the flow of blood. Flies were a problem, too, bringing with them traces of whatever filth they had recently tracked through, such as feces or carrion. Tolbert’s doctor may have done his best to clean the wound and to remove any related debris, but he would have done so with his fingers and whatever surgical tools he had at his disposal, which were probably not fully sterilized. Before such surgeries patients were given opium or laudanum if it was available, and chloroform if they were lucky.