by Alan Huffman
While Tolbert stayed with Sophronia for the rest of his life, Maddox married five times, and his life had an uneven cast. He often changed the spelling of his name. Born John Christian Maddox, he sometimes spelled his surname Maddux or Maddex, and he went variously by Chris, Christian, John, and, for some reason, C.J. He first married in 1868, but his wife, Elvira, died within two years, after which he moved back in with his parents. Later that same year he married Elvira’s sister Margaret, and he stayed with her until 1880, when he moved in with his mother again (his father had by then died) and sued for divorce. Margaret did not bother to show up for court. He next married Mary, but she died in 1884. The following year he married Sarah, who appears to have been the love of his life—he would be buried beside her—and after she died in 1901 he married Martha, who outlived him (and was later buried alongside him and Sarah).
Despite his disabilities, Maddox had trouble getting a $2-per-month pension, in part because of mix-ups over the spelling of his name and because he had lied about his age when he enlisted. He first applied in 1887, saying he had been disabled by diarrhea, which he attributed to bouts of malaria, improper food, impure water, and exposure during the Sultana disaster. In various documents he said he had first contracted diarrhea in Nashville, or in camp at Cahaba, or after the disaster. Perhaps it was hard to pinpoint exactly when everything went wrong.
Robert C. Lawson, who served alongside Tolbert and Maddox in the 8th Indiana, filed an affidavit on Maddox’s behalf, in which he wrote, “we were separated a while toward the close of the war I know he came sick from the war complaining with Cronic Diarrhea. I have lived a neighbor to him ever since I now of him doctoring with several doctors for two or three years I know of him suffering from said disease to the present time.” He added, “I know this by waiting on him while he was sic.”
Maddox’s decline was unquestionably precipitated by his wartime experience, but there was a cumulative impact, too. As Indiana soldier Benjamin Magee observed after encountering one of his former comrades years later, “something in the sunken lines of his face, in his hair, in the stoop of his shoulders, tells us that the years of peace have broken him more than all the marches and vigils of war.”
Tolbert and his brothers struggled with their health, too. The determined, hapless Samuel, who joined a Saluda band as a violinist, two years later disregarded his disabilities and at the still tender age of seventeen reenlisted as a drummer and fifer in the 4th U.S. Infantry, in October 1867. No doubt he wished that he had been a drummer and fifer during the war, instead of a soldier. He was subsequently stationed at Fort Laramie, Wyoming, and served for three years. Afterward he bounced around. When he applied for his pension in 1887, he was thirty-seven years old and unable to do anything that involved taking deep breaths, and he often awoke at night feeling as if he were suffocating. Twenty years after the war, he was still complaining about his side, and his only treatment was the application of liniment. His brothers were as powerless to help him then as they had been during the war. His brother-in-law wrote on behalf of Samuel’s pension application to say that he had paid him to do work now and then, but he could do little, and “If he had not been my Brother in law, and poor & needy, I would not have hired him.”
Samuel’s former captain, A.C. Graves, who saw him again about a decade after the war, said he “looked considerably stouter, but he had not grown much in height.” Ten years later, Samuel visited Graves at his home and spent the night. “We talked over our army life, and how we, both, had been broken in health, etc.,” Graves recalled. “He asked me if I remembered the trouble he had with his side in the army, and on my replying that I did, we were then out in the stable—and unbuttoning his pants, and pulling up his shirt, he showed me a lump in his side, and asked me to feel of it. I felt of it and it felt almost as large as a hen’s egg…He also told me that he was very poor, and that he did not know what he was going to do to better himself as he could not labor. He was so poor that he could not pay for the county clerk’s seal that attested the affidavit I gave him, so I paid for it.”
Samuel’s pension application was initially rejected, so he applied again. In addition to the hernia and respiratory problems, he claimed to suffer eye disease as a result of his service. The night Samuel spent with Graves at his home, the two slept in the same bed, “and when we were lying there just before going to sleep, he said, ‘Capt., I have smothering spells, so if you hear any disturbance tonight, don’t be alarmed,’” Graves wrote. “But, it takes a good deal of racket to wake me, so I did not hear him breathe extraordinarily hard that night. But he is a magnificent snorer, as I learned near morning.” Samuel also suffered heart disease and nervous disorders. A special examiner for the pension board later concluded that Samuel’s “whole system has been permanently injured by the hardships endured in service, and in line of duty.” His pension was finally granted. By then he was also suffering from “premature senility.” He died in 1917.
Mathew Tolbert, who had spent eighteen months in prison, reportedly in Andersonville, though his records do not say exactly where, settled in Plow-Handle Point, a steamboat landing in Saluda, where he, his wife, and her mother died of an unnamed fever within two days in October 1878. He was thirty-seven and left behind a three-year-old son named for his late brother Tyrus.
Silas Tolbert, who married late, also died comparatively young of heart disease at forty-seven, at his home in Saluda in 1893. He had enlisted at fifteen, had served four years in the army without being wounded, and was an artist and musician of local note. Oddly enough, the Courier repeated an earlier error in his obituary, reporting that among the six Tolbert brothers who served in the Union Army, Romulus had been killed aboard the Sultana. Perhaps the error provided for a little levity at the funeral. At the time, their brother Daniel, who had been twice wounded during the war, was living in nearby Paynesville.
Romulus Tolbert’s picture ran in The Rear Guard of Company H.: Officers and Privates surviving January 1st, 1910, a reunion scrapbook. His expression in the photo is not as tentative and apprehensive as in the images of him as a younger man. He is resplendent in his dark suit, starched white high-collared shirt, and tie. His hair is neatly parted, his white mustache carefully trimmed. He looks stolid and respectable. The photos typically were accompanied by a brief biography, and under Tolbert’s is the notation “Gave no particulars about himself but ‘Rom’ is all right. Just the same as he was as a soldier boy.” Maddox is also pictured in a striped three-piece suit, with a long gray beard, close-cropped hair, and a slightly provoked look in his eyes, as if he were expecting a challenge and was not particularly happy about it. The editor wrote, “John did not send any history about himself since the war. So I am unable to say anything, except he says he is always glad to please a comrade. He lives near Hanover, Jefferson County, Indiana and seems to be able to enjoy three meals a day.” In the picture Maddox does appear to have put on a few pounds, though the editor would probably not have mentioned his gastronomic habits had he known what Maddox was going through.
After having survived so much, Tolbert and Maddox may have felt they had proved themselves, or they may have lived in fear of what would happen next. Either way, each moment opened to another, the on-off switches forever flickering but somehow staying on. By the turn of the twentieth century, they had miraculously grown old.
They no doubt occasionally ran into each other and spoke of their experiences together, and may have attended a Sultana survivors’ reunion in Toledo, Ohio, on April 27, 1914, though the only evidence is a newspaper photo caption that today floats, unattached, on an Internet Web site. If so, it would have been an arduous trip for both of them. Tolbert, who was then seventy-one and one of only two surviving Tolbert sons, suffered from pain in the neck and neuralgia of the face and head, and he was two years away from a debilitating stroke that would leave him bedridden. Maddox was sixty-eight, two years away from his own series of strokes, and suffered from chronic diarrhea, hemorrhoids, liver d
isease, jaundice, a heart murmur, and slight enlargement of the spleen and prostate. The train ride would have been a long and uncomfortable journey into the past.
The Sultana reunion was one of the last chances the survivors had to commiserate about what they had been through together and to see the old familiar faces again. As it turned out, only fourteen made it—fourteen among the thousands who had fought in the war, been imprisoned at Cahaba and Andersonville, and boarded the Sultana, and who were now enduring the final challenge of growing old.
AS THE SURVIVORS OF THE Sultana saga aged and their memories dimmed, the physical reminders of the past began to disappear. Like the town of Cahaba, Andersonville fell into ruin and slowly rotted away. Immediately after the war, Clara Barton, along with a detachment of laborers and soldiers and a former prisoner, visited the abandoned site to identify and mark the thousands of graves of the Union dead. What had been a stinking burial ground was eventually transformed into a serene memorial, but there was no interest in preserving the stockade itself. A.S. McCormick, a soldier with the 86th Indiana Infantry who was captured at Chickamauga, wrote a brief account about his return trip to Andersonville in April 1888, during which he found little left standing. He cut a piece of wood from the north gate post which contained a minié ball as a souvenir. McCormick, one of a party of five who traveled to the site for a picnic, later wrote, “Just think of sitting down to such a feast as this inside of the old stockade at Andersonville! Fellow survivors of Southern prison-pens, I could not keep back the tears as I ate that meal under the shade of persimmon and black-jack oaks, about one hundred feet east of the spring, and remembered how many, many thousands of brave men had starved to death at that very spot!”
There was a groundswell of support for preserving the battlefields, including Chickamauga, Lookout Mountain, and Missionary Ridge, which became the nation’s first Civil War park. Chickamauga eventually hosted veterans’ reunions which drew participants from both sides—men who no doubt had more in common in old age, including having tried for two days to kill each other when they were young. The reunions were fertile ground for honing stories of what the men went through, and the results were sometimes at odds with what was recorded in diaries, official army dispatches, military and pension files, newspaper archives, personal letters, and other memoirs and historical accounts. In many cases the carefully crafted accounts suffered from the taint of hindsight, from the desire of their authors to both nail down and sanctify the story.
By the time J. Walter Elliott finished polishing his account of the Sultana saga, it looked as if he had carried his thesaurus with him along the way. Elliott’s vivid prose tended toward the purple end of the spectrum. In his submission to Berry’s book, he wrote of the Sultana’s sinking, “I have seen death’s carnival in the yellow fever and the cholera-stricken city, on the ensanguined field, in hospital and prison, and on the rail; I have, with wife and children clinging in terror to my knees, wrestled with the midnight cyclone; but the most horrible of all were the sights and sounds of that hour. The prayers, shrieks and groans of strong men and helpless women and children are still ringing in my ears, and the remembrance makes me shudder. The sight of 2,000 ghostly, pallid faces upturned in the chilling waters of the Mississippi, as I looked down on them from the boat, is a picture that haunts me in my dreams.”
No doubt the latter was true. Elliott endured epic travails, and it is clear that he was haunted by them for the rest of his life. He had the cast of characters, the drama, the theme, and the scars to prove it. He honed the story for all it was worth, crafting a series of dramatic tableaux that were both stylized and illuminating—the literary equivalent of a series of stained glass windows. Elliott was voluble and occasionally disingenuous, and he seemed always to be working both the story and the room, but it was probably no coincidence that he did so even as his experiences were slowly destroying him. The same dynamic that characterized each of his previous survival trials was still at work in the aftermath of the Sultana. The risks did not go away. They were transformed.
In stylizing and amplifying his tale, Elliott had an agenda: To convey to others the full impact of what he experienced and to justify what he was still going through. In that regard he was not alone. Countless others spent the rest of their lives in lamentation. Many of the survivors suffered from what is today known as post-traumatic stress disorder, and the process of drafting a serviceable narrative was a kind of immersion therapy aimed at controlling, containing, and capitalizing upon a terrible past, even as they slowly succumbed to the physical and mental wreckage that resulted from it.
The shaping of memories inevitably led to disagreements. Memory itself is malleable, and a person in the middle of a violent cataclysm often sees events unfolding in slow motion, with almost no peripheral vision, and so may miss important details that are clearly evident from another person’s vantage point. George Robinson told the pension board that he had floated on his dead mule alongside Ogilvie Hamblin; in response, Hamblin informed the pension board that Robinson had asked him to sign an affidavit to that effect, “but as I could not recollect any such thing I would not sign.” Thomas Newton felt compelled to write a letter to a veterans’ magazine to correct what he claimed was an unthinkably palliated account by a fellow former prisoner concerning the pens in Florence, South Carolina, and Andersonville. “I have written as I have because I feel it a duty to my old comrades who endured the sad, sad torments of that terrible prison pen,” Newton wrote. “It is strange that Comrade Herman Brown’s experience should so nearly coincide with mine at Florence prison and be so different at Andersonville.”
Faced with the inevitable disparities, the survivors tended to dig in their heels. To create a workable self-image required a certain confidence in their memory of the pivotal events of their lives, and the reunions, in particular, were fertile ground for swapping stories about the war, prison, and the Sultana disaster. Over time the men gave their tales more attractive rhythm, cadence, and purpose; emphasized favorite details; omitted others; superimposed later observations; and borrowed from one another. As Laurence Gonzales notes, the stories a person hears beforehand are part of the preparation for any survival challenge. Likewise, the urge to craft a narrative afterward is part of coming to terms with it. Given time to think—something most were deprived of in the heat of the moment—the survivors naturally sought to incorporate their experiences into a new model of the world.
Countless survivors wrote magazine and newspaper articles, spoke at reunions and other events, and published memoirs. George Robinson contributed an account to Chester Berry’s book, as did J. Walter Elliott and Perry Summerville, whose action-packed little piece was a summary of his own full-blown autobiography. In their accounts for Berry’s book, most of the survivors devoted only a few lines to the war and captivity but page after page to the disaster. The exercise was aimed not merely at recording what had happened but in explaining what was happening to them now. Among the two hundred thousand troops Indiana sent off to war, twenty-seven thousand died. In addition to those lost on the battlefield or to disease, twenty-one were reported murdered; eight were killed after being captured, one of whom was executed by the Rebels; eleven committed suicide; eight were executed by the Union Army; twenty died of sunstroke; and nearly eight hundred died of causes that were unclassified or unknown. Hundreds died aboard the Sultana. For most of the surviving veterans, the war trumped all their previous travails. For those who were also former prisoners, captivity trumped the war. And for those who survived the Sultana, the disaster trumped everything.
THE PREDICTABLE FLURRY OF POSTWAR memoirs was both prompted by, and contributed to, the debate over the various cantos of the war. In building his own narrative, Melvin Grigsby decided to fill in the blanks of his memories with living, breathing details. He returned to Cahaba, Alabama, in April 1884, hoping to find out more about Amanda Gardner, who had lent her books to him and other inmates during the war.
There was a clear br
eak in the ranks of survivors over just how bad things had been in the prison camps. Many whose emotional wounds had healed were inclined to accentuate the positive, such as the arrival of the Providence Spring at Andersonville, even to the point of glossing over horrendous details. Others just as determinedly nurtured memories of injustices and hardships, and they sought to lay blame. Grigsby, a nineteen-year-old soldier with the 7th Wisconsin Infantry when he was captured near Vicksburg and imprisoned at Cahaba, was about forty when he returned, and his recollections had softened. In his telling, the Cahaba prisoners were adequately fed and even the enemies were occasionally kind, including two Confederate guards. “We did not know enough then about life in rebel prisons to fully appreciate their kindness,” he wrote in his book, Smoked Yank, published in 1888. “Every day on the arrival of the mail, one of them would bring in a late paper, stand up on a box and read the news.” Even more inspiring was Gardner, who not only had supplied the prisoners with books and blankets but had nursed sick men in her home and given them much-needed fresh potatoes, peas, green beans, and corn. Grigsby traveled to Cahaba from his home in Wisconsin, hoping to find Gardner and her daughter Belle, with whom he had exchanged notes without actually meeting. By then, little was left of the prison itself except for a few broken bricks. The Gardners’ former home was occupied by an erstwhile guard, who said they had moved to Selma, along with most of the rest of the town. By then, continued flooding had taken its toll on Cahaba, resulting in a mass out-migration, mostly to Selma, where Belle worked as a dressmaker to support herself and her aging mother.