Doc Holliday

by Gary L Roberts

  In 1846, with the eruption of the Mexican War, Southerners flocked to the colors. Henry Holliday traveled to Columbus, Georgia, on the Chattahoochee River, with a company of men from Griffin who called themselves Fannin’s Avengers, after the martyred Colonel James Fannin, a former Georgian whose command had been massacred in 1836 at Goliad during the Texas revolution. Holliday was commissioned a second lieutenant in Company I, and his company served in the regiment of Colonel Henry R. Jackson of Savannah.25 They were soon bound for Mexico, where Jackson’s regiment was in the thick of the fight with General Zachary Taylor at Monterrey and served with distinction at Veracruz and Jalapa under General Scott. Discharged at Jalapa on June 1, 1847, Henry Holliday continued to serve as a clerk in the army’s Commissary Department for a time.26

  When Holliday returned to Griffin, he revealed a side of himself that might not have shown itself easily through his rough exterior. He brought with him a Mexican boy named Francisco Hidalgo, who had been orphaned by the war, and took him into his household, though at the time Henry was still a bachelor.27 That was about to change, however. Henry had his eye on Alice Jane McKey, the nineteen-year-old daughter of William Land McKey and Jane Cloud McKey, whose Indian Creek cotton plantation attested to the family’s prominence and success. How and when they met is not evident from the record, but that Alice Jane responded to his courtship was a coup for Henry, ten years her senior, and evidence of his progress toward goals that satisfied his prospective in-laws as well as himself. Henry and Alice Jane were married on January 8, 1849, and the couple moved into a house on Tinsley Street north of the railroad tracks in Griffin.28

  Alice Jane brought added respectability to Henry. Like the Hollidays, her parents had moved to Georgia from South Carolina. By 1849, they were well-known and respected citizens of Henry County. Her father was well-born himself, while her grandfather, Joseph Cloud, was a member of one of the wealthiest slaveholding and landholding families in the region, owning property for a distance of more than fifty miles from Stone Mountain to Griffin. Henry’s acceptance by the McKeys was itself evidence of his growing reputation and success.29

  Henry settled into married life at Griffin as a druggist and began to build a reasonably good life for his aristocratic wife and himself. He was soon a prominent citizen, noted as a hard-nosed businessman and a quick-tempered adversary. Griffin prospered, benefiting from a railroad line that ran from Atlanta to Macon and from the slaves who worked the surrounding cotton fields. It soon became a central point for shipping cotton. Its future seemed bright if not certain.30 Henry grew with the town, speculating in land and eventually acquiring forty-six plots within the town limits and hundreds of acres in the county as well as potential railroad properties in other parts of the state.

  By all accounts, Alice Jane was a refined, genteel, and pious woman, as befitted her background, a wife devoted to her husband and committed to charity and church. Reared a Methodist, she joined the Presbyterian church in Griffin to bring the family together in matters of faith, although she never personally embraced the doctrine of predestination. Henry had married well, and she gave him the kind of home that enhanced his social position as well as fostered the family Henry wanted.31

  Alice Jane McKey Holliday and infant John Henry Holliday, circa 1852.

  They wasted little time. On December 3, 1849, Alice Jane gave birth to their first child, Martha Eleanora, one day before President Zachary Taylor angered Southerners by proposing the admission of California and New Mexico as states without territorial status first.32 Like the compromise that took shape in Congress over the next few months, little Martha was frail and brought only a brief period of joy to her parents. On June 12, 1850, she died and was buried at the small cemetery in Griffin.33 The grieving couple was surrounded by the extended families of Hollidays and McKeys. John Stiles Holliday, Henry’s younger brother, was a prominent Fayetteville citizen, medical doctor, and businessman, with a growing family of his own. Alice Jane’s parents were also nearby. Childhood death was a fact of life in those days; five of Henry’s brothers and sisters had died before the age of ten. So the young couple coped and planned to try again.

  The infant Compromise of 1850 was in trouble, too, by August 14, 1851, when a second child, a son, was born to Henry and Alice Jane. The boy was likely delivered by John, who came down from Fayetteville for the occasion. They named him John Henry Holliday, after his uncle and father, and he became the center of their world. The Holliday family was both large and close, so John Henry’s birth was a major event in the life of the whole family. As the eldest son of the eldest son, young John Henry was destined to play a large role in family life. As he was the primary heir, the guardianship of the family’s good name would one day fall into his charge. The Hollidays celebrated and made plans for the future in light of this new birth.34

  One family source—and curiously only one—recalled that John Henry was born with a cleft palate.35 Mary Cowperwaithe Fulton Holliday, the wife of John Henry’s cousin Robert Alexander Holliday (and a person who never met John Henry herself), reportedly wrote that the “most distressed” John Stiles Holliday consulted with his colleague and cousin by marriage, the renowned Dr. Crawford W. Long, who assisted him in the delicate surgery closing John Henry’s cleft palate, using ether as an anesthesia.36 If true, this was an extraordinary event that should have made news throughout the country, not only for Long, who was involved in a public controversy about the use of ether at the time, but also for Holliday, who would have won accolades for the successful delicate surgery.

  In 1842, Long had removed a small cystic tumor from the neck of a patient using ether, but he published no paper on his discovery. In 1846, Dr. John Collins Warren of Massachusetts General Hospital experimented with ether, and in November of that year, Henry J. Bigelow published an article in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal announcing to the world the successful use of ether as an anesthesia. The reputations of Warren and Bigelow gave the procedure credibility, and they were heralded as the discoverers of ether’s anesthetic powers.37

  Once the Bigelow article had been published, Long tried, after the fact, to assert his own claim as the discoverer of ether’s use as an anesthesia. Long blamed his failure to act earlier on a “very laborious country practice,” and, once his discovery became public in Jackson County where he lived at the time, his practice fell off, he suffered some community ostracism, and one local elder told him that “if he should have a mistake and kill someone with ether, there was not a doubt but that he would be lynched.” But by 1851 he was involved in a very public controversy with Warren and Bigelow on the subject. His use of ether at an early date would eventually be verified and recognized, but because he did not publish a report of his discovery, the medical community did not, as the leading medical historian William H. Welch said, “assign to him any influence upon the historical development of our knowledge of surgical anesthesia or any share in its introduction to the world at large.”38 Regardless, in 1851 he was still very much involved in an effort to assert his claim, and success in an operation as complex as cleft palate surgery on an infant would have been a noteworthy accomplishment in any case.

  Dr. John Stiles Holliday, brother of Henry B. Holliday, who delivered John Henry Holliday and played a role in his nephew’s life.

  Long was living in Atlanta in 1851 and, at least theoretically, would have been available for such a procedure, although no contemporary source has yet been found to confirm it. This seems a little odd, because Long had learned the hard way the importance of reporting medical breakthroughs. Cleft palate surgery on an infant using ether was a formidable challenge, requiring better than average skill and luck as well as specialized tools. The surviving papers of Long, which detail many of his operations—most less significant than the complicated procedures of cleft palate surgery—contain no hint of such an operation, even though he was publicizing his discoveries, documenting examples of their use, and emphasizing their importance during the very time wh
en the operation would have occurred.39

  A successful cleft palate surgery on a small child was certainly newsworthy—and under anesthesia, extraordinary and groundbreaking. Several innovations were introduced between 1844, when Sir William Fergusson first outlined operative procedures for cleft palate surgery “founded on anatomical and physiological data,” and 1877, when Francis Mason published his work “On Harelip and Cleft Palate,” but notably the first successful cleft palate surgery under anesthesia was not reported until a physician named Buzzard announced his use of chloroform in 1868.40 If Holliday and Long did perform such an operation on John Henry, it was a major event, and, in light of his previous battles to gain recognition for his work, Long’s failure to publish reports of it was inexplicable.

  Cleft palate surgeries were performed as early as possible because of the complications of feeding infants caused by the condition and because of possible speech impediments occasioned by waiting until after a child began to speak before operating. The latter consideration argued for surgery before the second birthday, but surgery within the first several months was discouraged because of the shock to the infant’s system, the belief that small children did not “bear the loss of blood well,” and the simple fact that early efforts often failed to close the cleft satisfactorily.41 Given the complexity of the surgery, the specialized knowledge and tools required, and the complications of using anesthesia on an infant at that point in time, such a procedure would have been virtually impossible outside of a hospital or without receiving public notice.

  If such a surgery was performed on John Henry, it would have certainly happened in 1851 or early in 1852 at the latest, because Long moved to Athens, Georgia, in 1852. If John Henry was born with a cleft palate, it was never obvious in the photographs of him, even as a baby (the earliest of which was almost certainly taken before any surgery could have occurred). Of course, a posterior cleft would not have affected the lip or the upper jaw and would not have created a facial deformity. According to Mary Holliday, the cleft “extended to, but not through, his lip.”

  No convincing evidence exists to support the claim of a cleft palate. Still, the possibility of such a surgery must be considered because of the potential impact on both his physical and social development. If he did suffer from such an impediment, it doubtlessly affected him in two ways: first, by tying him closer to his mother and delaying the “dropping of the slips”—the point, usually about age four, when boys began to wear pants—and, second, by causing him to be, in the words of Mary Holliday, “somewhat self-conscious” and “withdrawn.” This would help to explain the child’s distance from his father and a perception of Doc as a “mama’s boy.”42 Unfortunately, the weight of evidence does not provide any real support for the claim.

  John Henry was baptized on March 21, 1852, at the Griffin Presbyterian Church.43 By then, Spalding County had been created, and Henry Holliday had become the first clerk of the superior court.44 As he prepared to take office in December 1851, a state convention convened at Milledgeville to consider Georgia’s course in light of the Compromise of 1850. On December 10, the attendees agreed to abide by the compromise but warned against further encroachments against slavery.45 The following year saw the compromise jeopardized, and although Franklin Pierce was elected president supporting it, the Free-Soil Party and the controversy surrounding Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best-selling Uncle Tom’s Cabin guaranteed that the issue had not been resolved. Men clung to the hope that it could be amicably settled but feared it would not be. And in it all, Southern solidarity was growing with a widespread perception that the South’s way of life was under siege.

  As the linchpin of Southern society, slavery involved much more than morality or even economics. In the South—indeed, in the country at large—the issue was not so much the effect of slavery on blacks but its effect on whites.46 What was at stake was the very balance of white society, the shattering of all the social conundrums of Southern life, and the anticipated reordering of the Southern way of life from top to bottom along the lines of the hated Yankee model. If Southerners rationalized the evils of slavery, they did so by making the contest one of honor, principle, and will. To the forefront rushed all the personal pride, individualism, and community solidarity that transcended class and welded together a fervent belief that the coming conflict was above all self-defense.47

  Henry’s stance on the issues can only be assumed based on his rising position in the community. Though he was not a planter, he did own slaves, and the perceived threat to Southern institutions jeopardized his upward mobility. Moreover, he shared popular views about Southern rights and Yankee meddling. Ever the individualist anxious to improve his lot and that of his family, Henry doubtless measured his future in terms of Southern unity. There was honor at stake, a way of life, and the images of Henry that have passed down the corridors of family remembrance are reminiscent of a contemporary portrait of the Mississippian Sargent Prentiss:

  Instant in resentment, and bitter in his animosities, yet magnanimous to forgive when reparation had been made…[t]here was no littleness about him. Even toward an avowed enemy he was open and manly, and bore himself with a sort of antique courtesy and knightly hostility, in which self-respect mingled with respect for his foe, except when contempt was mixed with hatred, and then no words can convey any sense of the intensity of his scorn.48

  The future that Henry sought for himself and his family was linked to the social order that had spawned him. Honor was separate neither from responsibility nor from safety for family and society. And the very solidarity of viewpoint that he shared with his neighbors and kinsmen gave to him and to them a sense of confidence and power, so that there was no loss of optimism about the future, only a fierce, resolute determination to ensure that it would not be disrupted. So then, Henry set his eyes on the tasks at hand, the practical matters of business and family, and he was unwilling to sacrifice the present with fears about the future.

  Alice Jane’s mother died on January 26, 1853, beginning an eventful year that would involve other changes.49 In October 1853, Henry sold his house on Tinsley Street and bought a new home and land northwest of Griffin near the railroad tracks.50 Little John Henry was not yet two years old when Francisco, his name anglicized to Francisco E’Dalgo, moved out to start his own family. He married Martha Freeman in Butts County on June 12, 1854, and settled down there.51 And even though Henry and Alice Jane had no more children after the birth of John Henry, the house was soon full again. On November 9, 1856, William Land McKey, Alice Jane’s father, also died, and Henry became the guardian of his wife’s minor siblings, Thomas Sylvester, Melissa Ella, Eunice Helena, and Margaret Ann, as well as guardian of their inheritance and his wife’s.52

  Tom McKey, who was fourteen when his father died, became the older “brother” whom John Henry idolized as he grew. John Henry had already dropped the slips before Tom moved in. He turned six with “bleeding Kansas” in the news. For him, though, the education of a gentleman had begun already, both in the manners of the wellborn taught by his mother and in the stern demands of Southern manhood imposed by his father. Southern boys of all classes were given a surprising amount of freedom as children so as not to limit their aggressiveness or to feminize them with a strict discipline that would break their spirits.53

  At an early age they learned independence, took to the fields and woods, and began their tutelage in hunting, the handling of firearms, and horseback riding. They were also taught deference to their elders and learned the “Sir” and “Ma’am” required of them in speaking to adults whether highborn or low. Courtesy, spirit, and firmness were all part of the curriculum of individualism that Southern sons learned, but care was taken not to undermine their self-confidence or pride.

  So John Henry grew. Nurtured by his extended family, he learned a way not so different from the aristocratic ideal that his mother wanted to teach him. “The result,” as Cash wrote of Southerners in general, “was a kindly courtesy, a level-eyed pr
ide, an easy quietness, a barely perceptible flourish of bearing, which for all its obvious angularity and fundamental plainness, was one of the finest things the Old South produced.”54 From his father came a sense of personal honor and discipline; from his mother came a proper sense of manners and the principles of faith. Cousins, uncles, aunts, and neighbors filled out the life of a child growing.

  In 1857, John Henry’s uncle, Robert Kennedy Holliday, moved to Jonesboro with his family so that most of the Hollidays and McKeys were now within the triangle of Griffin, Fayetteville, and Jonesboro, close enough for support and frequent visits. Robert’s wife, Mary Anne Fitzgerald, was a devout Roman Catholic. His daughters, Martha Anne (called “Mattie” by the family), Lucy Rebecca, Mary Theresa, and Roberta Rosalie, added yet another dimension to John Henry’s experience. Mary Anne Holliday’s uncle, Philip Fitzgerald, and his wife, Eleanor, were also part of the family circle.55 Then in 1859 Henry agreed to assume the guardianship of a young orphan named Elisha Prichard, who moved in with the family.56

  The family prospered. Land holdings mounted. Martha Holliday, the sister of Henry and John Stiles, married James Franklin Johnson, a planter, lawyer, and state senator, which extended the family’s influence.57 Close at hand, the future looked bright. Not even the Panic of 1857 dampened optimism. Indeed, Southerners saw its mild impact on them as evidence of the superiority of their system.58 Griffin grew—its population approaching three thousand by the end of the decade, making it the largest city between Atlanta and Macon—and offered amenities and opportunities found in few Georgia towns, including three colleges and a public library.59 Despite growth and prosperity for Griffin, however, the boiling clouds and rolling thunder of politics were increasingly difficult to ignore.