27 June 2022 copyright Hershel
Parker
Cousin Fletcher Hill--Teacher, Soldier,
Escape Hero, Promoter of Veterans, and Writer
John Fletcher Hill (1833-1903), a
Hill-Truman cousin of mine, was a schoolteacher in Ohio before he enlisted in
the Union army in August 1862. By then Fletcher
(as the family called him) had four sons already, born between 1856 and 1859 (all
of whom acquired more formal education than he had received). Captured with his
regiment in September 1863 at Chickamauga (on the border between Georgia and
Tennessee), he was shipped to Libby Prison in Richmond (a place of starvation
and disease). He wrote in 1865 for the Scioto Gazette this grim account: “At first, our daily allowance was one
half pound of bread per day, and two ounces of tainted beef, and that without
salt. . . . It generally was so bad that we could smell it as soon as it was
brought into the room. At times we had some bacon issued to us, and it was
strong, old, and maggot-eaten, looking like a honey-comb, it having been saved
and cured with ashes and saltpetre, and the meat then had a slimy look, like
soft soap. At last we got some kind of meat we could not fairly account for. It
was neither beef, pork, mutton, veal, nor venison. It was a tough, lean,
black-looking kind of flesh; and it was the decided opinion of all that it was
mule meat.” Then Hill was shipped off as overflow to the repurposed tobacco
warehouses of Danville, Virginia, just north of the North Carolina border.
Quickly Hill realized that to keep from
starving or dying of disease he had to escape, and did so, in an outbreak of 70
or so on 14 November 1863, a mass escape. Almost all these men were killed or
re-captured. Very few made it to Union lines. On 29 December 1863 the
Philadelphia Inquirer announced the
“Arrival of an Escaped Prisoner from Danville, Va”--a drummer boy. Inexact on
details (Danville was “a small village about thirty miles from Richmond”), the
article was convincing on the lice and vermin at Libby and on the escape from
Danville. Hill made it sooner to Union lines than the drummer boy, and after a
longer leave rejoined Union troops under Sherman. Besides Hill, neither the drummer
boy nor any other successful escapee from 14 November wrote any known public
comments on the escape and journey north.
At Jonesboro, Georgia, later in 1864,
Hill was wounded in the left leg so severely that he was crippled all the rest
of his life. In 1865, having regained some mobility, he wrote the articles for
the local Gazette. Frank Moore had
the articles in hand by the end of 1865 for his mammoth 1866 collection Anecdotes, Poetry, and Incidents.
Thereafter Hill supplemented his pension for invalidism by teaching--a long
time in Kansas, finally in Arizona. He worked on school boards in both states,
for instance as clerk and also to the committee on buildings in Kansas (according
to the Parsons Palladium, 14 May
1884). He taught, lost his first wife to death, married again, had a daughter, and
divorced, married yet again.
His private life is almost unknown, but
he was an activist, often hobbling to meetings away from the house. He volunteered for public service and earned respect
from the locals. For years he shrewdly
and persistently helped citizens overcome bureaucratic incompetence and
irresponsibility that kept pensions from being granted to qualified soldiers
and their widows. I know from the Revolutionary pension applications just how
often bureaucrats took pleasure in delaying or denying legitimate claims: Hill
was a one-man defence squad. Otherwise, he was a selective joiner during the
heyday of male fraternal organizations (some of which in the South look very
like lingering KKK groups). He was an organizer. On 23 March 1899 the Arizona Republican quoted his idea that
a Phoenix association of Ohio veterans be formed: “Is it not a fact that within
the last thirty years or more, all that great men--statesmen and warriors--and
pretty women, hail from the Buckeye state? In looking around I find many of
them have found happy homes in the broad and fertile valley of the Salt river.”
His eye was on local issues but also on
national issues involving veterans, as spotlighted in the Washington D. C. National Tribune, the paper devoted to
Union veterans (from 1877 to 1896 under its first ownership). On 17 June 1882
the National Tribune published a long
letter from “John F. Hill, Co. K, 89th Ohio Vols.” in Oswego,
Kansas, on “Escaped Union Prisoners.” Underlying the letter was Hill’s
resentment that the North had stopped exchanging Confederate prisoners for men
like himself. (For this General Grant was often blamed: many thought he wanted
Confederate soldiers out of action more than he wanted Union soldiers back in
service.) As prisoners, soldiers cost the government because their pay was held
for them, assuming they could live to collect it. When a soldier managed to escape
and was able to rejoin the troops, he was paid no more than if he had remained
in prison. Hill heightened his rhetoric: “Now I think that those soldiers who
either scaled or tunneled the walls of confederate prisons, risked their lives
in crossing ‘dead lines,’ making miraculous escapes, and then after days and
nights of hazards, hunted with bloodhounds, they finally made our Union lines
in safety and rejoined the army again, and did good service till the close of
the war, are deserving of something more than the small monthly pay their
received.” As an escapee he thought enterprise should be rewarded: “Justice
demands that some recognition should be shown those who dared to do what others
would not undertake, though having the same opportunities.” Greater pensions
would not be a burden on the government since there were so few surviving escapees
who then rejoined the army. In the nearly two decades that had passed, the
results from their prison sufferings and the hardships endured in their escape had
made themselves more manifest than ever, in daily pain. He summed up the status
of him and his companions: “one of the four has got his final discharge, and
answers no more the roll-calls of earth. The other three of us are still
hanging tenaciously to life, with broken-down constitutions, waiting patiently
for one of two things--an acknowledgment and compensation for our services as
our circumstances demand, or for that old muster-out officer whose discharges
are never revoked.” Hill was in daily, even hourly pain which was increasing, not
lessening, with age.
For all we know Hill’s strongest emotional life may have been
to his wives, sons, and daughter. There survives a remarkable letter to his
brother after his rejoining the Union army in 1864. His family loved him. In
late October 1900 two sons took a train from Kansas to Phoenix on news of his
serious illness. Yet he was more a public man than a family man. The sparse existing
record shows that he was devoted to veterans like himself, especially veterans who had been wounded in the war or
suffered in Southern prisons. He was
respected: the Oswego, Kansas Republican
on 11 January 1883 reported on a “meeting of old Soldiers to organize a Grand
Army of the Republic Post” at which Hill was elected as Commander.
Hill’s eye was on local issues but also
on national issues involving veterans, as spotlighted in the Washington D. C. National Tribune. Even after he had
published his story in a dozen issues of the National Tribune in 1883, his anger festered. In his second installation
address on 5 January 1884, after being re-elected Commander of the Oswego Post,
he first stressed the value of bringing all veterans into their fellowship,
“Fraternity” being what had kept them together when the Union was
threatened. Then he deplored the loss of
prestige they had all suffered in the last decades from “envious and jealous
enemies,” vindictive politicians and an unscrupulous press: “This class is
attempting to hold our old heroes up to the scorn, sneers and contempt of the
begrudging and unthankful of the nation--the nation they gave their prime of
manhood to save. From them we receive daily dished up, the unpleasant epithets
of beggars, paupers, frauds and thieves.” They have been betrayed, early mocked
as “Lincoln’s hirelings,” now if hobbling mocked as “old ‘pegleg,’” if
one-eyed, mocked as “‘old-squinty’” and the like. Their duty now was to
remember the dead--and seek justice for the survivors. The editors of the National Tribune felt the same sense of
betrayal.
On 29 March 1883 in introducing Hill’s
narrative the National Tribune cast
the North as “God’s country” toward which every prisoner of the Confederates
“set his face.” Think, the editor said, “of a sick and starving man, tracked by
bloodhounds, and pursued by devils, pushing his way three hundred miles through
an enemy’s country, with no other guide save the North star, and no other beacon
save the friendly moon, hiding by day in the thickest of the forest, at night
fording rivers and scaling mountains now begging a morsel of food from some
sympathizing contraband, now forced to subsist like a beast on wild roots and
berries, haunted always with the fear of being surprised by enemies or betrayed
by strangers, but still plodding on with feet shoeless and bleeding and
clothing rent and rain-beaten, and at last staggering into the Union lines,
like one risen from the dead!” But in the 1880s the North was “God’s country”
no longer. The prisoners of war “are to-day forgotten.” Now Congress “votes
millions for the improvement of the Mississippi River” while leaving the
veterans “to battle single handed still with poverty and disease.” No wonder
they welcomed Hill’s narrative.
What Hill gave them was a thrilling
narrative of dangers and sufferings through a country he was not familiar with,
enlarged from the Scioto articles (now known only in the Frank Moore
collection). His escape route was not easy for him to formulate and not easy
for us to trace. In the first episode (29 March 1883) he describes what the
plotters planned to do once outside the prison. One of the soldiers had an old
map of the United States which they consulted as to the basic direction they
should take: “Our present whereabouts--Danville--we found was on the south side
of Dan River, one of the tributaries of the Roanoke River, and nearly on the
line of Virginia and North Carolina. The best route--the one along which there
would be the least danger of coming in contact with rebel troops--would take us
in a northwest direction, across the mountains of both Old and West Virginia,
and bring us to the Union lines somewhere on the Kanawha or Ohio River. Hill
did not carry even a rudimentary copy of the national map a soldier had
produced, and they were lucky enough that it showed Danville. On the route Hill
made some notes with an inch of a pencil, preserving them despite being
drenched at times, but he destroyed those notes in fear of capture. Later, in the 10 May installment, his section
on Craig Valley Unionists, he says he “recruited” his writing material:
“Heretofore I had been trying to keep some notes of our travel, with roads,
towns, names and distances; and had been using a small pencil about an inch
long, keeping my memoranda on anything I could get hold of--brown paper
generally.” Here a man gave him a pencil and another “three sheets of old-style
letter paper.” Once he was behind Union lines
General Scammon asked him to “reduce to writing all that we knew about
the people and country from Salem all the way to Fayetteville”--the later part
of the trip. His description was acted upon, to the devastation of Salem. And
he gained some practice in putting down his narrative.
The “Mountain Ranger,” a member of a
different escape party led by W H. Newlin, confirmed that like Hill they had
not been able to cross the Dan River at the Seven-mile Ferry. Hill, he said,
went north through Rocky Mount, Franklin County. Hill, he says, “must have
crossed the Blue Ridge at nearly the same point where we subsequently crossed
it,” since their groups “were at or near the same points on either side of the
mountain.” He went on: “At Big Lick Station Hill’s party slipped around, while
we passed directly through the place.” From then on, Hill went west or
southwest of Newlin’s route. Hill’s route took him, “as ours did, from Roanoke
into Craig county. From Craig county Hill passed through Monroe and Summer and
Raleigh counties to Fayette county, reaching the Union pickets at Fayetteville.”
Newlin took another route, but both groups encountered the Fifth Virginia
infantry at “Falls of the Kanawha.” A soldier though a fugitive, in late 1863
Hill described the fortifications of Salem in a way that allowed Union forces
to devastate it. Two decades later, Hill published names of Union sympathizers
in Virginia and West Virginia who had fed and clothed him, not using false
names so as to protect any benefactor from delayed retaliation. Reconstruction
was over and white Southern men had regained all their lost power, but as far
as we know there was no such retaliation by readers of the National Tribune.
Hill identified real people so often
that I assume he was doing so throughout,
to the best of his memory. There was a real Susan Corbin (Corban, the Scioto Gazette said) and an old man named Yates
in Pittsylvania county, north of the Dan. Others from these early days were
named in the Scioto Gazette but not
all in the 1883 version. Presumably there was Smith, a veteran of the War of
1812, and an Aunt Reynolds. The “partial destruction” of Salem the next year by
“General Kelley” was real, so was the “Quaker lady” who told him about “several
fine flouring mills, a large supply of commissary stores for the rebel army,
besides wagons, mules, munitions of war, &c., under the guard of but a
small detachment of rebel troops.” The Brillharts, the Surface brothers,
“Colonel” John E. Trout--all real, most likely, as was Smith near Greenbriar
County, and Layton Guinn. Jacob Grimmett (1805-1896) and Joseph Grimmett
(1808-1896) were real, however their name was spelled; Joseph made his will so
far in advance he had to multiply his codicils as the years passed! Thomas
Richmond and his wife were real, tragic figures (although Hill mixed two
brothers), and presumably the more elusive Israel Givens. The Thurman brothers,
William and Thurman, thieves and murderers, were real: the Point Pleasant WVA Register (7 July 1864) noted the capture
of “Bill” on Sewall Mountain by two soldiers of the 23d Ohio Regiment. In the
Scioto Gazette, Hill had quoted
Thomas Richmond: “there would be a great many old grudges to settle after this
war was over, between them and the treacherous and murderous rebel bushwhackers
of the country.” I could not find any repercussions from Hill’s naming of
names.
The people Hill and his companions
encountered were more often whites than blacks, although they were sometimes
surprised that a cabin so ill-built and ill-maintained was lived in by whites,
who were poor too. As a Union soldier fighting secessionists, Hill might have
had complex attitudes toward blacks, from glorying in freeing them, as an
abolitionist might do, to resenting them for causing all his sufferings in battle,
in prisons, and on the run. His attitude, in fact, seems not complicated. There’s
a comment he wrote in 1865 about the bread they lived on in Libby Prison: “a
small corn ‘dodger,’ about the size of a saucer, and hard enough to knock a
negro down, and so strong with alum--instead of salt--as to fairly burn our
throats.” There is no such demeaning comment in
the National Tribune series. There Hill
wrote, on the third day, a Sunday, he and his friends heard someone coming
toward them at night “and singing as gay as a lark.” “Who be dar?” the man yells,
the dialect enough for them to decide he was a negro. They had to threaten him
to stop him from running. He told them they were “about twenty miles from
Danville, and in Spottsylvania county, Virginia.” He did not believe they were
Union soldiers: “You no Massa Lincum soldiers. Dey all ware better close dan
you’ve got on.” They decided he was “so ignorant” that they could have
confidence in anything he said.” This particular
negro was ignorant, not aware of local events, even. The episode depicts him as
bumpkin negro but primarily as bumpkin from isolation, not from race. However,
this negro was not so stupid as the text of the National Tribune makes him. He would not have said “Spotsylvania” (usually
spelled with one t), no matter how ignorant. He would have said “Pittsylvania,”
the other county being far to the north, nowhere near Danville. This first bit
of specific information about their location may just be a mistake Hill made in
writing the section.
In the 5 April instalment Hill meets
Sarah Corbin. In the 19 April episode they are rushing to the northeast when
they panic at the sound of a horse’s hooves. The others get away faster than
Hill. By the light of the moon Hill sees that the horseman is a negro: “As he
passed me he raised his cap and said, ‘Howdy do, massa.’ Of course, I felt very
much relieved, and flattered myself that I was not such a fool as my two
companions, to run away from a genteel and polite African!” In the 3 May
instalment while they are trying to cross the Roanoke River Hill knocks at the
door of a “comfortable little hut” whose inhabitants are singing: “There was a
whole house full of colored people, who had convened for some kind of religious
services. Their voices were raised to a high pitch, and they wre in the middle
of a stanza, but as soon as I entered the door the song stopped instantly, and
dead silence prevailed.” Hill persuades two or three men to step outside with
him rather than involving all the others. The upshot is that the negroes decide
that “Brudder ‘Somebody’” has “an old ‘hoss’” that might take them across. The
river was not deep but “very swift,” so the negro and horse had much to do to
get them across. Hill does not praise the negro rider, but he declares of the
animal that “he was a noble old horse--God bless him!”
The negro they had recruited from the
singing service guides them past Big Lick Station (named for the valuable salt
licks) to the “negro cabin” of “Uncle ‘Somebody’”: “As we crossed the old man’s
threshold we received an introduction to the blackest negro we ever saw. The
old African patriarch turned up his nearly sightless eyes and exclaimed: ‘God
bless you, Massa Lincum’s brave, brave boys! Take a seat.’ This we did
cheerfully, seating ourselves on one of uncle’s best six feet benches. As we
sat there, we ate one of the best meals, although of the roughest nature, that
we had ever had; it was kindly tendered by one of nature’s simple children." Then, presumably by the old man, they were
told how to do twelve miles, cross a valley in a diagonal line, “and strike the
Alleghany Mountains near the main road crossing the same.” The man who welcomed
them as Lincoln’s brave boys, fed them plenty of simple food, and gave them
precise directions to continue their way to the Union lines, was nevertheless
one of “nature’s simple children.” If the patriarch had been white, a fervent
Unionist who fed and directed them wisely, would he have been described
differently?
In the 10 May episode in Craig County
Hill is welcomed by the Unionist “Colonel” John E. Trout who tends to his feet
(“sockless, bleeding, and tied up in rags”) but cannot furnish him with big
enough footwear until they think of getting stocking and shoes (size 11)
belonging to Uncle Josh, “one of the colonel’s colored men.” So much for
Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, then almost a year old. At a celebration
of Unionists in Craig County they meet a patriotic old white woman “whose last
son had been kidnapped, like a negro from Africa, and forced into the rebel
ranks.” They stay at the “temporary home” of the white family of Thomas
Richmond, a leading Unionist, where he and his wife “had a couple of negroes,
who had formerly been their slaves, and still lived with them.” Both negroes said
they would be happy to pilot the escapees at night to New River, where the
ferry was still called “Richmond’s Ferry.” One young Richmond son had been
seized and taken away then decapitated, his head thrown before the house.
Thomas Richmond was sleeping wild, sometimes in a cave, but he arrived to greet
the visitors. “During the entire evening a sentinel stood guard a short
distance from the house--two negroes relieving themselves at interval--while
one of the young ladies kept an independent watch in the yard. The sentinel was
to give a peculiar whistle which would be repeated by the young lady, so the
inmates of the house could fly, hide, or prepare to fight. As it turned out
Thomas Richmond himself piloted them to New River, well on their way to
freedom.
That was the version in the National Tribune. There is an oddly
variant version in the 1865 or early 1866 version in the Scioto Gazette: “By the middle of the afternoon
we had reached the residence of Mr. Thomas Richmond, one of the best Union men
in the country, and a man of wealth. He advised us to go no farther in
daylight, but told us to stay with him until midnight, when he would go with us
as far as New River; then he thought we should be safe. We passed our time very
much at home at Mr. Richmond’s, who was a whole-souled gentleman. He interested
us by giving an account of his family and connections, which were very
numerous, and good Union. But they had suffered severely from the hands of the
bushwhackers. His brother, who owned a ferry on New River, had been shot dead
in his own yard, and his two sons taken thirty miles off and shot. He also had
one brother who had been in Castle Thunder for over two years, and he did not
know whether he was alive or not. Besides, a great many of the family had to
flee to the North, leaving all their possessions behind. (Hill explains Castle
Thunder in the Scioto Gazette: “There they put their own
deserters and criminals, and also our own incorrigible “Yankees” that they
cannot so easily manage in the Libby prisons. The treatment and fare in Castle
Thunder are said to be worse than were ever known in any half-civilized nation
on the globe. There are said to be men within that prison who have not a
particle of clothing, and have for their beds piles of saw-dust, in which they
nestle down together like hogs. They are there denied all privileges of
comfort–no lights, or water to wash with, just only a little food, barely to
sustain nature.” In a former tobacco warehouse like the Danville prison, Castle
Thunder, Hill well knew, was even worse than the nearby Richmond prison, the
notorious Libby Prison.
In the 1880s narrative Hill shows that he has always lived in a
white world. He probably was never again near as many negroes as he was during
his escape. A strong comment on slavery comes from the Quaker woman, against
all war but believing that this war would be the salvation of the nation: “It
would wipe out the curse of slavery and build up a country where every man
would enjoy civil liberty and possess equal rights, without respect to color,
rank or race.” Nothing like that comes in his own voice, whatever he felt. In
the two decades after his escape he brooded about the mistreatment of injured
veterans, particularly those who had been imprisoned, and worked to encourage the
fellowship of other veterans. Reconstruction in 1866 and 1867 may not have
caught his attention: he was in physical pain. There is no evidence that he ever
became greatly concerned with raising the position of freedmen and women. Nor
is there any indication that he paid much attention to the violent rise of the
KKK. Yet he fervently rejoiced at encountering white Southerners who were loyal
to the Union. In Virginia and West Virginia he was buoyed by the patriotism
expressed by the Union sympathizers he met. He has Sarah Corbin declare that
her husband had been compelled to go into the rebel army “though like herself,
he was as loyal to the Union as any man who ever swore by the stars and
stripes.” They are welcomed by an old man who “danced for joy”: “His name was
Smith, and he had been a soldier in the war of 1812, and we found that there
was still burning in his bosom the fire of devotion to his flag and his
country. He would have worshiped us if we had had wings like the angels.”
Having escaped the bloodhounds (he thinks they were trained to hunt only
blacks) they come to the cabin where they heard a woman, Mrs. Brillhart: “she
prayed that God would open the eyes of the blind and deluded people of the
South and bring back the prodigals to the Union. She prayed, too, for the
President of the United States, and asked that victory might be granted to the
Stripes and Stars.” The “noted” Unionist John E. Trout at first seems “to be
less enthusiastic and zealous than our old friend Yates,” who had “whispered”
to them that “his sentiments were Union,” but they decided that Trout’s
“patriotism was as deep as the river and as loft as the mountains that
surrounded his native homestead.” Unionists arrive at Trout’s, bringing food:
“Fifty souls or more sat around that jovial board that day, among them “the
aged patriot, whose hairs were frosted with the snows of many winters, but
within whose heart a patriotism burned that time could not cool.” They meet another Mr. Smith, “an active member of the
Order of the ‘White, Red and Blue String” whose house (in the 1850s?)
had been “a station on the main line of the underground railroad, and was
frequented by those who were fleeing from slavery, bigotry, treachery and
treason, to freedom, enlightenment and loyalty.” When Joseph Grimmeth learned
they were Union soldiers who had escaped from Danville, he “fairly danced with
joy.” Then they meet the family of “one of the leading Unionists of the
county,” Thomas Richmond.
As Hill got nearer and nearer to Union
lines he met more people who belonged to the secret Union League who recognized
each other passwords and by fingers held in certain ways in handshakes. Himself an initiate, Hill thinks it will
be no harm “at this late day in stating that one of their signs of recognition
was a string, composed of three threads--one white, one blue and one
red--twisted and tied, about three inches long, in the button-hole of any
garment on the left breast.” The second Mr. Smith they meet is “an active
member of the Order of the ‘White, Red and Blue String.” When he gives the
password Mrs. Talbot “at once reached across the table, took my hand, gave me
the grip, and then laughingly said that the women had as much at stake as they
men, and that they could be depended upon to do their share.” Her words he knew
were true from his experience.
During the war Union sympathizers in
the South denied the existence of the “Red String Party,” as William Holden did
in his Raleigh Standard (6 July 1864):
“We know nothing about this red string party, or any other secret political
party. If such a party exists, we do not know it. That is it to us if [it] does
exist? ‘What is Hecuba to us or we to Hecuba.’” (Hamlet, of course.) Fervent Confederate newspapers saw in the red
string party “‘gorgons, hydras, and chimeras dire,’” a phrase instantly
recognizable then as from the passage on irresolute devils in Paradise Lost, Book 2. After the war Holden could be open: “The ‘Red Strings,
as they are called, are simply the heroes of America. . . . There are,
probably, ten thousand heroes of America in this State. They have their signs,
grips, and passwords, like the Know-Nothings, to which the editors of the
sentinel used to belong. They are unconditional Union men and patriots.” Now,
in 1866, the Democratic governor of North Carolina Worth, through agitation of
the Raleigh Sentinel, wants them
indicted as “treasonable to the Constitution and prejudicial to the quiet and
peace of the State.” (The Philadelphia Evening
Telegraph, 27 October 1866, quoting both Sentinel and Standard.)
It took a few years, but the Democrats gained control again, ending
Reconstruction.
Hill seems not to have been aware of this ugly aftermath to
the Red String party in parts of the South. He must have known of other
fraternities with secret handshakes that flourished before and after the war,
from the Masons
to the anti-abolition Know-Nothings to his own fraternal group, the Grand Army
of the Republic. For him, later in life, the Odd Fellows fraternity was, as it
proclaimed, a protector of the poor and sick, ready to bury the impoverished
dead and educate orphans. It had its grips and passwords, all benign, a manner
of earning intimacy with other men who shared your beliefs. His day by day,
year by year, focus was on improving the condition of Union veterans,
particularly the ones who had suffered imprisonment war wounds and lived in
physical pain for the rest of their lives. Heroic for escaping and heroic for
returning to fight, Hill was even more heroic for persisting decade after
decade in his fight for fairer treatment of his fellow veterans, especially
those wounded in the war.
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