« Back to Histories

---

George Washington Hollabaugh I: A Soldier's Promise

The Bounty

"A man is bound by his word." —Confucius

In the autumn of 1861, Colonel Americus V. Rice rode through Putnam County, Ohio, signing up men for the Union cause. He was persuasive, well-connected, and carrying a promise: three years of service, a soldier's wage, and a bounty of three hundred dollars — a sum that could buy seed, shoes for children, and perhaps a measure of peace of mind for a farmer's wife facing a long Ohio winter alone. George Washington Hollabaugh, husband of Charlotte, father of children who were going barefoot into the cold, signed his name. He mustered in with Company A, 57th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, and whatever else history would make of him, he was a man who kept his promises.

The three hundred dollar bounty, it turned out, was the first in a series of promises the United States government would fail to keep.

The Smell of War

"War is the science of destruction." —Napoleon Bonaparte

By February 24, 1862, George was writing home from Paducah, Kentucky, a man still marveling at the width of the Ohio River — more than two miles, he reported with the wonder of a landlocked farmer — and at the sheer improbable spectacle of twenty-five thousand soldiers filing past his camp in a single day. He had arrived to find a town half-emptied, its secessionists fled, a great steam mill burned to ash. His regiment was camped on the ruin of it. "This place looks desolate," he observed with the quiet understatement of a man who had seen enough to understand that war was less about glory than about wreckage.

George was not without humor. He wanted Charlotte to learn a song so she could sing it to him when he came home. He noted that a fellow soldier had drowned on a Sunday, that fifty others had the measles, and that he did not yet know when they would be paid — but he was fairly optimistic about March 15th. March 15th came and went without particular financial drama, as did April, May, and June, the last month for which the army's records show he ever drew wages.

Shiloh: 450 Men and a Church on a Hill

"The Civil War was the first modern war." —Shelby Foote

The 57th Ohio did not arrive at Shiloh in fighting trim. Disease had been doing the Confederate army's work for months. Of the nearly one thousand men who had mustered into the regiment at Camp Dennison, fewer than half were fit to carry a rifle by the time the battle opened on April 6, 1862. The rest lay in tents and makeshift sick wards, hollowed out by dysentery, measles, and the relentless fevers that moved through a camp the way rumor moves through a courthouse — silently, then all at once.

George Washington Hollabaugh was among the 450 who could still stand.

What those men found when they reached Shiloh was chaos dressed up as a battle. General Grant's army had been caught badly off-guard on the morning of the sixth, the Confederates hitting the Federal camps before breakfast was off the fire. The ground around Shiloh Church — a modest log meetinghouse in a Tennessee clearing that had never asked to be famous — became the hinge upon which the first day's fighting turned. The 57th formed up and advanced across that broken, wooded ground, past men who were falling back and officers who were shouting contradictory orders, until they reached the little eminence where the church stood.

Then they stopped. And they held.

For four hours, three Confederate regiments came at them. For four hours, the men of the 57th — half of whom had watched their comrades die of fever rather than gunfire in the weeks before — refused to give the ground. When the shooting finally slackened, 78 Confederate dead lay in the field in front of the regiment's position. In three days of fighting the 57th lost 27 killed, 150 wounded, and 10 captured.

George survived it. He lost clothing in the battle, $17.24 worth by the army's careful accounting, because the army would tally a dead man's debts with admirable precision while losing track of what it owed him. He does not appear to have written home about Shiloh. Perhaps there were no words that fit in an envelope.

Charlotte Holds the Farm

"Behind every great man stands a woman." —Unknown (popularized in the 19th century)

Charlotte Hollabaugh was not writing about the weather. When she told George in February 1862 that she had "a bad cold ever since you was at home" and didn't suppose she would get over it very soon, she was delivering news in the only language a respectable Ohio farm wife could use in a letter that might pass through any number of hands before reaching her husband. George understood perfectly. By July, writing back from Memphis, he feigned elaborate theatrical astonishment — "I was very much surprised to hear of Such Seed growing the place as I did not know of any Such being Sown" — which is the kind of joke only a man who had known the news for five months and sat on it through Shiloh could properly deliver. He compared himself to a farmer who lets his land to rent and cannot predict what the new tenants might plant. He hoped the crop would make a good soldier. He told Charlotte not to mind his jokes. George would never know his namesake, George Washington Hollabaugh II.

Back in Ohio, between nursing Sarah Emily through ten days of dysentery, managing horses that had no work to do, and eating corn bread because the money came "very slow," Charlotte found time to negotiate horse sales with Jacob Blosser (who thought thirty dollars was too much for a gray mare), organize the hay hauling with brother Dan and young Mike Bright at twenty-five cents a day, and write letters that were, in their own way, small acts of heroism.

"I cant help but looking down the road to see or hear you come," she wrote. The neighbors were out sleigh-riding in their furs. Charlotte had none. Brother Dan had built a sleigh, and she put it away for next winter, "providing the war is over and hope it will."

It is the hope that catches the throat.

She asked George not to spend money on things he didn't need. She already knew, with the practical wisdom of a farm wife, that the army's promises moved through the mail slower than weather.

Downriver — Memphis

"Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul." —Emily Dickinson

By July 1862 the 57th was encamped north of Memphis near Wolf Creek bridge. George was still alive, still writing, still trying to arrange a furlough. His letter of July 27th is a remarkable document — part tender reassurance, part careful strategy. He told Charlotte she should write directly to Colonel Rice explaining that she needed her husband home. George believed Rice would help. He would come home for sixty days if he could manage it. He would travel on credit — "go on tick" — if he had no money, which he likely did not, since the regiment had not yet drawn pay. He wanted her to take care of whatever money he sent, because she was, he wrote with plain and unadorned feeling, "the only friend I have."

He added, with the solicitude of a man who knew more about her condition than he let on: she must not overdo herself at work. If anything laborious needed doing, she should get somebody else to do it.

The furlough never came. What came instead was typhoid.

The Arithmetic of a Soldier's Death

"The soldier above all others prays for peace." —Douglas MacArthur

The encampment near Memphis sat downriver from the horses and livestock, which is to say it sat in the path of everything those animals produced and everything the river carried past them in the August heat. Typhoid fever moved through Civil War encampments with a patience and efficiency that Confederate cavalry rarely matched. It required no courage, no flanking maneuver, no artillery. It needed only bad water, summer heat, and men weakened by months of hard service. The 57th's own history tells the story in cold arithmetic: of the diseases and accidents that killed men in the regiment, 234 enlisted men died that way — three times the number killed in battle. A man who had stood his ground at Shiloh Church against three Confederate regiments had no particular defense against what was flowing downstream.

George died in the field hospital in Memphis on November 8, 1862. Records say he died with no personal effects. His clothing account showed $55.24 issued, offset by $17.24 lost at Shiloh. The three hundred dollar bounty Colonel Rice had promised him in Putnam County sat uncollected. His last recorded pay was in June.

The government's final accounting of George Washington Hollabaugh was, in essence, a balance sheet with nothing on the credit side.

What Charlotte Received

"There is a love of country which is ennobling." —Harriet Beecher Stowe

Colonel Americus V. Rice, who would be severely wounded the following year at Vicksburg, took the time — between his own wounds and the regiment's grinding march through Chickasaw Bayou, Arkansas Post, Vicksburg, Missionary Ridge, Atlanta, and the sea — to file an affidavit on Charlotte's behalf. It is there in her widow's pension file, the colonel's sworn statement that yes, George Hollabaugh had served, had died in service, had left a wife and children in Ohio.

Charlotte received a pension. It was the only compensation the government ever paid toward the debt it owed to George Washington Hollabaugh.

The sleigh brother Dan built sat in the dry that winter, and the next, and the next after that. Charlotte had been right about one thing: the war did end. She had been wrong, as so many were, about the part that mattered most — that the man who left to fight it would come home to go sleigh-riding with her, "as the rest of the neighbors," furs and all, down the long road she kept watching from the door.

---

George Washington Hollabaugh served in Company A, 57th Ohio Volunteer Infantry. He died November 8, 1862, Memphis, Tennessee. He was the great-great maternal grandfather of William F. Stratton, who transcribed from the original letters behind this story in January 2004.