ON A SUMMER MORNING IN 2007, A DIESEL TOWBOAT churned the placid Ohio River as the day’s first tourists strolled the waterfront promenade of Madison, Indiana, squinting at their guidebooks, alert to any meticulously restored cottage or mercantile-store-turned-candle-shop. Madison is an old port town that looks as if it sprang full-blown from the collective mind of a well-heeled preservationist society, which is what most tourists come to see.
A few blocks up the hill from the river, a beer truck discharged kegs at the historic Broadway Tavern and Inn, where the night before a crew from the Discovery Channel had filmed a TV segment on ghosts. The Broadway has been in continuous operation since 1834 and has never been remodeled, aside from the addition of electric heat and in-room baths, and its atmosphere of studied inertia is said to provide an attractive venue for ghosts. The steep stairs creak creepily underfoot, and the décor, despite an overlay of careworn 1980s upholstery, is appropriately antiquated. The downstairs tavern, with its massive oak bar and nicotine-stained walls, feels both historic and rowdy. It is easy to imagine newly enlisted Union soldiers and workers from the nearby International Paper Company plant feeling equally at home there.
As the Discovery crew filmed in the inn’s dining room two local guys sat at the bar sporting barbed-wire tattoos and fashionably ripped jeans. When the director came into the bar, one of them stretched elaborately, trying unsuccessfully to catch his attention. Everyone wants something big to happen, and the guy might have gotten his break playing the role of Romulus Tolbert or John Maddox, had anyone known their stories. But the focus of the show was on the sort of apparitions who slam hotel doors. No one knew Tolbert’s and Maddox’s stories, and no one recognized the young guy’s willingness to play.
There was a time when Tolbert and Maddox were trawling for their own recognition, and Madison was their venue, too. Tolbert was a young farmer from nearby Saluda, a quiet guy with a handsome, slightly pensive face. Maddox, whose blue eyes glimmered against an otherwise dark visage, was a friend of Tolbert’s from down the road. They had served together for three months in the local militia in 1862 but did not enter the actual Civil War—the launching pad for their series of mounting trials—until the following September. When they set out, Tolbert was twenty. Maddox was seventeen and had lied about his age to get in. It was their first trip far from home.
Madison, Indiana, is known for its history, but few locals knew or cared about Tolbert and Maddox other than Robert Gray, a veteran of World War II who spends his free time purposefully roaming the back roads of Jefferson County in his aging Plymouth, or in whatever car his grandson, a used-car dealer, lends him to drive. Gray never tires of scouring abandoned graveyards and other places of historical interest, many of which are forgotten. His grandson, Beau, who sat at the bar the night the Discovery crew filmed, said he was proud of the old man’s love of history and his fidelity to the momentous details of forgotten lives, but like most people—no doubt including Tolbert and Maddox in 1863—he was more concerned about where his own life was leading him.
Gray stumbled upon Tolbert’s Civil War record in the National Archives a few years back while researching a group of local soldiers, and he wanted to know more. He began asking around but found no one, including among Tolbert’s local descendants, who had much information to share. Here was a young man—for in Gray’s mind Tolbert would always be a young man, though he died at nearly eighty, as many years ago—who went through an astonishing series of survival trials, yet afterward retired to the quiet life of a farmer and rarely spoke of any of his ordeals again. Tolbert had mailed home a postcard during the war, but it had been somehow lost. A trunk containing his small cache of memorabilia was likewise abandoned when his descendants moved out of his old clapboard farmhouse, which was eventually torn down. The imposing brick farmhouse where he grew up still stands, but the people who live there know nothing about him. Maddox’s family home is gone. The elderly woman who last lived in it recalled the night it burned and said she and her late husband were lucky to get out alive. The overgrown Maddox family cemetery is tucked away in a hollow along the abandoned Saluda pike. Tolbert’s dates are chiseled in stone in the well-tended graveyard of the New Bethel Church a few miles away. On the surface, that seemed to be all there was. None of the numerous local historical markers mentions Tolbert or Maddox, and a search of their names in the local historical society’s database produced no hits. Their stories remain deeply submerged, which in Tolbert’s case seems to have been by design.
Tolbert’s great-granddaughter, Anne Woodbury, who never actually knew him but has heard, said he was reticent by nature. He scribbled a sketchy summary of his war experiences when he applied for a military pension, and he offered a few terse replies to one of his son’s persistent questions. Otherwise, he remained mum about what he went through between September 1863, when he and Maddox joined the U.S. Army, and May 1865, when he finally made it home. A casual observer would not have suspected anything remarkable about him afterward, though he had endured enough pathos and drama by the time he was twenty-one to blanche the apparitions trotted out for the Discovery Channel crew. Among his extraordinary feats of survival was one that seemed to ensure he would be forgotten, but which intrigued Robert Gray: Managing to become outwardly ordinary again. From all appearances, Saluda was the only place Tolbert ever wanted to be, and he spent two long years in an epic struggle to get back, and the rest of his life getting over what had stood in his way.
The Tolberts farmed on a high, rolling plateau along the Ohio River, where the rock ramparts of Kentucky tower over broad fields of corn, tobacco, and wheat. Saluda was then, and remains today, a pleasant outcropping of rural Americana, of neat farmhouses and calendar-worthy barns, with open land serrated by hollows shrouded in sycamore, poplar, locust, and hickory trees, where ferny creeks plunge in minor cataracts to the floodplain of the river. At the center of the farm stood the Tolberts’ two-story red-brick house, large but unpretentious, with a few curlicues embellishing an otherwise restrained façade. From the front porch the family could see the quaint Tryus Church, where they attended services and whose very name seemed to entreat new supplicants. Through the wavy glass of the dining room windows the landscape tilted down to the family cemetery, where, by the time the war broke out, Tolbert’s father lay. As late as the spring of 1862, Tolbert was still helping to cultivate the crops and tend the livestock, eating his fill at his mother’s table and sleeping each night in his own bed. Jefferson County remained—on the surface at least—comparatively serene, though it existed in a border zone between the solidly pro-Union western states (as the Midwest was then known) and the sprawling slave plantations of the South. The county was home to both rabid abolitionists, some of whom were involved in the Underground Railroad, and Copperheads, who supported the Confederacy. Today Jefferson County has its share of shrines to the Union cause, but it is not unusual to see pickup trucks traveling the back roads sporting Rebel flag decals. On the outskirts of Hanover, on Route 56, stands the Johnny Reb Lounge.
During the Civil War, there was talk of Indiana seceding from the Union to form a separatist government with other western states. A local soldier named Andrew Bush wrote home to his wife in January 1863 to express his dismay over the news, saying, “I trust that it aint so for if it is so us pore soldiers will have to Suffer.” Bush did not share the enthusiasm of certain soldiers who believed that secession would provide a ticket home. He had sworn allegiance to the United States, though he disagreed with “old Abe’s proclamation” and wrote that he would not have enlisted had he believed the war was about freeing the slaves, whom he did not consider human. Such a paradox—men who fought a war to prevent secession, harboring a desire to secede—was not unusual in Jefferson County. The county’s bucolic air belied inner turmoil.
From the outset of the fighting, Jefferson County stockpiled war matériel—kegs of gunpowder, rifles, muskets, revolvers, bullet molds, cannonballs, bridles, and spurs—to outfit and train what was known as the Home Guard. In the summer of 1862, Tolbert and Maddox served their three-month stint in a militia known as Captain Monroe’s Independent Company, an initiation that proved uneventful and took them only as far as Indianapolis, where they were assigned to guard Confederate prisoners of war. By then, four of Tolbert’s five brothers were in the active Union Army.
Then, in July 1863, a few days after the Union victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, a Confederate cavalry division known as Morgan’s raiders swept through southern Indiana and Ohio, looting farms, stealing horses and generally terrorizing the citizenry. Afterward, everything changed. A local woman who wrote an account of the raids seventy years later noted that people were already discouraged about the war and fearful of a possible Rebel invasion. The woman, who was a child at the time, recalled that Morgan’s raiders stole all the horses and guns and forced her and her sisters to bake them bread. As the girls baked, the men sat in the kitchen and read the local newspaper. After the raiders left, as darkness fell, a group of relatives and friends arrived to hold vigil during the night. The next day, a group of Union soldiers passed through on their way to southern Ohio, where they joined other troops who captured or killed more than eight hundred of the raiders near Athens. Morgan himself was captured a week later.
As invasions go, it was not exactly the Mongol hordes, and in fact the raid was as remarkable for its relative tameness and civility as for its unexpectedness and could not compare with Union assaults against Southern civilians. But Morgan’s raid brought the conflict home to a large, previously remote population and prompted a general call to arms. Tolbert, who was of draft age, and Maddox, who was approaching it, were among those who responded two months later. They departed Saluda on the familiar winding road to Madison, the county seat; filled out the necessary paperwork; enlisted for three years in the 39th Indiana Volunteer Infantry; collected their respective $25 bounties; and caught the train to Indianapolis to muster in. Neither apparently took the opportunity to document the occasion in a photograph, though many new recruits did.
Vincent Anderson, a fellow Indiana soldier, recalled that he set off in search of a photographer “as soon as I donned my soldier suit.” The photographer he found kept a few guns and swords as props to place in the hands of soldiers, and “When I went to get my picture taken, and he saw I was a private he took a musket with the bayonet fixed and knelt down and showed me how to form a hollow square out of myself and resist a cavalry charge, I at once took to his idea and down on one knee I went, and with the gun and bayonet, as directed, my picture was taken.”
Most recruits had little or no actual military experience. Ideally they would be given months of drills and training, but that was not always possible. Sometimes they were pulled directly from the farm, or from their jobs, and thrust into the violence of war with a few choice words and the guidance of a two-bit photographer.
Tolbert and Maddox remained in Indianapolis for only a week or so, then headed south to Nashville. A Jefferson County soldier who made the same journey noted that none of the recruits in his group even knew how to pitch a tent and were therefore put up in a hotel upon their arrival in the city. Few had ever ventured far from home, which was a quieter and more self-contained place than most Americans can imagine today. In Saluda, Indiana, in 1863, noise was invariably associated with a meaningful event: The passage of a steam locomotive, the report of a hunter’s gun, the bawling of a cow stuck in a swamp, the thunder of an approaching storm. Tolbert and Maddox had never experienced anything like the unending, insidious, ear-shattering din of battle, and they had no idea whether they were remotely prepared. All they knew was that something big was about to happen.
At the time of their enlistment, the recruits were required to fill out a questionnaire about their physical and mental health. One question was whether they had ever experienced “the horrors,” which is something akin to panic attacks. Tolbert and Maddox both answered no, but in hindsight a more accurate answer might have been not yet.
THE TRAIN THAT CARRIED THEM to war traveled south from the Ohio River into the Kentucky bluegrass. Most of those aboard were novice soldiers on their way to “see the elephant,” as the saying went—to lay their eyes upon the much-ballyhooed beast of war. The recruits wore crisp blue uniforms and carried the essentials in their knapsacks: Fresh underwear and socks, soap, a knife and fork, a toothbrush, a supply of paper and envelopes, pen and ink, perhaps a few photographs, some twine, a needle and thread, a mirror, and a comb or brush (certainly for Tolbert, who tended to fuss over his hair, judging from photos of him). The knapsacks were both their overnight bags and survival kits. Most also carried smaller haversacks of leather or painted cloth, along with their canteens, guns, and up to forty rounds of ammunition. Soon, when they became cavalrymen, Tolbert and Maddox would carry sabers—elegant and deadly props.
The recruits would hold on to their personal possessions while circumstances allowed, but that was not usually for very long. Their accoutrement and baggage would become a burden. The knapsacks alone weighed as much as twenty pounds, and soldiers inevitably discarded their treasured possessions one by one during long marches, or stowed them on the eve of engagements and never saw them again. In the end, most would retain only those items they carried in their pockets, and often those would be lost, too. They would start out sleeping in shared tents, but those would later be left behind, and they would lie on the ground beneath the stars or under a rubber blanket in the pouring rain. Eventually, even the blankets would go.
As the train rocked into Tennessee the physical evidence of the war began to drift past the windows: Burned buildings, abandoned towns, clumps of bedraggled refugees. It was obvious they were getting close. For two years Tolbert and Maddox had heard the news from afar, from soldiers on furlough, in letters, in the local newspaper. The headlines had grown increasingly shrill as the fighting intensified and moved closer to home. In the fall of 1862, beside an ad for Dr. Roback’s Blood Purifier and Blood Pills, the Madison Courier had exclaimed:
BRAGG ADVANCING IN KENTUCKY!
GREAT EXCITEMENT!
A FARMER HAS JUST COME OVER FROM MILTON TO
GET HIS GUN FIXED!
STILL LATER!
A Small Boy Passed up Main Cross Street Displaying
A SECESH FLAG.
The People Greatly Excited
The sudden militancy of a local farmer and public outrage over a boy bearing a secessionist flag were evidence of the increasing threat posed by the army of Confederate General Braxton Bragg, who was stirring up trouble in Kentucky, just across the Ohio River. The Courier reported from Perryville, Kentucky, on October 9, 1862: “A portion of Bragg’s army attacked a portion of McCook’s corps d’armee at this place on Tuesday. The fighting was desperate.” Three days, later the newspaper reported that sixteen thousand Union soldiers had engaged an unknown number of Confederates at Perryville and that perhaps six hundred of them, as well as thirteen hundred Rebels, had been killed. Later accounts put the number of troops engaged as thirteen thousand Yankees and nearly seventeen thousand Rebels. The article noted: “Doctor Heard, medical director, has been required to prepare for the reception of three thousand of the Perryville wounded.”
On October 22, the New Albany Ledger reported that the troops had fought hand to hand with the Rebels and that the 22nd Indiana, in which Tolbert’s brothers Tyrus, Silas, and Daniel served, “went in like tigers. They were in the front of the battle throughout the day, and suffered terribly—being cut to pieces. We have heard their loss at over 175 killed, and 350 wounded. They repulsed seven charges of the rebel cavalry.”
This was news that everyone devoured, particularly in the Tolbert household. Among those killed was one of Tolbert’s brothers, identified by the Courier as Second Lieutenant Tyrus Talbert, who was shot through the heart at twenty-nine and left behind a wife and a three-year-old son. For Romulus Tolbert, who was old enough to fight, the news must have been both grievous and provocative. With three brothers now in the army, he was left waiting in the wings alongside his younger brother Samuel, who was just a boy.
Amid the war news was this advertisement: “MANHOOD; How Lost! How Restored!” which offered, for six cents, a lecture by one Dr. Robert J. Caldwell, delivered in a sealed envelope, on the nature, treatment, and cure of “Spermatorrhoea, or Seminal Weakness, Involuntary Emission, Sexual Debility and Impediments to Marriage generally,” along with related problems of nervousness and mental and physical incapacity resulting from self-abuse. Also: “Ohio River Farm for Sale!”