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By BRIAN D. MCKNIGHT *
NY Times Commentary - 09/11/2011
At around two in the morning on Sept. 7, 1861, Confederate soldiers burst into the home of Julia Marcum, intent on killing her father. They “broke the door open with bayonets on their guns and said there was 36 men around who had come to kill” him, she later wrote. The 16-year-old girl lived with her parents and five siblings on a farm in Scott County, Tenn., northwest of Knoxville near the Kentucky border. Like most of their neighbors, the Marcums were strong Unionists. Early in the war Julia’s father, Hiram, made his farm available as a way station for the thousands of Southern men traveling north to join Lincoln’s army, guiding many of them to the border himself.
Because of Scott County’s political uncertainty, Confederate units had quickly moved into the area. In the late summer of 1861, a company of the 11th Tennessee Infantry Regiment camped a mile and a half from the Marcum farm. Hiram Marcum, having heard rumors that his life was in danger and expecting soldiers to visit his home any day, began “laying out” at night, sleeping in the woods or his fields to avoid detection in the case local Confederates came visiting after dark.
When they did come, that night in September, they threatened to “kill all the women and burn us all in the house. We began to holler and scream for help,” Julia recalled. While the rest of the soldiers scattered over the Marcum farm in search of Hiram, one remained behind in the darkened house. Julia’s sister Didama lit a piece of candle to see him more clearly, but now he could see them too, and began to pick “out at us with the bayonet on his gun.” The man then grabbed Julia’s mother by the throat and began choking her. When Didama ran upstairs, the soldier followed and threatened to “cut her throat and burn us all in the house.” Julia and her sister Minerva picked up the only weapons in the house, two axes, and went up after him.
Hearing the screams of his family, Hiram Marcum left his hiding place and headed toward the house. Upstairs, the soldier struck at Julia with his bayonet, but she eluded his blows. Finding the right moment, Julia “ran under the gun and chopped him in the face and breast with the ax,” leaving him cut “to the hollow,” with his chin split open. The man dropped his gun and staggered around the room begging “don’t chop me any more.” When he promised that he would leave the family alone if Julia would allow him to escape, she let down her guard. The soldier then “picked up his gun and struck me with the Bayonet In the fore head and bursted my braines out.” Aside from her dangerous head wound, she lost her left eye and had the third finger on her right hand shot off during the struggle.
Just as Julia fell, Hiram came up the stairs and shot the invader through the shoulder. As the soldier fell, he knocked out the candle. Hiram finished killing him in the dark.
Hearing the commotion inside, the rest of the soldiers had run away, but Hiram feared they would return the next morning. He carried his badly wounded daughter to the downstairs bed, then, kissing his wife and children goodbye, disappeared back into the woods.
Julia’s mother sent one of her sons to look for help from the neighbors. But all of them had heard the screams, and “every man run off and hid” when he heard the boy’s knocks. He finally returned with a woman in tow, who tended to Julia’s wounds. Then, the next morning, the neighbor went to the nearby encampment to report the incident and inform the commander, Capt. George W. Gordon, about the dead Confederate still lying upstairs in the Marcums’ house. Upon meeting with the woman, Gordon led a company of men to the farm. After seeing Julia’s condition, he sent an order for two of his regiment’s physicians to hurry to the wounded girl. Considering the severity of her injuries, few people in the community expected her to live. Within months, however, she had rallied and was recovering nicely.
But that wasn’t the end of the Marcums’ war. With Confederates now camped on the family farm, Julia regularly came into contact with fellow Tennesseans who now considered her the enemy, and she them. Not only had the Southern forces in her part of Tennessee alienated, threatened and physically harmed her family, but Hiram Marcum, frustrated with his inability to protect his family, had gone to Kentucky to join the Federal army. The two sides, Unionist civilians and Confederate soldiers, eyed each other warily. Nevertheless, staying true to their Unionist principles, the family continued to provide food and shelter for men en route to Kentucky.
Julia’s cousin George was one such transient whom sought shelter with the family. Hiding out in the barn, George waited for an opportunity to slip away and continue his trek northward. Then one morning soldiers approached the structure. Fearing they might discover her cousin asleep, Julia, having partially recovered from her wounds, ran to the barn to sound an alarm. When they saw her streaking toward the building, nearby soldiers fired at her; though they missed, they came close enough to “cut a lock of my hair from my head with a bullet.” Awakened by the nearby gunfire, a frantic George ran for freedom, but was immediately shot and severely wounded.
Julia ran to George and implored the soldiers to help her carry him to the house. Instead, they threatened to kill Julia and Didama, who had run to her sister when she heard the shooting. Eventually the soldiers relented; the two girls moved George to the house, where he died within a few hours.
After the death of her cousin, Julia and the rest of the Marcums packed up what remained of their war-ravaged belongings and left Tennessee. For the next several months, they joined the countless other refugee families moving across the borderland. Before they finally settled in Casey County, Ky., where they would remain until 1864, Julia and her sisters frequently appeared in army camps, where they told and retold the story of Julia’s injuries. Hiram never rejoined his family. He had enlisted in the 13th Tennessee Calvary Regiment, a unit composed of pro-Union Tennesseans, but contracted smallpox in Nashville and died in 1864. His wife, Julia’s mother, followed closely behind, dying near the end of the war.
When the Civil War ended, Julia Marcum — 20 years old, parentless, blinded in one eye and missing a finger — moved back to Tennessee, where she became a teacher. She never fully recovered her health; she taught for 12 years before her wounds forced her to retire. One supporter recalled that her disability had escalated to the point that her mind was “seriously impaired” and her “health so completely destroyed that she cannot support herself.”
In 1884, Julia petitioned Congress for a pension, arguing that she had been injured in defense of her country. While she had a legitimate claim to a veteran’s pension based on wartime wounds, she also had a very important advocate in the House of Representatives. After the war her sister Minerva had married Albert Wolford, a brother of Frank Wolford, a member of Congress and a former, controversial colonel of the First Kentucky Cavalry (U.S.A.). During the war, Colonel Wolford had written President Abraham Lincoln a scathing letter denouncing his policies toward Kentucky, especially in regard to the enlisting and arming of black soldiers. By 1864 Lincoln and Wolford’s superiors had had enough, and they forced him out of the army. Returning to civilian life, Wolford won a seat in the Kentucky legislature; in 1882 he won the Congressional seat from Kentucky’s 11th District.
Late in his first congressional term, Wolford, as a member of the Committee of Pensions, brought Julia’s story to the attention of Ohio Representative Benjamin Le Fevre, likewise a war veteran. With his colleague’s assistance, Julia’s case sailed to approval. On Feb. 24, 1885, Julia Marcum became one of only a handful of women to receive a pension because of wounds suffered in combat during the Civil War.
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* Brian D. McKnight is an associate professor of history at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise. He is the author of “Confederate Outlaw: Champ Ferguson and the Civil War in Appalachia” and “Contested Borderland: The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia.”
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