Heard County  Georgia Military    Jonathan Wallace

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Arthur W. Bergeron, Jr.  bergero1@ix.netcom.com


Table of Contents page: http://www.usgwarchives.net/ga/heard.htm
Georgia Table of Contents: http://www.usgwarchives.net/ga/gafiles.htm


From an obscure publication by Walt Whitman about
Private Jonathan Wallace, Company D, 35th Georgia
Infantry Regiment, from Heard County:

"September 22, 1865.--Afternoon and evening at
Douglas Hospital....went through several neighboring
wards. In one of them found an old acquaintance
transferred here lately, a rebel prisoner, in a dying
condition. Poor fellow, the look was already on his
face. He gazed long at me. I asked him if he knew me.
After a moment he uttered something, but
inarticulately. I have seen him off and on for the
last five months. He has suffered much; a bad wound
in left leg, severely fractured, several operations,
cuttings, extractions of bone, splinters, etc. I
remember he seemed to me, as I used to talk with him,
a fair specimen of the main strata of the
Southerners, those without property or education, but
still with the stamp which comes from freedom and
equality. I liked him; Jonathan Wallace, of Hurd
County, Georgia, age 30 (wife, Susan F. Wallace,
Houston, Hurd County, Georgia). [If any good soul of
that county should see this, I hope he will send her
word.] Had a family; had not heard from them since
taken prisoner, now six months. I had written for
him, and done trifles for him, before he came here.
He made no outward show, was mild in his talk and
behavior, but I knew he worried much inwardly. But
now all would be over very soon. I half sat upon the
little stand near the head of the bed. Wallace was
somewhat restless. I placed my hand lightly on his
forehead and face, just sliding it over the surface.
In a moment or so he fell into a calm, regular-
breathing lethargy or sleep, and remained so while I
sat there. It was dark, and the lights were lit. I
hardly know why (death seemed hovering near), but I
staid nearly an hour. A Sister of Charity, dressed in
black, with a broad white linen bandage around her
head and under her chin, and a black crape over all
and flowing down from her head in long wide pieces,
came to him, and moved around the bed. She bowed low
and solemn to me. For some time she moved around
there noiseless as a ghost, doing little things for
the dying man." (pages 829-30)

Walt Whitman, "Army Hospitals and Cases - Memoranda
at the Time, 1863-1866," The Century, Volume 36,
Issue 6 (October 1888), pages 825-30.


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