The Civil War heroism of a 16-year-old Scott County girl
Hiram Marcum knew that trouble was coming.
Trouble had been looming for a while. On June 8, 1861, Scott Countians had voted 541-19 against secession, the largest margin of any county in Tennessee. Then, angered that Tennessee had broken away from the United States and joined the Confederacy, Scott County voted to secede from Tennessee, declaring itself the Free and Independent State of Scott. But Gov. Isham Harris refused to recognize Scott County’s sovereignty. It was rumored that members of County Court who had voted to break away from Tennessee had a price on their head, and Scott County was under Confederate control, and the command of General Felix Zollicoffer.
Scott Countians had spoken more loudly against secession than anyone else in Tennessee, but they weren’t alone. Most of East Tennessee remained loyal to the United States, and thousands of men were slipping across the border into Kentucky to join the Union army.
Hiram Marcum wasn’t a fighter himself — at least not in the beginning. But he intended to give aid to anyone willing to save the Union. The Unionists in East Tennessee who were heading north to join President Lincoln’s army knew they could find refuge at Hiram Marcum’s farm on Buffalo Creek, east of Huntsville. And they knew Marcum would guide them to the border himself, if they needed help.
The Confederates knew it, too. And when Rebel soldiers showed up on Buffalo Creek, Hiram Marcum feared the worst. His fears were proven true when the Marcum farm became the site of Scott County’s first recorded Civil War skirmish in September 1861. That was the day the Rebs came for Hiram Marcum. And it was the day his 16-year-old daughter, Julia Marcum, became an American hero.
* * *
The Summer of 1861 must have seemed like an eternity to the more than 3,000 people who lived throughout Scott County, Tenn. It was a summer that had changed everything. It began with an overwhelming vote against secession. Then a defiant stand against the state and its Confederate governor. And now Confederate occupation, and increasing forays by guerrillas who were sympathetic towards the Confederacy but weren’t military regulars; just ruffians taking advantage of the little law that existed in this isolated region.
Before the last of the harvest had been brought in from the fields that summer, a company of Confederate soldiers from the 11th Tennessee Infantry entered Scott County from the east, moving across the Cumberland Mountains. The 11th Tennessee had been formed in the Nashville area in the spring, as secession loomed. The troops then moved skirmished at the Cumberland Gap as part of General Zollicoffer’s plan to guard against a Union invasion through the mountain passageway.
Zollicoffer was leery of a surprise attack by the Union army, and he had reason to be. Union commanders knew that the majority of East Tennesseans were loyalists, and were anxious to free the region from Confederate control. Former Tennessee Governor Andrew Johnson and Congressman Horace Maynard — the two men who had appeared on the steps of the courthouse in Huntsville on June 4, 1861 and urged Scott Countians to vote against secession — implored President Lincoln to send his army to East Tennessee and free its people. And Lincoln was listening.
As Confederate troops guarded the Cumberland Gap, they arrested pro-Union leaders and raided pro-Union farms along the border. And late that summer, the 11th Tennessee encamped at Buffalo Creek, just a mile and a half from Hiram Marcum’s farm.
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Hiram C. Marcum (1813-1864) was a lifelong Scott Countian. His parents, Arthur Marcum and Anna Bransgrove, migrated from Virginia to Tennessee in the early 1800s. It was on Buffalo Creek that Hiram Marcum was born in 1813. In 1840, he married Permelia Huff, the daughter of John Huff (1785-1862) and Prudence “Nancy” Chism (1787-1849) of Fentress County.
Surprisingly, Hiram Marcum was listed in the 1860 census as a slaveowner, with a one-year-old black girl in his possession. He was one of nine slaveowners in Scott County at the time of secession. It isn’t known how the baby girl came to be in Marcum’s possession, but his daughter, Julia, outlined his fierce loyalty to the United States.
“Hiram Marcum was for freedom of our nation and its liberties for the people,” Julia wrote. “In the year of 1861, the secedents declared war against the North. Father stood for the Union and its principles.”
She wrote that her father was “a farmer, lived on his farm, made a living and was a happy, law-abiding Christian man and also his family. He stood for the flag, the freedom of America, and its perfect laws.”
But things were bad, and getting worse. As the heat of summer began to fade with the approaching autumn, Zollicoffer was tired of being gentle with the pro-Unionists of the Cumberlands. He had tried to persuade them to stop resisting the Confederacy. It hadn’t worked. Men like Marcum were not only resisting what they saw as a military occupation, but they were giving aid to those who were escaping to the North to join the fight. In Nashville, Governor Harris called up thousands of additional soldiers in East Tennessee. And he passed along orders to Zollicoffer: stop the resistance at all cost. Banish Union sympathizers from their homes and from East Tennessee completely, if necessary.
When the 11th Tennessee encamped on Buffalo Creek, Marcum heard rumors that he was a wanted man, and that the Rebels intended to kill him for giving aid to the Tennessee mean who were escaping northward to join Lincoln’s army. He took to hiding in the woods, away from the house, to avoid being ambushed.
“They sent their armies there to kill and destroy our men, women and property,” Julia wrote of the Confederates’ presence in the Huntsville area. “They came to our house and hunted for Marcum, watched night and day to kill him because he was a union man for the federal side and threatened his family with death if we did not tell where he was.”
Julia was just 16 at the time. She would soon find herself in a fight for her very life, and the lives of her family.
* * *
On the night of September 7, 1861, at two o’clock in the morning, things came to a head. The Rebel soldiers’ patience had waned; they were tired of waiting for Hiram Marcum to come out of hiding, and through with the fruitless threats against Marcum’s family.
A group of 36 Confederate soldiers busted down the front door to the Marcum farmhouse, bayonets affixed to their rifles, and said they were there to kill Hiram Marcum. If they couldn’t find him, they’d kill the women and burn their bodies in the house.
“We began to holler and scream for help,” Julia said.
The threats had finally worked.
One man against 36 might have been impossible odds. But the Confederate soldiers weren’t counting on the bravery of a 16-year-old girl.
For whatever reason — perhaps knowing that the women’s screams would bring Hiram Marcum out of hiding — most of the soldiers went back outside the home. But one man stayed.
The Rebel choked Permelia Marcum. When her daughter, Didama, ran upstairs to get a candle for light, the soldier grabbed her and said he was going to cut her throat and burn the house.
Minerva, another of the Marcum girls, grabbed one of the only two weapons in the house: a pair of axes. Julia grabbed the other. But as two more Confederate soldiers burst through the door, Minerva panicked and threw down her ax. Julia ignored them. She had to save Didama.
One of the soldiers swung at Julia with his bayonet. She ducked under the gun, and struck him in the face and the chest with her ax. “Cut him to the hollow and split his chin open with the ax, getting the best of him,” she wrote.
The soldier dropped his gun and pleaded for mercy. “Don’t chop me any more,” he said.
But he was able to get his hands back on his gun, and struck Julia in the forehead with his bayonet. “Burst my skull, knocked my brains out, put out my left eye and shot the third finger off my right hand,” she said.
Hiram Marcum burst through the door just as the soldier’s gun fell from his hands. He finished off the invader by shooting him in the soldier.
“The light was knocked out. All was in blackness,” Julia wrote. “I was knocked unconscious and didn’t come to for some time.”
The fierce fight put up by Julia and her sisters had caused the remaining Confederate soldiers to flee. But Julia was gravely wounded. It looked like she might not make it.
Clayburn, her 14-year-old brother, grabbed the dead Rebel’s horse and rode off into the darkness, begging for help at neighbors’ houses. Fearing the soldiers would return to finish the job they had started, Hiram Marcum returned to the woods. He left not knowing whether his daughter would live or die.
* * *
The following morning, Permelia Marcum sent a neighbor — a Mrs. Taylor, who had come to tend to Julia — to the Confederate camp to tell them to come and get their dead soldier.
Col. George W. Gordon, one of the field officers in command of the regiment and the man who would play a key role in the formation of the Ku Klux Klan after the war, brought some of his men to retrieve their dead comrade. When he saw Julia’s wounds, he sent for the regiment’s doctors back at the camp.
“They dressed my wounds and took the dead man away,” Julia said. “We were left in a terrible fix to the mercy of the Rebels but they went away.”
It took Julia three months to get out of bed after the fight. She never fully recovered; she would suffer from her wounds for the remainder of her life. But things appeared to have calmed down. Perhaps the realization of how ruthless it had been to threaten to cut the throats of teenage girls, the sight of a teenager with her head split open and eye punched out by a bayonet, had been enough to convince the higher-ups in the Confederate camp to leave the Marcums alone. Hiram even came out of hiding and started sleeping in the house again.
* * *
The fight wasn’t over. In January 1862, the Rebels returned. Julia’s cousin, George Marcum, was on the farm. He was enlisted in the Union army, but he wasn’t in uniform. He was waiting for a chance to slip through the Confederate troops and head north to rejoin his company.
George was hiding in the barn that January morning when Julia looked outside and saw Confederate troops approaching. She raced from the house to warn George. One of the soldiers fired at her. He missed, but she said the bullet was close enough to “cut a lock of my hair from my head.”
For a second time, Julia had narrowly escaped death at the hands of the Confederates. George wouldn’t be so lucky. He heard the commotion and attempted to escape from the barn, only to be gunned down as he fled. Julia pleaded with the soldiers to leave her cousin alone. They threatened to kill her and Didama, but eventually relented. They allowed the teen girls to carry George into the house. He died a few hours later.
* * *
Enough was enough. It had taken a while, but the Confederates had defeated the Marcum family. Hiram, Permelia and their children packed up the few belongings they had left that the Confederates hadn’t destroyed and headed out through the snow for Kentucky. They eventually sought refuge in Casey County, near the Green River, a ways northwest of Somerset. They would never return as a family to their Buffalo Creek farm.
Hiram Marcum had resisted the fight for as long as he could. His dead nephew, his permanently disabled daughter, was enough. He joined the Union army. He was assigned to the Thirteenth Cavalry of Tennessee, but later contracted smallpox in Nashville. He died in February 1864 at the age of 51, a little more than two years after his family fled their Scott County home. He is buried in a military cemetery in Nashville.
The rest of the Marcum family moved to Flat Lick Creek just northeast of Somerset. Permelia died in August 1865, just after the end of the war, at the age of 53. She is buried at Flat Lick Baptist Church.
Didama, the sister that Julia saved with the axe, married Dr. Lafayette Sproul and remained in Kentucky. She died in 1908 and he in 1912. They are buried in the Highland Cemetery in Williamsburg.
Minerva Marcum, the 19-year-old sister who took up an ax to help Julia fend off the Rebel soldiers, married Albert Wolford, a brother of Union Col. Frank Wolford who was discharged from the Union army during the war after he protested President Lincoln’s policies of enlisting African-American soldiers. Minerva’s brother-in-law was arrested for an anti-Lincoln speech in Danville. Lincoln intervened and had Wolford released from prison, but he continued his speeches and was later arrested a second time. When he was told that the charges would be dropped if he stopped the speeches, Wolford wrote to Lincoln, “Excuse the bluntness of a soldier, (but you have) by an exercise of arbitrary power caused me to be arrested and held in confinement contrary to law, not for the good of our common country, but to increase the chances of your re-election.” Lincoln eventually ordered Wolford released again. He was elected to Congress and played an instrumental role on Julia’s behalf. Minerva died in Casey County, Ky.
Clayburn Marcum, Julia’s 14-year-old brother who rode into the night for help that September night in 1861, married a Casey County girl, Emma Brown.
Martha Marcum, Julia’s youngest sister, married John Ford.
* * *
Julia Marcum returned to Tennessee after the war and was a schoolteacher for 12 years before her injuries forced her to retire. She petitioned Congress for a Civil War pension, and it was eventually granted, thanks to the help of Congressman Wolford. She was one of only a handful of women to be granted a Civil War pension, and the only woman in the United States granted a pension as a combatant in the war.
Julia was initially granted $30 a month. It was later increased to $40 a month in 1922. Her pension would have been worth about $620 a month today.
By 1926, when she wrote her short autobiography, all of Julia’s brothers and sisters and their spouses had died. “I am still here yet to enjoy the great blessings of life and God’s love,” she wrote.
It was 10 years later, at the age of 91, that Julia Ann Marcum died of pneumonia in Williamsburg, where she had moved after retiring from teaching. She was buried in Highland Cemetery, near the graves of her sister Didama and her husband.
Today, a plaque on the lawn of the Whitley County Courthouse in downtown Williamsburg recognizes “Aunt Julia” Marcum as the only woman to receive a U.S. pension as a fighter during the war.