A Soldier's Story of His Regiment (61st Georgia): And Incidentally of the Lawton-Gordon-Evans Brigade Army of Northern Virginia

Association.

Introduction

by Keith S. Bohannon

In his classic bibliography, In Tall Cotton: The 200 Most Important Confederate Books for the Reader, Researcher, and Collector, Richard B. Harwell wrote that A Soldier's Story of His Regiment (61st Georgia) and Incidentally of the Lawton-Gordon-Evans Brigade Army, Northern Virginia was primitive in its style, but lively and refreshing. Since the 1978 publication of Harwell's assessment, the usage of A Soldier's Story of His Regiment in numerous campaign and battle studies suggests its value as one of the finer memoirs penned by an Army of Northern Virginia veteran.¹

George Washington Nichols, the author of A Soldier's Story of His Regiment, was born January 22, 1843, in Bulloch County, Georgia. He was the son of Theophilus Nichols (1808-1881) and Rebecca Crumpton Nichols (1818-1869). Theophilus Nichols was a large farmer, honored and esteemed by the community. Despite being listed as illiterate in the census, Theophilus was successful in the management of his many acres and a master with tools. For labor, he relied on his large family and possibly hired hands, for neither Theophilus nor his children owned slaves.²

The Nichols family farm was near Bengal, a post office established in the early 1850s close to Lower Lotts Creek in Bulloch County. In 1860 the Nichols farm included 1,600 acres, one hundred of them improved for cultivation. Like many inhabitants of the wiregrass region of southeastern Georgia, the Nichols family raised livestock, including cattle, sheep, and hogs. They also cultivated Indian corn, oats, sweet potatoes, peas, and beans.³

On the eve of the Civil War, George Nichols, his older brother Absalom Jackson Nichols, and five younger siblings all attended a country school. They might have been under the tutelage of James C. Hodges, a well-respected man identified by George Nichols as his old professor. Hodges was a twenty-one-year-old teacher in the Bengal community in 1860.⁴

The Nichols brothers did not rush to join the Confederate Army immediately upon the outbreak of the Civil War. Absalom Nichols waited until early September 1861 to enlist as a private in a company commanded by Captain Henry Tillman. According to a 1911 memoir, Colonel Charles A. L. Lamar swore Tillman's company into service in Bulloch County on September 1, 1861. The compiled service records state that Absalom Nichols enlisted for the duration of the war along with his company on September 9, 1861, at Eden Station, No. 2, on the Central Georgia Railroad. Tillman's men and several other South Georgia companies remained along the Central Railroad at the Eden and Guyton stations until late September, when they moved into Savannah. There the companies became part of the 7th Georgia Infantry Battalion.⁵

George W. Nichols joined his brother's company on May 10, 1862, at Camp Bethesda, ten miles south of Savannah. During the succeeding weeks, the 7th Battalion received three additional companies and became the 61st Georgia Infantry Regiment. Shortly thereafter, the 61st went to Virginia, where it joined Stonewall Jackson's command in the Shenandoah Valley in the second week of June 1862.

When the 61st Georgia marched into battle for the first time at Gaines Mill on June 27, 1862, George Nichols had a high fever. After collapsing during the engagement, the exhausted and ill youth awoke the next morning to discover the corpse of his brother Absalom. The sickly George, unable to rejoin his regiment, began an extended period in the Confederate hospital system.

After a stint in Richmond and Lynchburg hospitals and a failed attempt to rejoin his unit, Nichols entered the general hospital in Danville, Virginia, suffering from debilitas on August 23, 1862. After being discharged from the Danville hospital on October 31, 1862, Nichols entered General Hospital No. 19 in Richmond on November 5, where he stayed through February 1863. By the end of February, Nichols had rejoined the 61st, who were then encamped below Fredericksburg. The extended hospital stay apparently invigorated the youth, for one of his comrades wrote home from Hamilton's Crossing in late March 1863 that G.W. Nichols had been out washing in the cold weather and was quite hearty.⁶

Nichols served with his regiment in the Chancellorsville Campaign, having bullets pass through his blanket and shoe during the fighting around Fredericksburg. In the subsequent march into Pennsylvania, the sick and weakly boy once again fell ill. Nichols spent the battle of Gettysburg in an ambulance, and on the retreat worked as a hospital steward for roughly a week before rejoining his regiment.

Throughout the rest of 1863 and 1864, Nichols served faithfully with the 61st. He passed unscathed through many engagements with two exceptions. The first was on July 6, 1864, when he received a bruise from an artillery shell fired by Union batteries on Maryland Heights. Then at the Third Battle of Winchester, Nichols endured a brief captivity before escaping back to his regiment. Later during the same battle, a spent ball struck him in the thigh and another pierced his hat, cutting his hair.⁷

On January 15, 1865, Nichols and several comrades left the 61st in the trenches at Petersburg to visit Georgia on twenty-four-day furloughs. When Nichols arrived nine days later at his parents' home, he found that Union General William T. Sherman's soldiers had ransacked the place, stealing horses and many other things. In his memoirs and pension, Nichols claimed that the passage of Sherman's Army into the Carolinas and the destruction of railroads made it impossible for him to rejoin his regiment before Lee's surrender.⁸

Two years after the end of the Civil War, George Nichols married on May 25, 1867, Jincy Parrish (1849-1923), the daughter of Absalom Parrish (1816-1865) and Rebecca Alderman Parrish (1819-1862). The ceremony took place in the home of the groom's father. Three years later, the census enumerator recorded that George's real estate was worth $500 and his personal estate worth $2,300. The couple also had a seven-month-old baby named John.⁹

The Nichols household grew steadily throughout the 1870s, so that by 1880 George and Jincy had five sons and a one-year-old daughter. Sarah Parrish, Jincy's sister, along with Sarah's daughter Jincy, also lived in the household. Eventually George and Jincy Nichols had eleven children, seven of whom became teachers—a testament to the importance that the family placed on education. A descendant noted that the Nichols household was a center of learning and that the Nichols clan was known far and wide as both public school teachers and farmers.¹⁰

Nichols enjoyed moderate success as a farmer in the 1870s. The agricultural census in 1870 lists him as the owner of 180 improved acres and 4,082 acres of woodlot worth a total of $500. He raised livestock, including several cows and 35 hogs; he also grew corn, oats, and sweet potatoes. Nichols might also have been engaged in timber cutting or the production of naval stores, as his census entry lists $100 in forest products.

By 1879, the value of the Nichols farm had tripled. He now owned 100 tilled acres and 700 acres of woodland, having apparently sold off much of his woodland, perhaps due to declining timber prices. Nichols had also moved into cotton and rice production, devoting twenty acres to the former crop and five acres to the latter. The ability of Nichols to hire colored labor for twenty-five weeks of the year gives further evidence of his prosperity. Nichols appears to have been following the advice given by many country newspaper editors to move into commercial crops only after first raising enough to meet household needs.¹¹

In 1887, George Nichols dictated his memoirs of Confederate service to his daughter, Jincy Parrish Nichols. He then sent the manuscript to the Pioneer and Eagle, a newspaper published in the Excelsior community of Bulloch County by the Reverend Jason A. Scarboro. The paper ran the memoir in installments.¹²

Three years after his recollections appeared in print, George Nichols became involved in a dispute that resulted in his family's departure from Bulloch County. When the Upper Lotts Creek Primitive Baptist Church burned, G.W. Nichols was one of the members instrumental in erecting a new building. When a member of the church apparently did not pay for building materials he had purchased in Statesboro, Nichols, a justice of the peace and the church secretary and treasurer, felt obligated to serve papers on the man. Nichols believed that either this church member or the entire congregation must pay the bill.

When the issue came before an open church conference, the minister's nephew accused Nichols of lying. Nichols responded by rising from his seat, advancing toward his accuser, and demanding that he retract the statement or be stomped through the floor. Four abled-bodied deacons had to restrain Nichols, and the congregation immediately voted to remove his name from the membership rolls. Nichols and his older sons subsequently took five mules and three wagons south to the Empire community in Wayne County, where they settled on a new farm. Jincy and the balance of the family joined them shortly thereafter.¹³

Following the move to Wayne County, George Nichols rewrote and enlarged his war memoirs at the urging of his children. In doing so, he corresponded with veterans of his regiment and brigade. The expanded version, which included muster rolls of the 61st Georgia acquired by memory, appeared in 1898 as A Soldier's Story of His Regiment.

According to descendant Troy Nichols, the veteran's children were not happy with the considerable expenses their father incurred in the book's publication and the subsequent disappointing sales.

No publisher is listed in the first edition of A Soldier's Story, but Troy Nichols surmised it might have been Benjamin Miliken, a Confederate veteran and newspaper editor in the Wayne County seat of Jesup. Inscriptions in several surviving copies suggest that Nichols sold them through the mail from his home. The author stated that he hoped to issue subsequent editions, but he apparently never