Travails of the Silent Raider

On Friday afternoon September 26, 1890, 50-year-old John Wollam died alone in his rooms at 309 Kansas Avenue in Topeka, Kansas. The local newspaper noted the passing of the “old soldier” with a single paragraph notice stating that he was “one of the eleven survivors of the famous Mitchel raid in 1862 and possessed a medal for bravery and meritorious services given him by the Secretary of War.”

          “Although ailing for the past few months, nothing serious was thought of until within the past month he noticed he was growing weaker, and for the last two weeks has been confined to his room,” the Topeka Daily Capital reported. “When the summons came, he expired suddenly while seated in his chair. He has lived here in this city for several years a quiet, unobtrusive life. No boasting or telling of the service he had done, and yet here was a hero.” And thus, was marked the passing of "The Silent Raider," one of the nation’s first Medal of Honor recipients.

This image of John Wollam likely dates from the late 1880s when he was living a quiet life in Topeka, Kansas. His post war years were marked with hard work and much misfortune. Wollam's former Raiders had not heard anything of Wollam since the end of the war and he caused something of a sensation when he attended the 1888 national G.A.R. encampment. Two years later, Wollam passed away of an apparent heart failure. 


          The second born of Balser and Harriett Wollam, John was born in 1838 (or 1840) in either Hamilton or Cincinnati, Ohio but grew up in Butler County, Ohio. Prior to the Civil War, he moved to the town of Portsmouth in Scioto County where he worked as a railroad mechanic. It was there that he enlisted in Co. C of the 33rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry which set him on the path to the Medal of Honor.

          In April 1862, Wollam was one of eight men from the 33rd Ohio who volunteered to take part in Andrews’ Raid, a celebrated but ultimately failed exploit in which 24 men penetrated deep behind Confederate lines into northern Georgia, stole a locomotive on the Western & Atlantic Railroad, and set off to wreck the line connecting Atlanta with Chattanooga. A determined Georgia railroad conductor, William A. Fuller, doggedly pursued Andrews’ party and after an 87-mile chase, compelled the Raiders to abandon their locomotive and take to the woods. Within a few days, all of the Raiders were captured and imprisoned. [To read more of this story, click here to read Daniel Dorsey’s account entitled “Stealing a Locomotive: An Andrews’ Raider Tells His Tale.”]

          Wollam himself did not leave a written account of his role in the raid or the aftermath, but other survivors including his friend Daniel Dorsey published extensive accounts of their time in Confederate prison camps. Once they learned that the Confederate authorities planned to execute James Andrews, Wollam played an important role in helping the Raiders to escape for their jail in Chattanooga. It was June 1, 1862 when four of the Raiders escaped (Wollam among them) but were quickly recaptured. Wollam was the last to be caught and was out for nearly a month. Upon arriving back in jail at Atlanta and  learning of the execution of seven of the Raiders, learning from his Confederate captors that one of the men had turned "state's evidence" and betrayed them. Wollam became convinced that it was William Pittinger who had turned state's evidence and thus "sacrificed his friends and Wollam would have nothing to do with him." Wollam's 33rd Ohio comrade Daniel Dorsey was also convinced of that fact and would spend the rest of his life attempting to prove it.

    Wollam escaped again on October 16, 1862, when he along with several others attacked their jailers and broke out. “We traveled by starlight for nearly three days, not trusting for some time to travel in the daytime,” Daniel Dorsey recalled. “After 21 days of fatigue, living most of the time on corn and persimmons or a head of cabbage, dodging the Rebel pickets and cavalry, climbing mountains, dragging through brush and wading streams, we finally were so fortunate as to find some Union men in the Cumberland Mountains.” After establishing their identities as Union soldiers, the east Tennesseans “took us to their house, gave us supper, lodging, and breakfast, then piloting us to another Union man, and so on, we were directed from one to another until we arrived at Somerset, Kentucky, from there we got transportation to Lebanon, Kentucky, and from there to our respective homes.”

Private John Wollam
Co. C, 33rd O.V.I.
Medal of Honor

          Wollam returned to the 33rd Ohio then encamped near Murfreesboro, Tennessee in early 1863. Unlike many of the other survivors, Wollam never received a lieutenant’s commission and as a matter of fact, did not receive his Medal of Honor until July 20, 1864. Many of the survivors received their medals in March 1863 but Wollam was somehow missed. By the time he did receive his medal, he had survived another term in the Confederate prisoner of war camps. Captured during the Battle of Chickamauga, Wollam received harsh treatment once his captors figured out who he was and that he had escaped from prison a year prior.

          William O. Johnson of Co. H of the 3rd Ohio Cavalry met Wollam while a prisoner at the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta, Georgia in the winter of 1864. “A ball and chain were fastened to his ankle which made it very difficult to move about,” Johnston wrote. “I remember asking him why he was subjected to this barbarous treatment, and his answer was “prejudice.” Johnson then learned that Wollam was one of the famous Andrews’ Raiders. The Buckeye had previously escaped Confederate hands and was determined to do so again. The Confederates had plans to hang him, but the night before his scheduled execution in February 1864, Wollam escaped from Atlanta and made it safely to Chattanooga. He then served out the rest of his three-year term of service with the 33rd Ohio.

          Wollam returned to railroad work, first in Ohio, then in Cerro Gordo, Illinois where he befriended a man named John Houck. Houck, however, after learning of Wollam’s exploits in the war, stole Wollam’s Medal of Honor and for a number of years masqueraded as John Wollam. Eventually, other Andrews’ Raid survivors and 33rd Ohio veterans exposed Houck as a fraud. By then, Wollam’s fortunes had cratered. Tiring of railroad work, he tried farming in western Kansas but grasshoppers killed off his crop and left him penniless. His health failing, he returned to Topeka where a chance meeting with a local blacksmith he had known in Portsmouth, Ohio before the war seemingly brought him back from the dead. Local veterans learned of Wollam’s plight and with some lobbying from a local congressman secured Wollam a special $24 a month pension that Congress had appropriated for survivors of Andrews’ Raid.

          In another positive turn of events, Houck was persuaded to return Wollam’s Medal of Honor and by July 1888 Wollam had both his medal back and a small but steady income to live upon. That fall, he traveled back to Ohio for the first time in 22 years and attended the Grand Army of the Republic’s national encampment held in Columbus. There he met with 10 of the 11 remaining survivors of the Raid. “He was treated with distinguished honors and met the comrade he had dared and suffered with so many years ago who had believed him to be dead,” a local newspaper reported. He had avoided previous reunions because of his intense dislike for William Pittinger who Wollam believed had betrayed the Raiders while captives in Atlanta, leading to the execution of seven of them on July 16, 1862. Wollam also visited his family with whom he had fallen out of touch. “He is now 50 years of age and under the benign influence of the Kansas climate he bids fair to be a centenarian,” the Cawker City Journal boasted.

The 1888 national encampment of the Grand Army of the Republic in Columbus, Ohio proved to be a highlight of Wollam's final years. 

          But it was not to be as less than two years later Wollam died of apparent heart failure. The local G.A.R. post in Topeka, in conjunction with Wollam’s former comrades in the 33rd Ohio, determined to return Wollam’s remains to his home state. The Kansas veterans escorted the body back to Ohio where the G.A.R. post of Jackson, Ohio took possession, and on September 29, 1890, buried John Wollam in Fairmount Cemetery.

          Wollam’s death prompted some soul-searching amongst his fellow Topeka war veterans. William Musson knew Wollam personally and lamented that Wollam “left behind him no record of those meritorious services for which he was voted the medal. “The comrades should write their personal war history,” Musson stated. “No one can write it for you unless you furnish the data. Write it for your own benefit while it is yet fresh in your memory; write it for the benefit of your family; and write it in order that future generations, by collating these many personal war records, may arrive at truthful conclusions in writing the history of the great civil strife.”

         

One of John Wollam's two gravestones at Fairmount Cemetery in Jackson, Ohio. 

Sources:

Lambert, Lois J. Heroes of the Western Theater: 33rd Ohio Veteran Volunteer Infantry. Milford: Little Miami Publishing Co., 2008

“John Wollam,” Topeka Daily Press (Kansas), September 27, 1890, pg. 4

“A Veteran Gone,” Topeka Daily Capital (Kansas), September 28, 1890, pg. 4

“Capturing a Locomotive: A Comrade’s Recollections of the Late John Wollam,” National Tribune, November 13, 1890, pg. 4

“One of Seven,” Cawker City Journal (Kansas), October 6, 1888, pg. 7

“A Hero in Our Midst,” Kansas Knight & Soldier (Kansas), December 21, 1887, pg. 2

“Death of an Andrews Raider,” National Tribune, October 16, 1890, pg. 5

“Write Your Memoirs,” Kansas Knight & Soldier (Kansas), October 29, 1890, pg. 4

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