Elijah Wallick

Farmer, Prisoner, Survivor — The Longest-Lived Wallick Veteran

Elijah Wallick was a grandson of "Bedford County" Michael and the son of Andrew Wallick. Andrew had been born, like all of his siblings, in Bedford County, Pennsylvania, and by 1830 had migrated west to become a farmer in what is now Holmes County, Ohio. Here Elijah was born, raised, and grew into manhood. He was about thirty years old when the political union of our nation was torn apart by the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter.

On August 8, 1862, Elijah joined the Federal Army and would serve his country for nearly three years in the western theater of the war. His cousin, David H. Wallick, also from Holmes County, served with Elijah in the 102nd Ohio Volunteer Regiment. They were about the same age and could have had a close relationship since they enlisted together and were in the same company.

However, on September 23, 1864, destiny led them in two different directions. Elijah was one of 350 men who were detached from two regiments of his brigade — the 102nd and 18th Ohio and Michigan — and sent to help the besieged Federal forces posted at Fort Henderson in Athens, Alabama. Why Elijah was part of this relief force and cousin David remained in camp with the rest of their regiment is unknown. For some reason only 20 men from Company G were selected to be part of this expedition.

Fort Henderson had been under attack for several days by the very elusive "Wizard of the Saddle," General Nathan Bedford Forrest — the same commander who had captured William Wallick in May of 1863. As a result, soldiers from the United States Colored Troops who occupied the fort were forced to surrender to General Forrest. Elijah and the 102nd arrived thirty minutes after the fort had been evacuated and they, too, after a brief but fierce firefight, were forced to surrender.

The men were eventually taken to the prison camp at Cahaba, Alabama, where they were "guests" of the Confederacy for the last six months of the war. Elijah became very ill while incarcerated in Cahaba. His service record from the National Archives tells us that he was one of the first to be paroled and immediately sent to the Union hospital at Camp Fisk, Vicksburg, Mississippi. He was diagnosed with scurvy and had also developed a severe case of rheumatism.

At first glance it seems unfortunate that Elijah's prison experiences had so broken his health that he was unable to celebrate with his comrades their release from captivity and the end of the war. However, the fact that he was so ill and needed to be hospitalized may have helped save his life. Had he been well enough to stay with his captured brethren, he most likely would have been on board the ill-fated steamboat Sultana — still considered the greatest maritime disaster in all of American history.

Elijah is captured and will spend the next six months in a warehouse that the Confederacy has converted into a Federal Prison. The town of Cahaba, in central Alabama, was Alabama's first state capital from 1820–1826. Frequent flooding of the Cahaba and Alabama Rivers eventually forced the relocation of the capital to Tuscaloosa in 1826, then to Montgomery twenty years later. The town of "Old Cahaba" is nothing more than a minor tourist attraction now — the antebellum river town died at the end of the nineteenth century but has recently been reclaimed as a historic park. "Old Cahaba Archeological Park" can be visited today and is located about fourteen miles southwest of Selma, AL. Nothing of the prison has survived; only its old location has been identified in the historic park.

At the end of the war, steamboat captains received from the U.S. Government five dollars per enlisted man and ten dollars per officer to transport them north and on to home. However, some of the captains offered army officers a kickback of $1.15 for every soldier put on their boat, thus resulting in many boats stuffed way beyond their capacity with passengers. The Sultana was just such a vessel.

Built in Cincinnati in 1863, it was registered to carry only 376 passengers. On its departure from Vicksburg on April 24, 1865, the Sultana was carrying over 2,400 soldiers — many of them friends of Elijah who were captured with him and refugees from Cahaba prison camp. Every available compartment was jam-packed with soldiers who hardly had an inch of open space on the decks to maneuver.

Muster Out & Epilogue

After Elijah's extended stays in various army hospitals, he did eventually return home to Holmes County and later married Olive Gibbens. They had one daughter, Rose, and relocated to Iowa in the late 1860s. They were part of the Wallick family's post-Civil War mass migration out of Holmes County and to the western lands.

Elijah died on May 8, 1922, at ninety-one years old in Ladora, Iowa. He lives farther into the 20th century than any other Wallick veteran of the Civil War — the longest-lived of them all.

Comrades-in-Arms · Cousins