The name James recurs frequently in my family. It was my father’s name. I have numerous cousins named James. It is the middle name of my first son, and I also had a great-uncle named James. At family reunions, yelling “James!” probably produced roughly the same result as yelling “Waiter!” in a crowded restaurant.
I never gave much thought to where the name came from. Families routinely recycle names, particularly good, sturdy names that are difficult to misspell. “James” is especially convenient because it works equally well for a farmer, preacher, bank president, outlaw, or man being questioned by the authorities. It accommodates almost any career path.
Truthfully, I have never been terribly interested in genealogy. I always assumed my father’s ancestors were a long line of modest farmers. “Modest,” in this case, is the diplomatic term for poor. They farmed land that was apparently capable of producing rocks, dust, grasshoppers, and predictable disappointment.
I was vaguely aware that my grandfather Fred had farmed in Texas, packed his family into a covered wagon, moved to Arkansas, briefly examined the opportunities available there, then loaded everyone back into the same wagon, and returned to the poor farm in West Texas.
I have seen that Texas farm and I can only conclude that all of Arkansas must have been on fire.
For most of my life, that seemed to be sufficient family history. We had farmers. They were poor. They owned wagons. At some point, somebody demonstrated questionable judgment regarding Arkansas. I saw no urgent need to investigate further.
Recently, however, curiosity got the better of me and I decided to find out whether any of my Southern ancestors had owned slaves. I was fairly certain they had not, principally because slave ownership required money, property, and economic resources that the Milliorns seem to have successfully avoided for generations.
The search produced one uncomfortable discovery: an uncle of one of my direct ancestors had owned one enslaved sixteen-year-old at the beginning of the Civil War. The census recorded the boy’s age, sex, and race, but not his name. The white people were named. The enslaved boy was treated as property and was entered on a separate schedule.
There is nothing amusing about that. Even one enslaved person is one too many, and the fact that his name was not recorded is a grim reminder of how completely the system attempted to erase individual lives.
Having established that at least my direct ancestors were apparently too poor to own anyone, I thought the investigation was finished, but then, I discovered James Bascom Milliorn.
James was born near Byhalia, in Marshall County, Mississippi, on January 14, 1844. He was the son of George B. Milliron and Frances Doddridge. The surname appears in records as Milliron, Milliorn, Millard, and occasionally, in whatever combination of letters a clerk could produce before lunch. Genealogy is considerably easier when your ancestors have names that census takers can spell consistently. My ancestors apparently regarded standardized spelling as an infringement on personal liberty.
When the Civil War began, James was seventeen. On March 10, 1862, shortly after turning eighteen, he enlisted as a private in Company E of the 34th Mississippi Infantry. Company E was known as the “Coldwater Rebels,” which sounds less like a military organization than a high-school football team with an unusually aggressive booster club.
The enlistment and unit are documented in the surviving 34th Mississippi Infantry roster. The regiment was organized at Holly Springs and fought in the Western Theater. It participated in the Battle of Perryville in Kentucky, the campaigns in Middle Tennessee, and the Battle of Chickamauga.
James evidently did not enjoy a comfortable war.
His Arkansas Confederate pension application states that he was shot in the left knee and suffered a fractured skull due to a second gun shot. Unfortunately, the information available does not clearly establish where or when this happened. Civil War soldiers were not issued convenient medical summaries, and Confederate record keeping deteriorated as the Confederacy ran short of paper, clerks, transportation, food, shoes, soldiers, and eventually, Confederacy.
Being shot in both the head and the knee would ordinarily qualify as the low point of a military career, but in James’s case, it may merely have been the opening act.
Testimony submitted with his pension application states that James was involved in an elevator accident while being held as a prisoner in a five-story hotel in Nashville. The elevator supposedly collapsed, dropping him several stories.
On first reading that account, I was skeptical. Elevators existed during the Civil War, but a five-story elevator accident involving Confederate prisoners sounded a little too elaborate. It had all the necessary ingredients for a story that had improved with age: a war, a prison, a hotel, an elevator, and a very long fall.
Surprisingly, the central event really happened.
In case you are wondering, Felix Kirk Zollicoffer was a recently deceased Confederate general and former Tennessee newspaper editor who had gone for a ride on a foggy morning and mistook the Union lines as Confederates. The general was rather quickly killed.
On September 29, 1863, approximately 600 Confederate prisoners were crammed into the top floor of the brick building. Many had recently been captured at Chickamauga. When the prisoners assembled to go downstairs for breakfast, part of the temporary staircase and flooring collapsed. More than 100 men plunged through several floors in a mass of soldiers, beams, boards, and debris.
Contemporary reports disagreed about the number killed. The first newspaper reports said that only a few died immediately, while later accounts claimed that dozens died at the scene or later from their injuries. A survivor insisted that the prisoners fell all the way to the bottom floor rather than merely to the third floor.
After the war, the building served as the site where Nathan Bedford Forrest was inducted into the Ku Klux Klan. Finally finished as a hotel, seven presidents, as well as Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, stayed there, and the coffee served at the famous hotel served as the start of the Maxwell House Coffee brand. Guests of the hotel claimed it was haunted by a ghost of one of the soldiers who perished in the collapse of the floors.
The important point is that this was not a family legend invented around a fireplace several generations later. The elevator account appears in testimony given in support of James’s pension application. Someone was formally explaining to the State of Arkansas why James was old, disabled, poor, and deserving of assistance. According to the application, during the collapse of the flooring, his “arms were mashed up.”
The testimony called it an elevator accident. Contemporary descriptions call it the collapse of temporary stairs and flooring near the stairwell. It is possible that the word “elevator” referred to an open shaft, hoist, or unfinished part of the building. It is also possible that, several decades after being dropped through a hotel, James did not feel obligated to supply the Arkansas pension board with an architectural diagram.
The distinction probably seemed unimportant to him. Whether the elevator fell, the floor collapsed, or the stairway gave way, gravity performed its assigned duty.
A casualty list published years later includes a “J. B. Millard” of Company E, 34th Tennessee. That appears likely to be another bureaucratically mangled reference to J. B. Milliorn of Company E, 34th Mississippi. The initials, company, regiment number, pension testimony, and circumstances all fit. Only the surname and state are wrong, which by Civil War record-keeping standards may qualify as unusually accurate.
In her book, Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell puts Ashley Wilkes in the Rock Island Prison Barracks. When Wilkes staggers back to Tara, he wearily describes the camp as the Andersonville of the North. It’s a good, well-written scene, but it is far from accurate as Andersonville had twice the death rate. Still, the almost two years James spent there must have been hell.
After serving for over 1100 days (with a little over half of them as a prisoner of war) James survived the war, as well as two gunshot wounds, his captivity, and the collapse inside the Maxwell House. He then returned to the much slower but apparently unprofitable occupation of farming.
His pension application offers an unusually blunt summary of his economic achievements. It reported that the total value of his property was less than $100. After a lifetime of farming, raising a family, and surviving events that should have killed him several times, James had accumulated property worth less than the price of a modest modern television.
The State of Arkansas approved an annual pension of $25.
That was not $25 a month. It was $25 a year.
In exchange for being shot twice, captured, imprisoned, dropped through several floors of a hotel, and remaining poor long enough to prove financial need, James received slightly more than two dollars a month. Government generosity apparently had not yet been invented.
Still, $25 was not completely insignificant at the time. It could purchase food and other necessities, but it was hardly a comfortable retirement. The pension system was designed as minimal relief for elderly or disabled Confederate veterans who could demonstrate both military service and poverty. James evidently met every requirement with room to spare.
After the war, he married Frances Evelyn Boggan and fathered a large family. Their children included Guy, Lillian, Elmo, Fred, Ray, and others. Fred, born in 1877, became my grandfather and helped carry the James name into later generations. My father was James H. Milliorn, and my brother and I gave one of their sons the name.
Thankfully, my great-grandfather’s pension was raised in later years. It appears to be his only means of support during the last decades of his life.
James Bascom eventually settled in Arkansas and lived until July 3, 1933, dying at age eighty-nine. He had been born before the Mexican War, survived the Civil War, lived through Reconstruction, and remained alive long enough to witness automobiles, airplanes, radio, the First World War, and the Great Depression.
That is an extraordinary span for a man whose military experience included being shot, captured, and dropped through several floors of a hotel before the hotel had even opened.
I began this investigation expecting to confirm that my ancestors were poor farmers. That part was easy. They were. James’s declaration that he owned less than $100 in property provides something approaching official certification.
Instead, I also found an unnamed enslaved boy who deserves to be remembered as a person rather than a line on a property schedule. I found a Mississippi teenager who joined a war, suffered a serious wound, became a prisoner, survived one of Nashville’s strangest wartime disasters, and lived another seventy years.
I also found the probable source of all those Jameses scattered through the family tree.
The name was not merely recycled because nobody could think of anything better. It may have been passed down because James Bascom Milliorn proved extraordinarily difficult to kill.
Considering his war—and the size of his pension—that seems reason enough.
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