In the summer of 1870, Charles R. Holcombe conducted an entirely fraudulent U.S. federal census enumeration for Liberty County, Georgia.
Not only were there glaring mistakes in the information for real people, Holcombe made up many of the entries, often using names that were common in the Northeast, where he was from. For example, my great-uncle, J. Sloeman Ashmore, was in Holcombe’s census, but the names of his wife and chiildren were completely wrong. Ashmore’s wife’s name was Esther, and his children’s names were Mary, Sarah, Lewis, Sloeman, and Strong. Holcombe had his wife’s name listed as Eliza, and his children as Mortimer (!), Ellen, Lydia, Georgia, Henry and Lucy.
Even more egregiously, this was the first federal census to include the people previously held in slavery, who were now free. Holcombe mis-recorded and made up their names as well.
That fall, locally prominent landowners were charged with conducting the census over again and did it correctly. Unfortunately, both sets of census records are available in Ancestry and other genealogy repositories and are befuddling researchers to this day.
In 2000, C. Calder Garrason wrote a scathing post titled “Holcombe’s 1870 Liberty Co Census Fiasco.” At the time, he did not know anything about Holcombe himself except that he had been born in Maryland and his wife in New Hampshire.
Thanks to the miracle of Ancestry.com, we now know more about Holcombe’s checkered career.
Holcombe was indeed born in Maryland, about 1843 in Baltimore. Though little was found about his family, he mustered into the U.S. Colored Troops 4th Infantry Regiment as a first lieutenant on September 1, 1863. He served there as a White officer in companies E, K, and I, raising to the rank of Captain before he mustered out in May 4, 1866, when the unit was disbanded.
Did Holcombe serve in Georgia? No, the 4th Infantry apparently did not see service in Georgia, though it fought bravely in multiple engagements during the Civil War. However, a man who would be important later in Holcombe’s life in Georgia, J. Murray Hoag, also served in the 4th Infantry.
As a 1st Lieutenant, Holcombe commanded the 4th Infantry’s Company E from January 27 to April 30, 1864, but in May 1864, a hint of Holcombe’s temperament was revealed when he was charged with being absent without leave and, specifically, with having been heard to say “that he wished that “Old Ben Butler” (meaning Major General Benjamin S. Butler, commander of the Department of Virginia and North Carolina) would get whipped like hell.” When he was cautioned “not to use such language,” he retorted that he had meant exactly what he said.
At the time, he was at the 4th Infantry’s camp at Spring Hill, Virginia. About two weeks later, while his unit was in camp near Point of Rocks in Maryland, he pretended to be sick to avoid going on duty as commander of Company K, disobeying his commanding officer’s orders. He allegedly laughed afterward and boasted at “how nicely he had deceived his Captain and said he would be damned if he was going at every call of his commanding officer.”
Among the witnesses? 2d Lieutenant J.M. Hoag, who was later to serve as the Freedman’s Bureau Agent in Savannah.
In September 1864, Holcombe claimed that he had suffered internal injuries due to a 13-inch shell rolling over his back and was sent to the “National General Hospital” in Baltimore, Maryland. He did report there, but in October 1864 he was no longer there and had not rejoined his regiment. He was ordered to appear before a court martial on October 24, but did not appear.
In January, 1865, it was suggested “unofficially” that he was still missing, and his command asked the hospital to check his records to see what had happened. On February 16th, he was directly ordered to go from the Hospital in Baltimore to the Officers Hospital at Fort Monroe, Virginia, for treatment. In April 1865, he requested and received a leave of absence from the hospital in Virginia, based on a certificate of disability signed by the officer in charge of the hospital, who had examined him and found him “suffering from shell wound of back, received in action…he is in my opinion unit for duty.” He recommended a 20-day leave of absence.
The reason he was ordered to go from the Baltimore hospital to the hospital in Virginia? He was under investigation for misappropriation of company funds, as well as his handling of mess accounts and for borrowing money from enlisted men of the regiment, who were all African American soldiers.
In June 1865, he was under arrest in New Bern, North Carolina, in June 1865, where he was denied permission to go to meals. He was instructed to make arrangements to have his meals brought to him. The order added, “In regard to the Sentinels, they were posted by me in accordance to instructions received from Major Augustus S. Boernstein, Com’d’g 4th U.S. Col’d Infantry, who regards Disobedience to Orders as an offence of the most aggravated character.”
He had been promoted to Captain in September 1864 while he was on medical leave. His promotion was confirmed by the U.S. President in June 1865. He commanded Company I from May 2 to October 31, 1865.
In 1866, he was due travel pay and a subsistence allowance for travel to Franklin, New Hampshire, most likely to see his soon-to-be wife. After leaving the Army, Holcombe married Helen “Nellie” M. Carleton in Franklin, Merrimack County, New Hampshire.
Helen was not a blushing bride. She was variously listed as widowed and divorced in the marriage records. The divorced one was the true record. She and her first husband, Hiram Burleigh Ingalls, divorced on March 20, 1863, in New Hampshire. They had one daughter, Martha A. Ingalls, born in 1861. Martha may have been farmed out to another family during her childhood, as she never appeared with either Hiram, who died in 1882, or Hellen in any subsequent records. In the year Hiram died, she married Frank O. George, and appears to have died without children in 1911.
Meanwhile, Charles and Helen moved to Liberty County, Georgia, in April 1867, where he was appointed the Freedman’s Bureau agent in Hinesville, Liberty County’s county seat. The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands was established by Congress in 1865 to manage everything relating to “refugees and freedmen and lands abandoned or seized during the Civil War.”
Holcombe’s previous service as a White officer in a United States Colored Troop regiment probably seemed ideal to qualify him for this position, and he was likely recommended by his Army comrade J. Murray Hoag, who had become the Freedman’s Bureau Agent in Savannah, Georgia, in 1866. Holcombe and Hoag likely saw each other often. In 1868, they were both witnesses to an attempted murder of a Lieutenant Moore by his mother-in-law while they were walking together down Bull Street in Savannah and had to testify in court.
The Bureau Agents performed all sorts of functions to help formerly enslaved people establish independent lives after the horrors of slavery. Holcombe’s signature appears on employment contracts between the formerly enslaved and employers, for example. An excellent book about this period in Georgia history is Paul A. Cimbala’s “Under the Guardianship of the Nation: The Freedmen’s Bureau and the Reconstruction of Georgia, 1865-1870.”
Holcombe served as Agent until 1869. While in Liberty County, he speculated in land. He attended Sheriff’s sales, where he purchased local land, including the Green Forest plantation, which had belonged to Randal F. Jones. He would resell the land to people from Savannah at high mark-ups. For example, he purchased Green Forest plantation for $425 and then sold it to his old comrade, J. Murray Hoag, for $3000 a few months later.
He appears to have ended his service with the Freedman’s Bureau before March 1869 but stayed in Liberty County. In June 1870, he was appointed as a U.S. Marshall for the purpose of conducting the 1870 census in Liberty County. Cue ominous background music.
It could be assumed that Holcombe was considered by locals as a “carpetbagger” who had come from the North to the defeated South to take advantage of its desperation and that he would have been very unwelcome. It could be speculated that one of the reasons he fabricated the 1870 census could have been a justified fear of going to individual homes as a federal agent in a county that had suffered greatly from Sherman’s Army raids not so very long ago.
This would be wrong. Holcombe’s wife Helen had purchased lots in downtown Hinesville and built a home there. Their neighbors bore old Liberty County names: William Harrison, William B. Gaulden, and J.W. Farmer. Perhaps they were despised by these neighbors?
Apparently not. In May 1870, only a month prior to the start of the ill-fated census effort, Liberty County gave a group of Liberty County citizens a plot of land in downtown Hinesville that had been the site of the former Hinesville Academy, for the purpose of turning it into a high school. The citizens were C.R. Holcombe, J.W. Farmer, H. Andrews, J.E. Zoucks, W. Harrison, J.A. Girardeau, Jacob Thiess, J.R. Brewer, Jesse Brewer, S.A. Calder, S.D. Bradwell, and J.B. Fraser. S.A. Calder was clerk of the Liberty County Superior Court. John E. Zoucks was the Liberty County Sheriff. Samuel Dowse Bradwell had been a captain in the Confederate Army and his father had founded the Hinesville Academy.
The high school was named the Bradwell Institute in honor of Bradwell’s father and today is a public high school. Bradwell became a state senator and later was president of the predecessor school to the University of Georgia.
The Bradwell Institute likely was intended as the “White” school, in contrast to the Dorchester Academy, founded after the Civil War to help educate freed African Americans, who were so thirsty for education that grown adults sat in on classes with children. In 2020, a recent Bradwell Institute graduate petitioned school board officials to consider changing the name, citing Bradwell’s service in the Civil War and his segregationist beliefs.
Why would Holcombe, as a former Freedman’s Bureau agent and a USCT officer, be involved in helping to create a segregated high school? We don’t know. He could have been trying to ingratiate himself with local officials. In the real 1870 census, he was listed as a lawyer, and both he and wife Helen owned substantial property. He may have foreseen a prosperous future for himself in Liberty County.
That future apparently did not materialize. After faking the 1870 census, Holcombe served five days in jail in Savannah that November. The same month, he petitioned for a divorce from Helen on the grounds that she had deserted him…and also because she was a bigamist. Remember her first marriage, which ended in divorce? Well, Holcombe was not her second husband. He was the third, and the second, Nathaniel Lowe, was still her husband when she married Holcombe. Lowe did not die until 1873. He may have deserted her, as he died in the Dutch West Indies.
Helen returned to New Hampshire, and died in 1910 in Maine as Mrs. Harry P. Newton.
What happened to Holcombe? This is the really puzzling part of the story, as there are abundant records of him prior to September 1871, when he was appointed as the Hinesville postmaster (a little surprising in context), but no verified records for him could be found after that.
It would be a mistake to think that Holcombe is typical of the Northerners who went to the South after the Civil War. J. Murray Hoag, the Freedman’s Bureau agent in Savannah, was a decorated Civil War veteran who lost an arm during the war. He was cited for “gallant and meritorious service in action at Chapin’s Farm, Virginia.” After his service in Savannah, he moved to Maquoketa, Iowa, where he became an insurance agent and later raised Shetland ponies that he imported directly from the Shetland Isles. One of his ponies won its class at the 1893 World’s Fair. Hoag was said at one time to have the largest herd of Shetland ponies in the United States. He died in 1917 and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. His record stands as stark contrast to that of Holcombe.
Both men are included in the African American Civil War memorial in Washington, D.C.
Many other Northerners served honorably in positions such as Freedman’s Bureau agents and teachers, and others donated substantial sums to help establish the freedmen in their new lives. However, Holcombe’s story cautions us not to take history at face value…and reminds us that people have had human frailties throughout history.
If you do genealogy research in Liberty County, how can you distinguish between Holcombe’s “census fiasco” and the true census conducted later by locals? Both are on Ancestry and FamilySearch and will appear in searches by name. First, always check the enumerator. If it is not Holcombe, you’re safe. Holcombe performed his census between June-August and the others later in the fall, so the dates will also be a signal. At a glance in the search results, you will notice that the locals did their enumerations by subdivision, while Holcombe mostly lumped everyone together.