John Salling: Virginia’s Last Confederate?

By Garry Victor Hill

Summary: His Confederate service while possible, remains controversial

Date of Birth: disputed: 1843, May 1846 about 1852, 1856, 1858, 1859 and May 1860

Date of Death: 17th March 1959

Age at enlistment: he claimed about thirteen or fourteen and then sixteen or seventeen

Rank: private

Unit: Company D 25th Virginia Infantry (claimed)

Service: scouring for saltpetre

Combat Experience: he said there was none.

Length of service: Salling stated about a year, but perhaps it was around three.

The controversy over John Salling started in 1933 when he was initially refused a veteran’s pension. The reason given was that he was not listed in the unit he said he served in, Company D 25th Virginia Regiment. Since then the controversy goes on and will probably always go on over the man who may have been among the last four people to serve the Confederacy. He was given his pension because a James Salling vouched for him.[1] J.W. Salling is listed in Official Records as serving in the 27th Virginia Infantry and this is probably the same witness named as John in Salling’s recollections. John Salling also gave the name and title of his commander as Captain James Collins. This was close to the correct name and rank of the man in charge, Captain John Collings. Note the confusion between James and John between these two. A February 2014 posting to John B. Salling Find A Grave concerning investigations into the Scott County militia by “SixDogTeam” stated that Salling knew the names of six people concerned with the 27th infantry’s saltpetre mining. One of the officials, Monroe J. McConnell was slightly muddled in his affidavit as J. Monroe McConnel and he knew two others by their first names when they were officially identified by initials. It is unclear if four of these men were soldiers or civilians.

Salling’s less than glorious accounts record that he had no uniform and spent his hours scouring saltpetre under floors. This sound honest. He also has the long, thin build of someone who would be given that task. This is the evidence in his favour.

Against this is another morass of census claims and those using them to discredit have a strong if at times muddled case. In 1910 when he was supposed to answer yes or no to the explicit question about Civil War service he chose to leave this a blank. This was repeated with the less explicit 1930 question about wartime service.

Most doubts refer to Salling’s statements about his age. Those who debunk him point out that in different documents he gives himself ten differing birth dates between 1843 and 1860. Virtually every source about him mentions this and then the birthdate he gave as May 1846. They then state this proves Salling was a fraud or leave the matter blank with the implications there.

The question here should be why a fraud who is not imbecilic or senile should give the government census people ten different dates? His application form stated that fraud was punishable. False dates were clearly evidence of fraud: so why do this when doing so could start an investigation leading to his prosecution? Senility and imbecility are not the answers. He sounds lucid in the interview which he gave that now exists on u-tube and imbeciles do not survive as household heads in Appalachia for decades. The probable clue that provides a more plausible answer appears in his pension application. The handwriting appears the same as the clerk’s and Salling signed with an x, the accepted form for illiterates[2] Although he frequently described himself as illiterate in the censuses, Professor Hoar states that he had a little learning.[3] Perhaps Salling incorrectly thought he knew his numbers better than his letters.

An unsigned passage in “John B. Salling’ also suggests that literacy was the problem and gives a hint about different ages: “John filed for a Confederate pension with the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1933 stating that he was 84 years of age.” [4] (my emphasis) Stating is of course ambiguous: it could mean written, spoken or taken down by a literate person. Less chance of an error emerges that way than in the census with two out of three of these ways. There are other reasons for giving this date of 1848/1849 as likely his birth year.

This also fits to his statement that he was thirteen or fourteen when he spent a year scouring saltpetre under floors as his Confederate service after enlistment.[5] That age range puts him into credibly serving in the war years.

Unfortunately Salling himself knocks this theory askew in an interview, now on u tube. The interviewer does not lead him into answers, but does gently try to clarify with his questions. He treats him respectfully and kindly, relieving the pressure of war talk with songs that they sing together. When asked if he was conscripted he affirms and then when asked if he was sixteen then he pauses and says seventeen clearly, but his tone sounds as if he is trying to remember and he sounds a little uncertain. That makes the May 1848 birth dubious as it would make him seventeen a month after Appomattox. In that same interview he says that he was born in 1846 and if he really was born then he could have been seventeen during the war years. The Guinness book of Records once listed him as one of the oldest men to have ever lived. They also made a birth date error, mixing up March with his birth month of May. This error went around the world for several years in their bestselling publication and was still there well into the 1970s. The only evidence that he was not 112 at his death comes from Salling’s contradictory statements.

In the same interview he also says that he enlisted. However he lacks enlistment papers or his name on the muster roll. These factors are not answerable with anything but conjectures, but are not good grounds for labelling his stories false either.

Captain Collings may not have wanted to see a boy of thirteen enlisted in case the company were called to battle service, a real possibility with Virginia invaded and facing a manpower shortage - or perhaps he thought boys that young doing that work were unimportant. To an officer they may not have been real soldiers. Collings would have had a point. They had no known real military training, no weapons or uniforms and they were not even militia. Another possibility is that perhaps an embarrassed Salling hid his illiteracy by not technically enlisting by writing, instead taking a verbal oath. Perhaps he was not enlisted at all.

Despite the u-tube interview and against majority opinion I rate Salling’s service, such as it was, as possible.

*

This is an abridged excerpt from America’s Last Civil War Participants: An Investigation by Garry Victor Hill. The full and illustrated text can be found for free at my website garryvictorhill.com.au/ Hopefully this will also be an e-book. Twenty eight other claimed Civil War survivors alive after 1951 are also assessed.

[1] Serrano, pp136-137.

[2] Pension Application for a Disabled Confederate Soldier March 11th 1933. Court of Scott County Virginia.

[3] Hoar, Vol.III p1721.

[4] ‘John B. Salling 1846-1959’ unsigned. Find A Grave Memorial http:/www.findagrave. com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page+gr& Grid+49607043

[5] Ibid, p135.

John B Salling