John Maud Blakeley Carlton(1808-1865)
My Maternal 3rd Great Grandfather married Nancy Mary Kelley (1810-1853)
John Maud Blakely Carlton, the son of Blake Carlton Jr and great grandson of a Scottish immigrant named Richard Charlton, was born March 1, 1808, in Greenville County, South Carolina. At the age of 24 he married Nancy Mary Kelley in Palmetto Georgia, and the couple settled down to family life. In the first ten years of their marriage, they produced three sons and three daughters. Their daughter, Francis Christiana Carlton, is my great-great grandmother. The size of his land holdings and the value of his livestock placed him among the top 10 to 15% of Campbell County farmers. He was not a plantation owner; he was a prosperous merchant, and a grain and livestock farmer. His slave holdings in 1860 amounted to ten persons, family units composed of 5 adults and five children under the age of eleven; a group not designed for the arduous rigors of cotton farming. John was respected in his community: he was a justice, and a representative in the Georgia General Assembly. His wife Nancy died young at the age of 43 in 1853. A year later John married seventeen-year-old Sicely Matilda Griffith, with whom he had four daughters and two sons between 1854 and 1863.
[Image: Photo of John Maud Blakely Carlton]
When the Civil War began John was 53 years old. In August 1861, despite being well past the typical age of enlistment, John joined his neighbors in Company C of the 22nd Georgia Infantry. In rural Georgia, military groups were built around kinship and civic leadership. A man like John - respected, literate and influential - was expected to stand with his community. And he did.
John fought for four long years. The Georgia 22nd infantry fought in the bloodiest battles of the war: Second Manassas, Antietam, Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, Wilderness, Cold Harbor, Petersburg, the Appomattox Campaign. When Robert E Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse the 22nd infantry had been reduced from 1,200 to fewer than 100 men. Among them stood 57-year-old Corporal John Maud Blakely Carlton. He was likely one of the oldest men in Lee’s army at the surrender. Most men of his age stayed closer to home and guarded the home front where it was safer. John’s actions were a testament to his physical and mental strength and unwavering commitment.
[Photo: This photo was labeled “The Carlton Boys” but unfortunately the specific names were not identified]
All three of John’s sons also answered the call to duty. in 1839. His oldest son John McPherson Berrien “Berrie” Carlton waited until he was 24 years old to participate. Berrie enlisted in April of 1864 as a Captain and was assigned to work at the notorious Andersonville Prison as a guard where he worked “until the surrender”. There he witnessed the suffering and collapse of the Confederate prison, the overcrowding, the starvation and the disease. It was a grim, morally complex duty - one that left deep marks on everyone who served there.
His son James Know Polk Carlton served first in the 2nd Georgia, Company C and later in the 19th Georgia Infantry, rising to the level of Sergeant. In August of 1864 during the desperate fighting around Petersburg, he was wounded in the Battle of Weldon Railroad, a key Union attempt to cut off Confederate line. James was captured and sent to Camp Lockout, Maryland, one of the largest and harshest Union POW camps. There he endured exposure, disease and hunger - the mirror image of what his brother witnessed in Andersonville. Miraculouly, he survived.
[Image: AI image of the Union run Point Lockout Prison Camp in Maryland]
John’s third son, John Caldwell Calhoun Carlton served in the 2nd Georgia Calvary, a regiment that fought in Tennessee, Alabama, and North Georgia. In July of 1864, during Sherman's Atlanta Campaign, John Caldwell was captured in the chaos of cavalry raids and skirmishes around Chattahoochee. He too became a prison of war.
[Photo: The Burning of Atlanta]
Meantime, while the men were off fighting the war, John’s 2nd wife Sicily was struggling to hold thing together with six small children aged two to nine, in Palmetto just 25 miles north of Atlanta. John returned home after the surrender and sadly, later that year on October 23, 1865, he died of unknown causes. He was buried with his first wife, Nancy in Ramah Baptist Cemetery in Palmetto. Sicily remarried 18 years later to Anselm Leigh in 1883. She died in March of 1905, and 81-year-old Anselm died of a heart attack while running to catch a train nine months later. Sicily is buried in the same plot as John and Nancy. Anselm is buried with his first wife at Oakdale Cemetery in the same town.
[Photo: The family plot where John Carleton and both of his wives are buried in Ramah Baptist Church Cemetery in Palmetto, Georgia]
