“Paid” in manuscript and “Chg Box 64” with no postmark on fresh Georgia cover with imprint of Q. M. Dpt./ Official Business (CSA Catalog WD-QM-20, CV $400). LISTING COPY, POSSIBLY UNIQUE. $300.

John S. Dobbins (1800- 1886) was born in South Carolina. Sometime before 1840, he moved from Spartanburg to Habersham County, Georgia, where he went into a mercantile business and acquired farming interests. In the approximately 20 years in which the family lived at Clarksville, Dobbins made a prominent place for himself in the community. Around 1858, he, his two sons, and a number of his slaves moved to a plantation near Calhoun, Gordon County, Georgia, leaving his wife, Sarah Williams Dobbins, whom he married in 1851, his daughters, and the remainder of his slaves to look after the place in Habersham. The men supervised clearing of the new land, planting of crops, and construction of houses and other plantation buildings. On April 1, 1860, Dobbins turned in a list of taxable property which included $15,000 in land, 35 slaves valued at $21,000, and enough other property to make a total of $40,850.

Dobbins was a staunch Unionist until Georgia seceded, at which point he became a devoted Confederate. His son, William, a student at Emory and Henry College, volunteered as a private in Co. C, Phillips Legion, Georgia Volunteers; William was apparently mortally wounded in the Battle of South Mountain, Maryland on September, 14, 1862, and fell into the hands of the enemy. No later knowledge of him ever came to light. James Redman, a free Negro and husband of one of Dobbins’s slaves, had been with William and was also captured, but in a different area of the battlefield. In 1866 Redman wrote from Maryland, saying he wished to return to Georgia.

The Dobbins family, including Joseph, who was attending Wofford College, and the daughters, who were at school in Rome, Georgia, refugeed to Terrell County in 1864 as Sherman’s army was approaching Calhoun. Joseph, who drove the horses and other livestock through the country served in Dawson as an agent of the Confederate government. In 1867 the family returned to Gordon County. At the end of the war Joseph went into a mercantile business in Marietta, but sold his interest in the business in about a year to accept a traveling position with a Baltimore firm. SOURCE: Emory University Finding Aids