American Civil War (North)
2nd U.S. Dragoons/2nd Cavalry, 1850-61—frontier duty in New Mexico, Texas, the Utah Expedition, and Kansas; promoted to 1st Lt. (1855) and Captain (1861), Commissioned Colonel, 1st Vermont Cavalry Volunteers, 14 Feb 1862.
Died by his own hand at Strasburg, Virgina. |
| Notes |
- Jonas Platt Holliday was born in the rolling dairy country of Allegany County, New York, in 1828, and from the start he seemed marked out for the Army. Neighbors in the hamlet of Burns remembered a serious-minded boy who drilled imaginary troops with a stick for a saber and spent long winter evenings copying maps out of his father’s almanac. When he won an appointment to West Point and graduated twenty-fourth in the Class of 1850, hometown pride turned to astonishment: one of their own was riding with the U.S. Dragoons on the nation’s far frontier.
Through the 1850s Holliday’s postings read like a litany of the Army’s hardest jobs. He scouted Kiowa and Comanche trails in New Mexico, guarded wagon trains on the Santa Fe Road, hauled supplies through waist-deep snow during the Utah Expedition, and rode patrol in “Bleeding Kansas.” Fellow officers found him a reserved man—“taciturn but capable,” one captain wrote—yet he earned their respect for cool judgment under fire and an almost scholastic devotion to regulations. Illness dogged him, however. Periodic bouts of fever and what surgeons then called “nervous exhaustion” sent him home on sick leave for months at a stretch, leaving a shadow over an otherwise promising career.
That shadow lengthened with war. In February 1862 the 33-year-old captain of regular cavalry was asked to take command of Vermont’s brand-new 1st Cavalry Volunteers. The Green Mountain troopers were eager but raw, and state officials wanted a West Pointer to whip them into shape. Holliday, newly promoted to colonel, threw himself into the task—rewriting drill schedules, inspecting mounts, even lecturing officers on temperance. Yet the strain showed. Soldiers noticed the new colonel pacing camp at night, reading the muster rolls by lantern-light, muttering that he would never have time to make real cavalrymen of them before they met Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah.
The breaking point came on a bleak, rain-soaked march south of Strasburg, Virginia. At dawn on Saturday, 5 April 1862, the regiment halted by a hedgerow while Holliday rode to the front. He ordered the column forward, struck a match to light his pipe, and—without a word—drew his revolver and fired. The shot echoed across the valley, and the colonel toppled from the saddle, dead before his boots hit the mud. Official reports would only say “Died near Strasburg,” but every man in the ranks knew the truth: their commander had taken his own life.
Holliday’s body was sent home to Burns for burial, yet the reverberations lingered in the 1st Vermont. For weeks the regiment marched without a colonel; captains bickered over seniority; enlisted men spoke in whispers of the “gloom” that had settled on their camp. Veterans later traced the regiment’s early confusion in the Valley campaigns to that single terrible moment on the road to Strasburg.
In the decades that followed, Jonas Platt Holliday became a cautionary footnote in Civil War histories—a reminder that not all casualties fell to enemy bullets. But in Allegany County, where the stone over his grave still stands among tall maples, people remember him differently: a gifted frontier officer who shouldered more weight than one man could bear, and who paid the ultimate price for his devotion to duty and discipline.
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1828 - 1862 (34 years)
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