Francis Orray Ticknor

Francis Orray Ticknor (November 13, 1822 – December 18, 1874) was an American medical doctor and poet. From the state of Georgia, he became known as a war poet ("Georgia's Confederate Poet"), mostly through the fame he acquired with the ballad Little Giffen.

Francis Orray Ticknor was born on November 13, 1822, in Fortville, Georgia, the youngest of three children born to Harriot Coolidge and Orray Ticknor. His parents came from Connecticut, where his father, Orray Ticknor, was a doctor. Orray Ticknor moved to Savannah, Georgia, in 1815, and married Harriot Coolidge, whose family had moved from Connecticut to Georgia around 1800. The family moved to Fortville, where they raised a family.

At age 13, Ticknor left for Pennsylvania where he attended a boys school, and then the Philadelphia College of Medicine (later Gettysburg College) where he got his degree in medicine in 1842. In 1844 he started a practice as a country doctor in Shell Creek, Georgia, a very quiet and rural place where Ticknor found himself missing the social life of bigger towns, though his practice seems to have thrived. He married his wife Rosalie Nelson in 1847. They had eight children (two of them died young) and moved to Columbus, on a hill called Torch Hill and a house named for the hill.

(Wikipedia)

Little Giffen

Out of the focal and foremost fire,

Out of the hospital walls as dire,

Smitten of grapeshot and gangrene,

(Eighteenth battle and he sixteen) --

Specter! such as you seldom see,

Little Giffen of Tennessee.

"Take him and welcome," the surgeon said;

Little the doctor can help the dead!

So we took him, and brought him where

The balm was sweet in the summer air;

And we laid him down on a wholesome bed --

Utter Lazarus, heel to head!

And we watched the war with abated breath,

Skeleton boy against skeleton death!

Months of torture, how many such?

Weary weeks of the stick and crutch;

And still a glint in the steel-blue eye

Told of a spirit that wouldn't die.

And didn't. Nay! more! in death's despite

The crippled skeleton learned to write --

"Dear Mother!" at first, of course, and then

"Dear Captain!" inquiring about the men.

Captain's answer: "Of eighty and five,

Giffen and I are left alive."

Word of gloom from the war, one day;

Johnston pressed at the front, they say; --

Little Giffen was up and away!

A tear, his first, as he bade good-by,

Dimmed the glint of his steel-blue eye.

"I'll write, if spared!" There was news of fight,

But none of Giffen -- he did not write!

I sometimes fancy that were I King

Of the Princely Knights of the Golden Ring,

With the song of the minstrel in mine ear,

And the tender legend that trembles here,

I'd give the best on his bended knee --

The whitest soul of my chivalry --

For "Little Giffen" of Tennessee.