Frank Hight - "The Unrepentant Rebel”

Francis Middleton “Frank” Hight was a bright young man with a bright future. Seventeen years old in 1860, he was born in Pennsylvania and had come south with his family when his father opened an iron foundry in Augusta. William Hight manufactured and repaired cars for the Georgia Railroad and made pipes and valves for the Augusta Water Works. Frank was a bookkeeper in his father’s office. Frank was a part-time soldier, too, a private in the elite volunteer company, the Oglethorpe Light Infantry of Augusta.

Despite his Northern birth, Frank was loyal to his hometown and in March 1861 he went to war with his company in the 1st Georgia Volunteers (Ramsey’s). The regiment spent a year on active duty in Pensacola, Florida, and in western Virginia. They were discharged in March 1862. Frank joined the Augusta Fire Department when he got home. In the summer of 1862 his fire company organized themselves as the Georgia Light Guards and joined the 48th Georgia Regiment in the Army of Northern Virginia. Frank entered service as a sergeant this time and was soon a second lieutenant, but in 1863 he was discharged for an unspecified disability.

Frank worked for the railroad for a while. When the war ended, his friends came home, but right on their heels were Yankee soldiers as occupiers, ready to begin Reconstruction. Late in the night of August 30, 1865, Frank and two of his army buddies from the Oglethorpes, Josh Doughty and Charlie Watkins, for a reason lost to history, killed a Yankee captain, Alex Heasley, an official of the Freedmens Bureau and a young man like themselves, shooting and stabbing him multiple times. Coincidentally, Alex, like Frank, was a native Pennsylvanian. The evil deed was witnessed and the alleged culprits were soon arrested. A blood-stained knife was found under Watkins’ pillow. During a trial by military commission that lasted for two months, the defendants were represented by the best attorneys Augusta could offer. Judge William T. Gould, Major Joseph B. Cumming, and A.H. McLaws, the brother of General Lafayette McLaws, handled their cases for them.

In the end, for Frank it was for nothing. The commission acquitted Watkins and Doughty, but Hight was adjudged guilty of murder and sentenced to fifteen years confinement at Auburn Penitentiary in far-off, cold New York State. To add to his anguish, Frank’s father had died during the trial.

Auburn was a model prison for its time but still a terrible place. Corporal punishment had been outlawed but the convicts were kept in absolute silence at all times, the “Auburn System.” Frank arrived there in dank, freezing December 1865. Happy to tell, he served only six months of his term before being pardoned by President Andrew Johnson. By the end of June 1866 he was back in Augusta.

What we can learn of Frank Hight’s subsequent career shows that he realized his early potential in large part. In 1868 he married Anna, the daughter of Dr. Edward E. Ford, rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. Frank might have “been sweet” on Anna before the trial. Anna’s mother was the sister of Georgia Civil War hero Francis S. Bartow, for whom Bartow County is named, and for a time in the 1870s the couple lived with Anna’s grandmother Bartow in Chattanooga and at Woodstock, Georgia. By 1887, Frank was manager of the Woodstock Iron and Steel Company in Anniston, Alabama, the company town founded by the famous Noble iron smelting family of Rome, Georgia. He was for many years commander of Pelham Camp #258, United Confederate Veterans, in Anniston, captain of the Anniston Rifles, and mayor of the city for eight years.

Anna died in Augusta in 1891, only 45 years old, leaving Frank and five children. He took her back to Anniston for burial. Frank’s life was ended by cancer in 1899. His obituary recounted his achievements but made no mention of his early indiscretion. A modern Georgia historian remarked recently that killing a Yankee in Augusta in 1865 did nothing to tarnish a Georgia man’s reputation. No doubt Frank Hight went to his grave completely unrepentant for his act of violence.