John Bell Hollis was just 19 years old, and it looked like he would never see 20.

The young Lawrence Countian was scheduled to be shot the next day just outside of Lawrenceburg–until quick thinking and whiskey intervened.

Hollis, despite being a native southerner, enlisted in the Union army during the Civil War. He served in Company B of the Second Tennessee Mounted Infantry from 1863 until the autumn of 1864.

According to the Annals of the Lawrence County Historical Society, an article written in the ‘Democrat-Union’ by Captain N. Brown Simms in the 1930s recalled that Hollis and a covert team of saboteurs “led a raid on the jail in Lawrenceburg to free Union prisoners” during the Civil War. It was a mission which must have been assigned him shortly after he enlisted in October 1863, as the Lawrence County Jail was burned by a different contingent of Union soldiers in November 1863.

Hollis’s raid, as the story goes, was a failure. He and his men were all captured and sentenced to death the following day. Their last night on earth was to be spent under careful Confederate guard in the vicinity of Pine Bluff in western Lawrenceburg.
That night, however, Hollis had a plan.

He convinced his guards that they deserved a drink.

And another. And then another. And then another.

Until finally, in the dead of the night, the Confederate guards tasked with guarding Hollis and his men were completely drunk. As the guards lay passed out, Hollis and his men melted into the woods near Pine Bluff and made it back to their regiment.

Although Hollis was from Lawrence County, the Second Tennessee Mounted Infantry was comprised largely of men from Wayne County, which was a hotbed of Union sympathy during the Civil War. Hollis served a year’s enlistment and went on to live a long life among his rebel neighbors.

Hollis’s status as a Union veteran apparently did little to hurt his reputation. When he died in 1917, at the age of 73, his obituary in the Lawrence ‘Democrat’ said, “As a gentleman, citizen and farmer he stood among the very best in the county. He was wise in council, calm in judgment, and faithful to the discharge of all duties.”