My Old Confederate Home Read online

  John Hess Leathers, president of the Louisville National Banking Company, picked up the large floral arrangement—hothouse carnations and roses arranged in a design of the Confederate stars and bars—which stood at the headplate. He carried it behind the casket to the waiting hearse.

  On March 6, 1898, an honor guard of Confederate veterans, all prominent Louisvillians, carried fifty-six-year-old William W. “Billy” Beasley, the crippled and impoverished owner of a street corner cigar stand, to his final resting place.1

  During the years following Lee's surrender at Appomattox, surviving Confederate soldiers struggled to cope with the consequences of having fought on the losing side in a long, bitter, ugly war.

  America's Civil War permanently marked the generation of men who fought its battles. One in five white Southern men of military age—fathers, brothers, and sons—didn't survive the war; more than a quarter-million were killed in battle, died of wounds they received, or succumbed to disease. Of those who came home, 20 percent were visibly wounded, or crippled, disfigured, or disabled in some manner that would impair them for the rest of their lives. Tens of thousands more were disabled in ways less visible, but no less debilitating.2

  William W. “Billy” Beasley was one of the visibly wounded.

  Twenty years old and employed as a typesetter in Selma, Alabama, Beasley enlisted on April 21, 1861, in Company A, Fourth Alabama Infantry. Within a fortnight he was marching into Georgia with ten thousand other Southern boys caught up in the awful excitement of war. By first frost he had tasted battle at Manassas Junction, almost within sight of Washington City.

  For the next three years Beasley and the Fourth Alabama fought in most of the major engagements of the eastern valleys: Seven Pines, Cold Harbor, Malvern Hill, and Gettysburg. At Chickamauga he was named color-bearer for his regiment and given a sergeant's chevron. Confident in his stripes, Beasley was, at twenty-three, an experienced infantryman with a long, drooping mustache and hair already showing gray.3

  At one of the battles of the Wilderness Campaign in May 1864, Beasley took the soft lead ball that would cripple him. It was a side-to-side belly wound, breaking his right hipbone, destroying the left hip joint, and mostly missing the major organs in his abdomen. Through some miracle of battlefield medicine he survived, but for the rest of his life he would be tormented by bowel and kidney infections. And Sergeant Billy Beasley of the CSA would never again walk upright.

  Eventually, Beasley and the rest of the surviving soldiers of the beaten Confederacy staggered home—most hungry, barefoot, half naked, sick at heart, and without a penny in their pockets—to confront the hell that had been visited on their homes.

  To be a citizen of the Old South in April 1865 was to suffer a psychic loss not unlike that of a farmer who emerges from a root cellar the morning after a tornado to see the things he had grown and owned now flattened or gone. The heady confidence of 1861 was replaced by shock, then a grim realization of the butchers’ bill paid and the need to replant and rebuild.

  In 1860 six Southern states were among the top ten states in the nation in per capita income. Twenty years later there would be no Southern state in the top thirty. Four years of war destroyed a century of Southern economic development.

  Most Confederate veterans—sickly, wounded, disabled or not—simply stood up, spat out the ashes of defeat, and did what they had to do to care for themselves and their families. One by one, day by day, they put aside memories of that awful time as best they could and went back to work. There was plenty of work to be done and too few people to do it.

  Nearly a million men who had worn the gray of the Southern Confederacy returned home after the war, and the victorious U.S. government felt no need to award its former foes any manner of medical care, pension, or assistance. The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibited payment of pensions or compensation to ex-Confederates, and Republican congressmen were positively gleeful at its ratification in 1868. (Congressman Thaddeus Stevens regretted only that the punishment was too lenient for traitorous Rebels. “A load of misery must sit heavy on their souls,” he said.)

  In state after state, Reconstruction governments refused to consider the payment of pensions to Confederate veterans (or promptly rescinded the few programs that were enacted). Even as the strictures of Reconstruction were eased, most Southern states were hobbled by debt and the costs of rebuilding. Few local governments were in any better position to provide significant relief to disabled Confederate veterans.4

  Shortly after the outbreak of hostilities, the federal Congress enacted a pension plan for its own injured veterans (and for the widows and children of those who would not survive the war). Throughout the 1860s and 1870s, Congress passed a series of acts that provided pensions of up to $31 a month for disabled Union veterans. Any Union veteran disabled by injury, disease, or conditions resulting from his service was entitled to a monthly pension or a lumpsum payment for the time since his discharge. A national organization of Union veterans, the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), was founded in 1866 and evolved into a formidable political machine, lobbying for increased benefits for soldiers of the winning side.5

  Some Southern states offered artificial limbs or enacted modest pension programs; ex-Confederate soldiers in Kentucky, however, received nothing.

  By the 1880s age and the debilitating effects of their time spent in uniform began to impair the ability of many Confederate veterans to earn a living. Disabled veterans grew more visible on the streets and in the alleys of Southern cities. Some were able to eke out a slim living; others were unemployed and homeless. Whether due to lingering pain in body or soul, many turned to liquor or laudanum for relief.6

  Sergeant Billy Beasley was one of the all-too-visible cripples. He could walk, but only in tiny half-steps from the knees down, as if his thighs were cinched together with harness strap. Pain and poor balance kept him stooped at the waist like a bowing manservant. Beasley was a skilled typesetter, his fingers fast and his eyes strong. He found regular employment at print shops and newspapers, but periodic bouts of infection and a weakness for strong drink regularly cost him the jobs those skills had earned.

  He drifted from job to job, city to city, northward through Tennessee and finally into Kentucky.

  As Beasley and other disabled ex-Confederate soldiers drifted, the United States was providing military pensions and medical care to more than 200,000 Union army veterans. (The pension office paid an estimated $88 million in 1889 alone.) Veterans’ benefits were becoming the largest single item in the federal budget, accounting for almost 18 percent of the total.7

  For the tens of thousands of crippled, impoverished, or soul-sick ex-Confederates like Sergeant Billy Beasley there was little public assistance in Louisville, Kentucky. If these veterans were to receive a helping hand, it would have to be from one that had shared the same canteen.8

  Many ex-Confederates, however, had no need of help. Through some inexplicable formula involving education, family connections, special skill, determination, or just plain luck, they managed to sidestep the awful and lasting personal consequences of four years of civil war.

  On Good Friday, March 30, 1888, banker John Hess Leathers left his office at the Louisville Banking Company and walked three blocks to the offices of the Louisville Courier-Journal. There he delivered a handwritten notice to the editor with the soft-spoken request that it be published as soon as possible in the newspaper.

  The notice appeared on the front page of Sunday's edition: “You are respectfully invited to attend a meeting of ex-Confederate soldiers, to be held on Monday evening, April 2, at 8 o'clock, in the City Court room, City Hall, entrance on Jefferson Street, for the purpose of forming in this city a permanent Society of ex-Confederates.”9

  More than sixty well-dressed men milled around the room on Monday night when ex-Confederate George B. Eastin called the meeting to order. Eastin was well known to the others in the room. He had been a Confederate cavalryman and had ridden with
General John Hunt Morgan. Captured during Morgan's Ohio raid, Eastin was imprisoned at Camp Douglas in Chicago but escaped, and made his way into Canada to join Confederate conspirators there. (Though he could have been hanged had it been known in wartime, by 1888 it was common knowledge that Eastin was one of the out-of-uniform saboteurs who infiltrated Yankee-occupied St. Louis for the purpose of destroying the docks and bridges there.) Eastin was now a prominent Louisville attorney with an extensive corporate practice.10

  Eastin opened the meeting by acknowledging other familiar faces in the room. He introduced two judges, an Episcopal bishop, two company presidents, a newspaper publisher, and others, all to loud applause.

  We have all been comrades around the campfire, Eastin told them, and today we are comrades in business and commerce. He reminded his listeners of the comrades not in attendance that evening because they lacked streetcar fare or appropriate dress, or because of their infirmity or misfortune. He spoke of men who had already passed away, who were buried in paupers’ graves without dignity or the honor due them.

  “I have gathered an organizing committee,” Eastin said, “to establish an association of men who were honorably engaged in the service of the Confederate States of America. As in the past, if no others should help us, we shall help ourselves.”

  The room erupted in cheers.

  The eight men of the organizing committee sat at the head table with Eastin, all men with impeccable Confederate and civic credentials. But it was the bullet-headed man in the fashionable dark suit sitting to Eastin's right who had assembled the committee, served as the group's secretary, and drafted the constitution presented to the veterans that evening. Major Eastin was at the podium, but former Sergeant-Major John H. Leathers was the one who got things done.11

  Like Billy Beasley, John Leathers was born in 1841, and both had been Confederate infantrymen who earned their sergeants’ stripes in combat. The similarities ended there.

  Leathers was born in northern Virginia, son of a cabinetmaker and the youngest of seven children. Working in his father's shop, writing bills of sale, delivering invoices, and keeping inventory, Leathers showed an early aptitude for numbers and organization. By age sixteen he was clerking at a dry goods store in Martinsburg, a crossroads town on the eastern slopes of the Appalachian Mountains just ten miles south of Maryland and the Potomac River.

  In 1859 young Leathers came to Louisville, having been called there by an uncle for employment with a retail druggist in the city. A year later he became bookkeeper in the wholesale clothing firm of William Terry & Company.

  At the first news of war Leathers put down his ledger books, returned home, and enlisted in the Second Virginia Infantry of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. By the time Leathers returned to Louisville in the autumn of 1865, having healed from an injury suffered at Gettysburg, his old employer had founded a new firm and was holding a position open for the returning veteran. Leathers needed only to buy a new suit of clothes and settle in to manage the firm's accounts.

  During the five years he kept books for the wholesale clothing firm of Jones & Tapp, Leathers built a reputation as a tight-vested young man: composed, controlled, and diligent at balancing assets and liabilities to the penny. It became apparent that Leathers's business skills extended beyond account books, and in 1870 the twenty-nine-year-old ex-Confederate was admitted as a partner in the renamed firm of Tapp, Leathers & Company.12

  Because of his business, Leathers adopted the habit of wearing stylish suits and cravats of the best fabrics. And he wore them well. Leathers seemed to stand taller than his five-foot, ten-inch height, largely because of his broad shoulders, slim waist, and rigid posture. His hair was a sandy brown, cut slightly shorter than current fashion. Older men wore their beards full, but Leathers shaved to a neat mustache and an imperial, a pointed tuft of beard on the lower lip and chin. Even at a young age, John Leathers exhibited the demeanor of a serious man.

  Throughout the 1870s and early 1880s Leathers managed the operations of Tapp, Leathers & Company while his partner, P. H. Tapp, a native of Florence, Alabama, cultivated customers. By 1885 more than 500 employees under Leathers's supervision were manufacturing Kentucky jeans and lines of men's and boys’ dress clothing for retailers throughout the country.

  In 1885 Theodore Harris, a successful Louisville financier, moved his Louisville Banking Company to a new building at the corner of Fifth and Market Streets. Harris had narrowly avoided the financial panics of the 1870s and was now poised for aggressive expansion throughout Kentucky. He was looking for a man with “all the snap and dash of Young America” to direct the growth of his bank. On April 1, 1885, Harris and his board of directors convinced John Leathers to oversee day-to-day operations of the Louisville Banking Company.13

  Three years later, by the night of the organizational meeting of ex-Confederates at Louisville's City Hall, Leathers's “snap and dash” had resulted in the tripling of deposits of the Louisville Banking Company. The forty-four-year-old former infantryman was head of Kentucky's largest financial institution.

  At Eastin's nod, Leathers distributed printed copies of the constitution he and his committee had drafted for discussion by the veterans present. Louisville city court judge W. L. Jackson moved that the constitution be read aloud and approved section by section.

  John Weller, a local attorney and former Confederate infantry captain, began his reading with Article I: “This association shall be known as ‘The Confederate Association of Kentucky.’”

  Within three hours the constitution of the new association had been debated and approved. Most of the debate centered around such extraneous items as the meeting schedule—four times annually “on the second Monday of April, July, October and January”—and the means by which men who had brought dishonor on the Confederacy could be excluded—”five black balls shall reject any application” for membership.

  Article II remained just as Leathers and his committee had drafted it. The first object of the association, the constitution read, “shall be the cultivation of social relationships” and “to preserve the fraternal ties of comradeship.” But the organization also pledged to “aid and assist those of the members who, from disease, misfortune or the infirmities of age, may become incapable of supporting themselves or families,” to “pay a decent respect to the remains and to the memory of those who die,” and to “see that no worthy Confederate shall ever become an object of public charity.”

  Much of the rest of the document was organizational boilerplate, but Article IX had been inserted at Leathers's suggestion: “This association shall have power to receive and hold any property, real, personal or mixed, that may be donated by any person for the use of the relief fund or for other purposes of the association.”

  The wording was sufficiently vague so that the article caused little comment on the evening of ratification; but this single paragraph would—more than a decade later—allow for the establishment of the Kentucky Confederate Home.

  The proposed constitution was ratified unanimously.

  The next bit of business for the evening was the election of officers. Reading from a sheet that had been prepared for him, Judge Jackson nominated Eastin for president, Leathers for vice-president, and newspaper editor Thomas D. Osborne for secretary. The slate was approved by acclamation.

  At the end of the evening sixty-eight men answered the first roll call, affixed their signatures to the new constitution, then turned and saluted their new officers. They were the charter members of Louisville's new Confederate Association of Kentucky.

  In the aftermath of the war, some veterans wished never to speak of it again. Others sought to regain the comradeship of others who, like them, had faced the cannon and have the chance to share stories of their wartime experiences.

  The South's surviving upper class—the more affluent, the better educated, the least affected by lasting hardships—were forming the first regional veterans’ clubs almost before the ink dried at Appomattox. The Army of N
orthern Virginia Association was organized in 1870, its membership consisting primarily of Robert E. Lee's former staff officers. There was the Society of the Army and Navy of the Confederate States, a Society of Ex-Confederate Soldiers and Sailors, and even an Association of Medical Officers of the Army and Navy of the Confederacy.14

  The Association of the Army of Tennessee (AAT), founded in 1877, provided an opportunity for well-heeled veterans to meet in a different city each year for extravagant banquets, cigars, music, and evenings of drunken storytelling. (The bill of fare from one of these banquets lists a choice of ten wild game entrees, eight oyster dishes, and fourteen desserts.)15

  Though these early organizations may have espoused noble ideals, most were elitist in their membership and were formed for little more than social purposes. Few expanded beyond their regional roots.

  The founding of Louisville's Confederate Association of Kentucky in 1888, however, marked a change in the nature of Confederate veterans’ organizations that was beginning to occur throughout the South as veterans aged and their needs increased. The new Louisville association would certainly serve a social purpose, but its membership was sworn to aid, honor, and support their less fortunate comrades.

  The veterans who chartered the Confederate Association of Kentucky were lawyers, physicians, legislators, educators, judges, bankers, and business owners. They were members of Louisville's commercial and social elite and could certainly afford the association's $5.00 initiation fee—the equivalent of a week's wages for a factory worker—and dues of $1.00 at every meeting. The organization's money would not be spent on elaborate banquets and bands, however. Instead, the funds would be banked (at Leathers's bank, of course) in separate accounts, with initiation fees designated for relief and dues used to pay the group's minimal operating expenses. From time to time, amounts not used for organizational expenses would be moved into the Relief Fund. The Confederate Association of Kentucky was strict about spending its money on relief and not revelry. During its first nine years the group collected $7,500, spending all but $425 on relief and memorial work.16