My Old Confederate Home Read online

  The association's bylaws empowered the officers of the organization—including Eastin, Leathers, and Osborne—to examine applicants for need and worthiness, then make their recommendations for assistance to an executive committee.

  When Billy Beasley, disabled and destitute at forty-eight years of age, arrived in Louisville with his two-year-old daughter in the humid summer of 1889, no public assistance program was available to him. But Beasley and his family would receive the help of some of Louisville's most prominent citizens.

  P. H. Tapp, John Leathers's former partner in the clothing business and a native Alabaman, may have introduced Billy Beasley to the banker. Or perhaps Beasley wrote his own letter of introduction to Leathers, who was fast becoming one of the most prominent ex-Confederates in the state.

  By whatever means the introduction occurred, Beasley and Leathers met at Leathers's office off the main lobby of the Louisville Banking Company in November 1889. Beasley needed help, and Leathers would give a serious hearing to any man who had worn the gray.

  Leathers and Beasley had been born just two months apart. Both grew up practicing a trade, and both might have lived fulfilling lives as tradesmen had not the war intervened. But in 1889 it would be difficult to find two men more different.

  Leathers stood tall. Freshly barbered, with his made-to-order suit and shined shoes with thin leather soles, he radiated the vitality of a successful capitalist in the process of building a New South. The cork soles of Beasley's shoes scuffed across the floor as he hobbled into Leathers's corner office. He was bent at the waist, barely able to look Leathers in the eye, a secondhand derby in his hand.

  The first order of business between the two men was to establish Beasley's bona fides as a Confederate veteran: date of enlistment, units served, marches, encampments, and, finally, the battle that put a ball through Beasley's hip. Beasley produced his discharge and parole papers.

  Discussion then turned to Beasley's need for assistance and his worthiness for relief.

  The bent man told of his years since the war: constant pain, increasing disability, a growing familiarity with alcohol, and the loss of job after job. Like a guilty traveler emptying his suitcase before a customs inspector, the Alabaman laid out the sad highlights of his life story for Leathers.

  Beasley had married for the first time in Nashville three years before. She was a churchgoing woman for whom Beasley had forsaken alcohol completely, but his bride had died in childbirth. Now, with hands too tremorous and brain too slow to find employment sorting type for a printer, the crippled veteran was left with a baby to raise and the hope of finding occasional odd jobs to support them both.

  As a bank manager, Leathers was accustomed to hearing tales of woe, and he shared a conviction common to successful men in the nineteenth century. An individual's character—not his upbringing, not his current circumstance, and certainly not society—made him responsible for his own acts. The “worthy” man is one whose character is sufficiently strong to avoid the pitfalls of alcoholism, drug addiction, financial mismanagement, or moral dissolution. Or, if so ensnared, the worthy man has the strength of character to return himself to a virtuous path with the assistance of others.17

  A veteran like Beasley had shown his strength of character on the battlefield by carrying a rifle and following the bugle. He had further demonstrated the inner strength necessary to give up alcohol and drugs, and take responsibility for his family. Beasley's indigence was, therefore, not a result of poor character. By this measure, Leathers and the Confederate Association of Kentucky deemed the crippled and unfortunate Sergeant Beasley worthy of assistance.

  Within days of his meeting with Leathers, Beasley began receiving a temporary stipend of $2.00 a week to provide food for himself and his daughter. He received a letter telling him of a vacant apartment owned by Thomas Osborne in which he could live rent-free for six months. And he received a $100 loan from the Louisville Banking Company—guaranteed by Leathers, of course—to open a news and cigar stand at the corner of Market and Fifth Streets in Louisville.

  Seven years later, in the winter of 1896, Mrs. Nannie H. Williams of Guthrie, Kentucky, came to Louisville for a stay at her son's home. One day during her visit, Mrs. Williams was sharing tea with callers, and the women were recalling war days in Kentucky.

  Her son told the visitors of an acquaintance, a Confederate veteran who kept a little cigar stand on the corner of Market and Fifth Streets. “He was wounded in one of the battles of the Wilderness,” the son said, “and can't walk a step; but he is always there, cheerful and pleased to serve his customers.”

  “We women soon had on our bonnets,” Mrs. Williams later wrote, “for this one considers herself a Confederate veteran, and that story had touched a sympathetic chord.”18

  Nannie Williams, her friends, and her son boarded a streetcar for the trip downtown to meet Billy Beasley.

  “The inevitable stand was by the wall of the great bank (doubtless by courtesy of some friend within),” she wrote, “and an old gray-haired Johnny Reb with keen eye beneath his shabby derby hat was perched on his high seat, ready to sell cigars, chewing-wax or anything in his line.”

  Billy Beasley had made the most of his last chance. With the help of the Confederate Association of Kentucky he had opened a little cigar, news, and snack stand, a wooden lean-to nestled next to the granite stairs outside the entrance to John Leathers's Louisville Banking Company. He had taken a sobriety pledge and joined a church. There he met and later married a widow, also with a daughter, and the family of four lived simply in a small rented home on East Madison Street.

  Beasley became a celebrity of sorts in the fall of 1895, when 150,000 Union veterans descended on Louisville for their annual Grand Army of the Republic reunion. Beasley's downtown newsstand was a popular destination for the swarm of Yankee veterans, and out-of-town newsmen found the crippled but cheerful Rebel a good subject for the feature stories they dispatched to newspaper editors back home.

  At her son's introduction, Mrs. Williams stepped forward to shake Beasley's hand.

  “My best friends have always been the ladies,” said Beasley with a warm smile and a quick wink.

  Nannie Williams was charmed by the little man, and Billy Beasley, proud to have escaped the poverty and uselessness that had dogged him through his middle years, was gratified by the attention.

  “When you go to that hospitable city of Louisville,” Mrs. Williams advised, “find the old sergeant at his stand. You will be none the poorer to invest in some of his offerings.”

  On the humid afternoon of March 6, 1898, John H. Leathers met the hearse carrying Billy Beasley's casket at the entrance to Cave Hill Cemetery. A persistent abdominal infection related to the wound he suffered years before had finally overcome the crippled merchant with the shabby derby, even after six weeks of hospital care.

  W. B. Haldeman, John Castleman, Bennett H. Young, Thomas D. Osborne, John Pirtle, William O. Coleman, Harry P. McDonald, and dozens more of Kentucky's business, social, and political elite—Confederate veterans all—formed ranks to escort the body of Sergeant Beasley to its final resting place in the cemetery's Confederate lot.

  Leathers lingered by the graveside for a few moments after interment, one of Kentucky's most prominent bankers paying final tribute to the unfortunate cripple. As newly elected president of the Confederate Association of Kentucky, Leathers would soon approve bank drafts paying the bills for Billy Beasley's hospital care, funeral service, floral tributes, cemetery plot, and headstone, all in fulfillment of the group's promise to “pay a decent respect to the remains and to the memory of those who die.”

  Three decades after the end of the war, Kentucky's Confederate veterans were caring for, supporting, honoring, and burying their own.19

  Chapter 2

  The Private and the Clubwoman

  The afternoon air smelled of blooming dogwood, fresh-cut flowers, and raw pine lumber on Saturday, June 10, 1893. Fourteen men and women sat in folding chair
s on a wooden speakers’ platform erected the day before on a hillside in the Confederate section of Lexington Cemetery.

  A thick carpet of greenery and cut flowers encircled the platform. Some of the flowers were formal arrangements; most were snipped from gardens that morning, gathered into proud bouquets and laid against the others. Blue, white, and red ribbons fluttered from the arrangements. Outside the colorful perimeter a patient crowd of some two thousand people milled about, meeting friends, sharing greetings, waiting for the festivities to begin. Here and there, families spread picnic fare on quilts in the shade among the gravestones.

  From his seat on the speakers’ stand, John Boyd looked down on the frivolity with a vague expression of disapproval. He said nothing, but sat rigid on his wooden folding chair, back straight, palms resting flat on his knees, head up, eyes moving only to appraise the crowd. He was a stiff-necked man in his fifties, of average height but with a slight excess of weight. An impressive mustache drew attention from his thinning gray hair, receding hairline, and thickening jowls. As was his practice during public appearances, Boyd wore a dark woolen suit of generous cut, a boiled white shirt, a black silk four-in-hand, and a lapel button that identified him as a veteran of the Army of the Confederate States of America.

  Seated near Boyd, Adeline Allen Graves twisted and turned left and right to chat with other dignitaries on the platform, a social ballet at which the slim brunette was particularly adept. She spoke to those near her with an easy familiarity; at one time or other she had asked most of the women surrounding her to chair a volunteer committee and most of the men for a charitable donation. Adeline Graves—everyone knew her as “Addie”—was one of Lexington's most active clubwomen, and if she was not speaking with people nearby about Confederate veteran business, she was certainly conducting the business of some other civic or service organization. On this day she wore an expensive china silk dress, stylish for the new season but not faddish, the muted colors appropriate for a public ceremony honoring Lexington's Confederate war dead.

  At 4:00 P.M. sharp John Boyd consulted his pocket watch; then, closing it with a snap, he stepped to the podium to begin this ritual of the Lost Cause.1

  The formation in 1888 of Louisville's Confederate Association of Kentucky reflected a desire by ex-Confederates to revisit what for many was the most significant experience of their lives.

  In towns and villages throughout the South in the decades following the war, ex-Confederates began gathering for small meetings and reunions. At first, the meetings were impromptu and informal—old friends meeting at a country graveyard, a local grillroom, or the county courthouse to speak quietly of the sights they had seen and the faces they would never see again. “You go to reunions,” said one old veteran of another war, “and you find yourself trying to remember what you've spent the last fifty years trying to forget.”2

  Kentucky's postwar economy fostered a new middle class—business owners, shopkeepers, physicians, lawyers, skilled workers—in the smaller cities and towns, and these men began to organize into formal local groups. The ex-Confederates met to celebrate the fellowship of their shared experience in wartime, but, like their counterparts in more urban areas, found it difficult to overlook the disabled and impoverished veterans in their own communities.

  These local Confederate veterans’ groups were more inclusive than the elite national associations of former officers that sprang up immediately after the war. They flourished as social and political organizations (though most publicly disavowed any political purpose), and many provided some manner of personal relief for their aging and less fortunate comrades: a box of groceries for a neighbor too sick to plow or enough cordwood for a one-armed man to get through winter.

  By the end of the 1880s the rebuilt South was dotted with hundreds of independent small-town groups, and some began to coalesce into statewide organizations. Groups in Georgia rallied under the banner of the Confederate Veteran Survivors Association, South Carolina groups formed the Old Survivors Association, and Virginians launched a campaign to assemble their Grand Camp of Confederate Veterans.3

  At a statewide reunion of veterans of Kentucky's Orphan Brigade held in Louisville in September 1889 (and hosted by Louisville's new Confederate Association of Kentucky), banker John Leathers proposed that Kentucky's ex-Confederates establish auxiliary branches of the Louisville group. Local branches of the statewide organization would pay dues into a common fund, elect a slate of officers, and adopt bylaws dedicating themselves to the care of members in distress and to honorable burial of the deceased. Visiting veterans saw the benefit of affiliating with Louisville's Confederate Association of Kentucky, and appointed a committee to make it happen.

  “It is likely,” said the enthusiastic committee chairman, “that nearly all of the ex-Confederates in the state will be members of the Association by [next year].”4

  The committee chairman failed to account for the determination and salesmanship of one former Confederate private from Lexington.

  John Boyd of Lexington was, by all accounts, one of those men for whom military service becomes a defining moment in life.5

  A native Kentuckian, Boyd was born in 1841 in Richmond, thirty miles south of Lexington, but his family moved to Texas during the first years of the Great Southern Migration of the 1850s. A yellow fever epidemic killed some of his family and sent the rest scurrying back to Lexington three years later.

  There, Boyd attended public schools and worked horses—caring for them, training them, and trading them—until he joined the army of the Confederate States when it occupied central Kentucky in 1862. He served as a private in the Buckner Guards, a cavalry unit of the state militia.

  A private soldier in combat learns quickly that his immediate world is divided into two parts: one for himself and one for the officers. The officer is always warm, dry, clean, and safe; the private is invariably cold, wet, and a mile from food or relief.

  During days on the march and nights in camp Boyd shared cold, wet, and hunger with other men of the lowest ranks. He formed lasting friendships with Kentuckians who knew what it meant to sleep under a pine-bough lean-to while officers slept on cots in taut canvas tents. He trusted his life to the men standing next to him in the battle line, not to the officers who viewed combat through spyglasses. Boyd's unit surrendered in North Carolina at the end of the war, and he joined the rest of the exhausted veterans on the long walk back to Kentucky.

  After his return to Lexington, Boyd supported himself as a saddlemaker and an investor; but he comported himself as a soldier. He was said to be an absolute teetotaler with a clear and unequivocal view of right and wrong.

  During the postwar years, when garrulous generals were describing the wisdom of their battlefield strategies in books and magazines, Boyd felt compelled to celebrate and honor the common soldier. He organized the effort (and paid much of the cost) to relocate the bodies of fourteen Lexington soldiers from poorly marked graves on distant battlefields to new burial plots under the crabapple trees in Lexington Cemetery. Boyd's collection of Civil War–era photos, engravings, and artifacts was said to be the finest private collection in Kentucky.6

  For the best of motives, perhaps, Boyd distrusted the founders and leaders of Louisville's Confederate Association. They were officer types, he reasoned—high-sounding, inflated, and not to be trusted by the common soldier.

  In 1890 Boyd formed his own Kentucky veterans’ organization.7

  He enlisted former comrades-at-arms from twenty rural counties to serve as chairmen, each responsible for helping to organize a local veterans association. After less than a year of ardent correspondence, personal visits, and recruitment, Boyd had assembled twelve newly organized groups into his own statewide organization, the Confederate Veteran Association of Kentucky, on November 29, 1890. (The Louisville association of ex-Confederates was not invited to affiliate.)

  “Your [Executive] Committee … will be pardoned the pride they have in the success of the organization,” Boy
d wrote to members shortly after founding the new organization. “Our Association has steadily grown from its birth, scarce ten months ago, until now its Veteran and Honorary membership has reached more than three hundred in number.”

  From the beginning, Boyd was dismissive of any social purpose for his new statewide association. The strenuous efforts of the association, he wrote, quoting from the group's bylaws, are to be directed toward “the permanent establishment and endowment of a home for those who, ‘from disease, misfortune, or the infirmities of age, may become incapable of supporting themselves or families.’”8

  Boyd's more immediate goal, however, was to affiliate his group with a new national organization, the United Confederate Veterans.9

  A quarter century after the founding of the Grand Army of the Republic, the organization of Union veterans, representatives of a dozen Confederate veterans’ groups from Louisiana, Tennessee, and Mississippi met in New Orleans in 1889 to form a national association for ex-Confederates. The small group chose a name, United Confederate Veterans (UCV), and began gathering the smaller, independent Confederate groups (called “camps”) and fledgling state organizations into a single national association.10

  Under the UCV umbrella, small camps would share similar bylaws, dues structures, and membership requirements quite different from the more elitist, big-city associations with their $5.00 initiation fees and $1.00-a-meeting dues.

  Not surprisingly, the UCV operated under a military structure. The chief national officer was the “commander-in-chief,” and all other officers were given a military rank in the organization. The chain of command provided for three geographical departments, and each department was divided into state divisions (although individual camps were virtually autonomous).