My Old Confederate Home Read online

  Not content with merely serving the veterans at their tables, independent Southern women eventually established their own private club. Correspondence between Caroline M. Goodlett, a native Kentuckian and president of a woman's auxiliary to the Tennessee Confederate Soldiers’ Home, and Anna D. Raines, a member of the women's auxiliary of Georgia's Confederate Veteran Association, led to the formation in 1894 of a nationwide service organization unifying hundreds of women's auxiliaries and ladies’ memorial associations. Goodlett and Raines envisioned a national federation to foster the social, historical, monumental, and benevolent purposes of existing independent clubs while instilling in the people of the South “a proper respect for and pride in the glorious war history.”

  “The ladies of the South ought to organize in one broad sisterhood,” Goodlett wrote Raines, “and band themselves under one name, and throw around it such restrictions as would exclude all persons and their descendants who were not loyal to the South in her hour of need.”

  Goodlett and Raines invited representatives of women's clubs to Nashville to draft a constitution. Delegates approved a constitution, elected officers, approved the design for a club badge, and chose a name for their new organization, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). The constitution provided that new chapters would be numbered in the order in which they entered the federation.30

  In October 1896 fifteen clubwomen of Lexington, including Addie Graves, were admitted as the charter chapter of Kentucky into the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Theirs was the twelfth chapter to enter the new national organization.31

  The groups represented on the speakers’ platform by John Boyd and Adeline Graves that day in 1893 would gain in size and social influence as Kentuckians moved toward the end of the century.

  John Boyd's single-mindedness drove the statewide growth of the Confederate Veteran Association of Kentucky to thirty-seven camps by 1897. The group maintained a healthy treasury (which Boyd invested in Lexington city street bonds) and an enthusiastic membership. That same year, Louisville's Confederate Association of Kentucky—still not affiliated with Boyd's group—applied for membership in the national United Confederate Veterans organization, bringing total enrollment of active ex-Confederates in Kentucky to more than 3,500 by 1900.

  The United Daughters of the Confederacy drew together disparate women's groups in Kentucky into a single organization that was thousands strong. The corresponding secretary of Lexington's new UDC chapter reported in 1896 that the “Lexington Chapter now numbers one hundred members.” She added that “Richmond has a large chapter, and Winchester and Georgetown have organized.”32 By 1900 more than 4,000 Kentucky women (under the statewide presidency of Addie Graves) would hold active membership in the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

  The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the United Confederate Veterans provided a national canvas on which the culture of the Lost Cause could be painted large. In addition, news of successful Confederate veterans assistance programs in other states could be shared with (and replicated by) Kentucky veterans’ groups and the women of the UDC.

  This combination of active ex-Confederates and sympathetic women, all working as part of strong statewide organizations, would in just a few years result in the establishment of the Kentucky Confederate Home.

  Chapter 3

  The Boat Captain and the Bank Robber

  Captain Daniel G. Parr had been a hearty man in his earlier days, but at seventy-six years of age, his arms and legs were as thin as dowel rods. Barely balanced on a scrawny neck, old Dan Parr's head started as a broad, bald dome, then tapered to a pointed chin with wispy white chin whiskers. Between brow and beard were a pair of dark, piercing eyes with just a touch of confusion about them and, below, an expressionless slice of a mouth with thin and bloodless lips. His was a triangular face, gaunt, and beginning to show the skull beneath. Taking his daily exercise down Louisville's Fourth Street on an April morning in 1901 with the help of an ebony walking cane, the stick-thin man with the oversized head looked like nothing less than a giant mantis in a black wool suit.

  With a black body servant at his elbow, Captain Parr wobbled down the street as if he owned it—which, in fact, he did. Daniel G. Parr, a steamboat captain and boat owner who discovered that the real money was to be made with warehouses and the property on which they sat, was by the start of the twentieth century one of Louisville's largest owners of commercial real estate. He was known as “The Pioneer of Fourth Avenue,” and the Parr blocks on Fourth Street south of the new courthouse had recently been valued at more than a half million dollars.

  On the morning of April 11, 1901, Captain Parr and his black helper halted to meet another man, younger and taller than he.

  “You're the Confederate?” Parr asked.

  “I am, sir,” the younger man answered.

  “Then meet me at my office soon, sir,” the capitalist commanded. “I have in my mind to do something for the Confederates.” The manservant made a note in a small leather daybook, and Captain Daniel Parr's appointment with Bennett Henderson Young was set.1

  When John Leathers inserted language in the constitution of his Louisville Confederate veterans’ group allowing that organization to receive and hold real estate, and when John Boyd wrote that a purpose of his statewide veterans’ organization was to be the “permanent establishment and endowment of a home” for indigent ex-Confederates, both men were acutely aware of Virginia Hanson's failed home for Confederate veterans, widows, and orphans in Georgetown.

  Virginia Hanson was the widow of beloved General Roger W. Hanson of Lexington. Hanson had served as a U.S. Army lieutenant in the Mexican War before returning to his law practice in Kentucky. Elected to the state assembly as a staunch supporter of states’ rights, he lost a close election for a seat in the U.S. Congress in 1860. As Kentucky teetered on the brink of secession in 1861, Hanson raised a regiment and rode south to join the Confederate army.

  Hanson was a commander who led from the front ranks, shouting personal encouragement to his men as he dodged Union shot and shell during combat. On January 2, 1863, his luck ran out: Brigadier General Roger W. Hanson fell, mortally wounded, during the battle of Stones River.2 His wife, Virginia, was left a childless widow with a comfortable estate near Mt. Sterling.

  Following the war, men of her husband's command would visit the widow Hanson to pay their respects to their fallen general's memory. It was through them that she began to hear stories of broken fortune and financial distress among the men who had followed her husband into battle.

  She met a private in her husband's command “who was reduced by wounds and disease and is now in the Fayette County poorhouse.” She knew a family of six children, she said, “their father dead and their mother in a lunatic asylum. These children are scattered among poor relations who are unable to support or educate them.”3

  In 1881 Virginia Hanson and Captain James E. Cantrill began soliciting donations to establish the Confederate Soldiers’ Home and Widows and Orphans Asylum in Georgetown. They wanted to provide a temporary shelter where the men of her husband's command—or their widows or children—could build lives free from the stain of pauperism. The Georgetown home would be a combination work camp and trade school; men and women could work as they were able, and children would be taught the industrial arts or homemaking skills.

  Initial contributions allowed Hanson and Cantrill to acquire the buildings and property of a former girls’ school for their asylum, and the first residents arrived in November. Bourbon County appropriated $150 to send Mr. and Mrs. A. Gunsaulte to live in the former schoolhouse, where the couple was expected to “do some light work in raising table supplies.”4

  Mrs. Hanson was counting on pledges from ex-Confederates to support and endow the asylum, and she enlisted the support of her husband's former officers. She was tireless in crisscrossing the state to solicit donations at reunions, political rallies, and other assemblies where she might find a sympathetic ear.5
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  But private contributions and good intentions alone weren't enough.

  The Georgetown home enjoyed warm public support, but it lacked strong, local Confederate veteran organizations to sustain interest and fundraising. Municipal and county governments were willing to pay for hometown indigents, but the Kentucky legislature showed no desire to fund the home.6

  Strangled with debt and out of money, Mrs. Hanson closed the home in 1883 after less than two years. The remaining residents were returned to the meager support of the county poorhouses or less-then-welcoming relatives.7

  Just as Leathers and Boyd were familiar with the failed Georgetown home, so were they and their fledgling veterans’ organizations familiar with attempts in other parts of the country to establish institutions for Confederate veterans who had fallen on hard times.8

  Although there was no coordinated national Confederate Home movement, veterans in many of the states of the old Confederacy (and several of the border states) began to establish their own asylums for indigent and invalid comrades. Fifteen homes had been attempted or opened by the time the nineteenth century wound to a close, and the means by which these early institutions were organized and funded differed state by state as ex-Confederates learned how (and how not) to finance and operate such a major undertaking.

  The Lee Camp Soldiers Home in Richmond, Virginia, resulted from a nationwide fundraising effort by Confederate and Union veterans in that city. Former combatants, now business associates, sought donations from comrades across the country “to establish a Home at said city for disabled ex-Confederate soldiers who are unable to take care of themselves, and whose helpless and pitiable condition calls for a liberal charity.”9 With money raised from Northern philanthropists, theatrical benefits, charity bazaars, and gifts from Confederate veterans everywhere, the home opened in February 1885.

  Confederate veterans in Austin, Texas, raised enough money to buy and equip a seven-room house on fifteen acres near the state capitol in 1886. The Texas Confederate Home for Men struggled for five years until the Texas legislature (in contravention of its own state constitution) voted regular funding in 1891.10

  Like Kentucky, Louisiana experienced its own false start at a home for indigent Confederate veterans. The Louisiana legislature in 1866 voted to fund a home, but reversed itself before a permanent place could be established. Twenty years later, after a series of political knife fights, the state again appropriated money to supplement local contributions, establishing a Confederate soldier's home in New Orleans in 1884.

  Wealthy veterans of the Baltimore Confederate Association established a home in Pikesville, Maryland, in 1888, but were unable to sustain it through their own contributions. They scrambled to drum up statewide support through most of the 1890s.

  Ex-Confederates in North Carolina organized, reorganized, and struggled for more than five years to raise money for a home in that state. It wasn't until 1891, when the state provided property and voted an annual appropriation, that the North Carolina Soldiers’ Home in Raleigh first welcomed nine needy ex-Confederates.

  As local Confederate veteran camps in Tennessee and Arkansas joined into statewide organizations under the United Confederate Veterans banner, they began to organize their own institutions. Tennessee Confederate veterans convinced the state to lease them Andrew Jackson's former estate in Nashville and provide a cash grant. Tennessee's first needy ex-Confederates moved into the Hermitage with the opening of the Tennessee Soldiers’ Home in 1890. Arkansans set out to raise $50,000 and, with the first $9,000, bought an old homestead south of Little Rock. The Arkansas Confederate Home opened officially in December 1890.11

  The thriving United Confederate Veterans (UCV) organization shared news of each fresh fundraising committee, false start, successful opening, and failure through Confederate Veteran, its monthly magazine, and the news spurred a regional competitiveness. As new chapters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) were organized, wives, sisters, and daughters of veterans added their voices to the call for statewide homes of care and refuge.

  By end of the 1890s it was apparent that the number and needs of invalid and indigent Confederate veterans were simply too great to be met by local assistance or niggardly pensions (in the states that could afford to provide them). It was one thing to bestow the temporary assistance that could help a crippled comrade reclaim his life, as John Leathers and Louisville's Confederate Association of Kentucky had done with Billy Beasley; it was quite another to provide rehabilitative care for entire families, as Virginia Hanson had attempted at Kentucky's short-lived Georgetown home.

  Southerners also took note of the residential care provided to Union veterans by the U.S. government. Even before Civil War battle flags were furled, the U.S. Congress had appropriated monies to establish asylums “for the relief of totally disabled officers and men of the volunteer forces of the United States.” In 1866 a board of managers acquired a bankrupt resort hotel near Augusta, Maine, and opened the first of thirteen institutions for Federal veterans of the Civil War. The homelike facilities provided residents with organized recreational activities, libraries, theaters, and regular religious services. (No ex-Confederates need apply, of course.)12

  Viewing the successes and failures of Confederate homes at the end of the century, it was apparent that the construction of a successful institution required three distinct pillars: a unified and energetic statewide Confederate veterans’ group, a sympathetic and enthusiastic public, and a generous state government.

  By 1897 these factors were coalescing in Kentucky.

  Active UCV camps and UDC chapters were part of the civic fabric in most large Kentucky towns. The two statewide organizations—John Leathers's Confederate Association of Kentucky in Louisville and John Boyd's Confederate Veteran Association of Kentucky, headquartered in Lexington—while not always acting in tandem, shared a commitment to care for needy veterans. And in the spring of 1897 John Leathers and his Louisville association applied for membership in the United Confederate Veterans, affiliating with Boyd's Lexington group. Boyd was nominally in charge of the statewide organization, but with 250 active members, the Louisville camp would set the agenda.13

  At the same time, an ever-increasing United Daughters of the Confederacy membership began speaking up for a Kentucky Confederate home. At the first statewide meeting of Kentucky's UDC chapters in 1897 the president spoke of an urgent need for “a place of refuge and care” for Kentucky veterans.

  As the veterans and Daughters waved the bloody shirt at every opportunity, more Kentuckians were expressing their sympathy for the plight of their state's indigent Confederate veterans.14

  All that was lacking was a political commitment, and John Leathers had a plan for that.

  Leathers, now commander (president) of one of the largest United Confederate Veterans camps in the country, appointed an executive committee to explore the subject of a statewide home for disabled ex-Confederates.15 He enlisted Louisville attorney Bennett Henderson Young to draft the committee's report.

  Bennett Young's roots were deep in the Bluegrass. Born in 1843 on the palisades overlooking the Kentucky River near Nicholasville, he was the child of a family that had crossed the Cumberland Gap when Kentucky was still part of Virginia. He attended nearby Bethel Academy and graduated in 1861, at age eighteen, from Centre College, intending to study for the ministry.16

  As Kentucky balanced on the knife-edge of war—with Federals digging in along the Ohio River and Confederates marching northward from Tennessee—Bennett Young enlisted as a private under a charismatic cavalryman who would come to be known as the “Thunderbolt of the Confederacy”: General John Hunt Morgan.

  Morgan was an Alabaman who had settled in Lexington, where he formed a mounted state militia before hostilities broke out between North and South. At the outbreak of war, he gathered 500 young men who, like Bennett Young, were of good breeding, at home in the saddle, and burning with a patriotic fire. During the early years of the Confederacy, Mor
gan's men seemed to appear everywhere throughout the hills of central Kentucky and northern Tennessee, harassing poorly defended Union encampments and disrupting supply lines. Even as the Southern campaign in Kentucky collapsed, Morgan conducted raids—some authorized by the Confederate high command, some not—deep into the Bluegrass. To Confederate sympathizers in Kentucky, he was a Robin Hood, sweeping into a village at dawn with no warning to steal Federal supplies, horses, and gold.

  Bennett Young rode with Morgan on his final raid into Kentucky in July 1863. Now a brigadier general, Morgan—without direct orders—chose to lead more than 2,500 men northward, crossing the Ohio River into Indiana. Once into Indiana, he turned eastward toward Ohio, perhaps intending to join Lee's Army of Virginia, which was then advancing on the town of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania.

  Morgan's Raiders (as they were described by fear-stricken Northern newspapers) drove east toward Cincinnati, where civilians panicked at the thought of gray-clad cavalrymen sacking that city. The men continued eastward on horseback, south of Columbus, north of Chillicothe, and past Zanesville, pressing for the Pennsylvania border. But Federal troops, state militiamen, and a hostile civilian populace bit into Morgan's flanks like hyenas into a gazelle. On July 26, 1863, after eighteen days and almost 500 miles in the saddle, General Morgan surrendered to Union troops near East Liverpool, Ohio. (For the next seven decades, men would tell anyone who asked that their life's most valiant accomplishment had been to follow General John Hunt Morgan on that ill-fated Ohio raid.)

  Morgan and his officers were imprisoned in Columbus, and the enlisted men—including Bennett Young—were transported to Camp Douglas, a Federal prison camp near Chicago. There, with 5,000 other prisoners on seventy acres surrounded by twelve-foot walls and armed guards, Morgan's men were expected to wait out the rest of the war.17

  Bennett Young couldn't wait. After just four months in prison, he escaped from Camp Douglas and made his way 300 miles across enemy territory into Canada.