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Authors: Rusty Williams

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Chapter 1

The Cripple and the Banker

A
ttorneys, banking officers, city officials, presidents of manufacturing firms, and other members of Louisville's business elite crowded the downstairs rooms of Billy Beasley's tiny rented home for his funeral on a late winter morning in 1898.

A hundred mourners, shoulder touching shoulder, listened in respectful silence as the Reverend Charles R. Hemphill, pastor of the city's prestigious Second Presbyterian Church, spoke a brief memorial tribute to Beasley.

The day was unseasonably warm. Every window of the small house at 227 East Madison Street was open, but the humidity from earlier rain showers and the close quarters caused the men in attendance to perspire under their black woolen suits. Despite wilting collars and sweat at the smalls of their backs, the men remained at solemn attention around Billy Beasley's open casket during an a cappella solo performed by Mrs. John S. Morris.

Then the Confederate Quartet, standing outside the parlor window, sang an upbeat medley of old soldier camp songs, ending with:

The same canteen, my soldier friend,

The very same canteen.

There's never a bond, old friend, like this!

We have drunk from the same canteen.

At a signal from Rev. Hemphill, Beasley's wife and daughters were escorted through the crowd and out to the street. Eight men stepped forward to close the casket, and then silently carried it to a horse-drawn hearse waiting outside.

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.

BOOK: My Old Confederate Home
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