My Old Confederate Home (25 page)

For a man who had navigated the treacherous shoals of elective politics for most of his life, his berth at the Home was a delight. Florence Barlow handled most of the paperwork; Henry George could spend time sharing stories with inmates and guests. He found time to dabble in local politics and write a book, a detailed history of four Kentucky Confederate regiments.
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But Martha's death dealt the good-natured man a blow he just couldn't shake off. “He pays but little attention to his duties,” an inmate wrote, “his having lost his wife, becoming despondent from it.”
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Fiercely loyal to her employer and friend, Florence Barlow stepped in to do much of his work (“Miss Barlow is virtually the superintendent,” according to a visitor).
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She and Henry George were of like minds about bringing joy and humor to the Home, but there was no more loud, honking laughter from the commandant.

During the financial problems, the closing of Duke Hall, and the two-meals-a-day controversy, Henry George lost weight and the color in his cheeks. Just before Thanksgiving 1917, thin and wan, he presented himself to the resident physician complaining of chest pains. Dr. Pryor sent him immediately to a hospital in Louisville.

Several days later, while convalescing at his son's home in Louisville, George sent a letter of resignation to Bennett Young. His health required that he should give up, at least for the present, his duties and responsibilities at the Kentucky Confederate Home.

The board was divided about how to treat George's resignation. Some trustees felt he really wasn't up to the job anymore; others wanted to give him time to recover from his physical and emotional problems. John Leathers came up with a compromise at their meeting on December 4, proposing that George be “granted an indefinite leave of absence with hope that in the near future he may be able to resume his duties.” In the meantime, trustee Andrew M. Sea would become acting commandant, visiting the Home daily and discharging the duties of the commandant.
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It was a sound plan for about eighteen hours, until seventy-seven-year-old Sea, on a train to Pewee Valley the next morning to assume his duties, dropped dead of a heart attack.

Immediately on news of Sea's death, Bennett Young telegraphed another trustee, Charles L. Daughtry, at his farm in Bowling Green, asking him to take charge of the Home right away. Daughtry arrived the following day.

Charles Lawrence Daughtry was a smart man. He was efficient. He was a planner. Active in the Bowling Green UCV camp, he was named to the Home's board of trustees in 1904 and reappointed after each term.

Daughtry's military record is a little sketchy (and he later took pains to smooth over some of the wrinkles). He was fifteen years old, living with his widowed mother near Gallatin, Tennessee, when Union troops occupied the town. With some vague plan to join the Confederate troops, he and another boy stole two Yankee horses, “intending to go to the country for a short while.” The boys spent several weeks hiding in the woods around Gallatin, dodging Union patrols, before falling in with a crew of out-of-uniform marauders. He eventually enlisted in John Hunt Morgan's Ninth Tennessee Cavalry and may have ridden on the Ohio raid. Either with the marauders or with Morgan's raiders, Daughtry was captured and sent to a prison camp under the name Charles Douglass. He was exchanged in time to join General Basil Duke's retreat from Richmond.
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After the war Daughtry and his mother moved north to the high rolling hills near Bowling Green, where he took up farming. Daughtry was an early adherent of what came to be called “scientific farming”—rotating and checkerboarding grain crops, experimenting with seed types, cutting furrows to precise depths—and his high yields made him a success. His success made him a self-proclaimed expert.

Daughtry was short, barely over five feet tall, with all the intensity of a man who never learned how to relax. He wore short-cropped hair on his round head, and a fastidiously trimmed beard accentuated his high cheekbones. He was assiduously self-educated, and he could declaim on topics as diverse as water management or streetcar operation. There was no problem that couldn't be solved, it seemed, if only the listener would adopt Daughtry's solution.

During the 1903 harvest season, Daughtry left his wife, Mattie Rose, alone on their Bowling Green farm while he attended to some out-of-town business. No sooner had he left than the hired harvest laborers struck, asking for more money before they would bring in the wheat crop. Mattie Rose, described as “a club and society woman,” sent the workers on their way, changed into work clothes, and cut twenty acres of wheat before her husband returned. She knew how Charles Daughtry could be when things didn't go according to his plans.
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Over the years, Bennett Young had used Daughtry's selfassurance to investigate problematic situations at the Home. If a woman from the UDC reported that a Home matron had been rude, Daughtry would hold hearings and investigate; if a furnace were malfunctioning, Daughtry would build a case against the manufacturer. His reports were concise, conclusive, compulsively neat, and perfectly spelled.

When Young asked him to come to Pewee Valley to take over the Home, Charles Daughtry knew there were problems there and knew he had the solutions. He didn't need to be likable; he just needed to be smart, efficient, and tough.

Daughtry had three weeks to inspect the Home, inmates, and employees before his first board meeting as commandant on January 5, 1918. The problems facing the Home, he reported to the board members, were greater than he expected.

The Home itself was in deplorable condition—roofs were leaking, paper was peeling from the walls, and dry rot was ruining the floor beams. Too much maintenance had been deferred for too long, and the place was in danger of collapsing on the old men.

Discipline was nonexistent. Daughtry blamed Henry George for laxness, but it was more likely that the inmates were restive after being denied the use of Duke Hall and crowded together again as parts of the main building were shut down.

The employees were in revolt. After twelve years of Henry George's easygoing temperament, Florence Barlow and head matron Lela Henley weren't ready to accept Daughtry's more autocratic management style. Even more critically, engineer Alexander McFarlan had received another job offer, and without a raise he would be forced to leave. (The board quickly voted the talented man an extra $20 a month.)
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Daughtry drew up a plan for what needed to be taken care of, but Bennett Young had a bigger project to discuss. He needed Daughtry's toughness to help reverse the financial outlook at the Home. Despite deferring needed maintenance and reducing the number of meals, the Home was still operating at a deficit. Young and Daughtry would travel to Frankfort the following week in a plea to win yet another increase in the Home's appropriation. They would ask legislators to increase the Home's annual payment from $42,000 to a whopping $60,000.
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Incredibly, they succeeded.

After the state legislature passed the increased appropriation, Daughtry made ready to work on the maintenance, inmate, and employee problems he had identified. Before the acting commandant could pick up a hammer, however, Henry George wrote the board of trustees announcing his intention to return to work.

It was apparent to others that Henry George wasn't ready to return to work; he just needed someplace to go. The once-vigorous man was still frail and distracted. He wasn't happy living with his son in Louisville, and after twelve years in Pewee Valley he had no home or friends left in Graves County. As much as Bennett Young liked Henry George, Young knew that Charles Daughtry was the man who could whip things back into shape. So Young recommended a compassionate solution that would have unfortunate consequences for the Home.

The board wrote Henry George “to congratulate him on the improved condition of his health and express the appreciation of the board for the good and faithful services rendered in the past.” The board requested that he remain on leave of absence, but “continue to occupy his room at the Home” and “to stay at the Home as much as he possibly can.”
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Daughtry was thus forced to deal with the problems of the Home under the nose of the man who, in Daughtry's opinion, was responsible for the problems. And, because Henry George would continue to occupy the commandant's suite in the Kentucky Confederate Home, Daughtry was unable to move his wife to Pewee Valley.

Things were definitely not going according to plan for Acting Commandant Charles L. Daughtry.

On January 9, 1918, President Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat and a Southerner, announced his support of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, granting women the right to vote. The National Women's Party waged a vigorous campaign against anti suffrage senators, and it was apparent after the fall elections that Congress would pass the constitutional amendment.

A month later, Bennett Young acquiesced to increasing political pressure by the Kentucky UDC and allowed them a formal voice in the management of the Kentucky Confederate Home.

The women of the UDC had been unwavering supporters of the Home from the time of its conception two decades earlier. They had given freely of their money, time, and hearts to foster a place of comfort, kindness, piety, and respect for the “blameless martyrs” who lived there. Time after time, however, the men of the UCV and the board of trustees had thwarted the women's desire for more oversight of the Home's management. Efficient management was men's business, they believed, best handled by men.

But times were changing. The Nineteenth Amendment (and changes in Kentucky statutes) gave women a voice at the ballot box and more equal standing in courts of law. At the same time, the men of the UCV and the Home trustees were aging, perhaps growing tired of their role as sole head of the ex-Confederate household. At the Kentucky Confederate Home—and at Confederate soldiers' homes elsewhere—the 1920s marked a time of greater administrative involvement by women.
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On December 27, 1918, John Leathers put before the board of trustees a proposal to establish an advisory committee of women; William A. Milton seconded the motion. Bennett Young said nothing, perhaps because he was eager to leave on a much-needed vacation to Florida.

The board approved a committee of seven women to advise on domestic issues of the Home. The committee was to recommend to the board such actions “as they deem wise and proper for the comfort and care of the inmates.” Members of the committee would elect officers and send a representative to future board meetings. (The board also expressed hope that the committee would encourage UDC chapters to return their attention to the care and maintenance of the Home.)
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The Kentucky UDC president recommended a slate of seven women for the Women's Advisory Committee, all officers of the Covington, Paducah, Nicholasville, Lawrenceburg, Paris, Lexington, and Louisville chapters. When the seven women met, they elected as their president and spokesman the Daughter from Louisville, social activist Mrs. John L. Woodbury.

Years later—long after the mothers, wives, and sisters of Confederate veterans had passed away—women such as Charlotte Osborne Woodbury would be recognized as True Daughters. They were the biological daughters of Confederate veterans, true to the principles of the Lost Cause for which their fathers had fought.

Charlotte Osborne Woodbury was the biological daughter of Thomas Osborne, veteran of the Sixth Kentucky Infantry and part of the Orphan Brigade. And she was true to much more than her father's Lost Cause.

Thomas Osborne was a devout Baptist who demonstrated his faith through lifelong charity and progressive social work. His primary career was as a newspaperman—most notably as the
Louisville Courier-Journal's
religion editor—and he founded
Baptist World
, the weekly political organ of that denomination, while an officer of the Baptist Conference of North America. Closer to home, his dedication was as much to the cause as to the denomination. He was active on the boards of the (largely Catholic) All Prayer Foundling Home, the Kentucky Institute for the Blind (with Bennett Young), and the Louisville Industrial School (with John Leathers). Osborne's ardent support of trade unionism likely caused some concern among his conservative friends, but he was convinced that free access to honest labor was a moral right for all men.
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Charlotte, Thomas Osborne's oldest daughter, grew up in a household that prized social work as an imperative of Christian belief. Mealtime prayers never failed to mention the needs of others and one's personal obligation to aid the disadvantaged. In the Osborne home, Charlotte learned that compassionate charity was best exhibited face to face, the result of personal involvement. As a child, she accompanied her father to board meetings, reading to a blind child or playing dolls with little girls who had no parents while her own father conducted the business of the institution. She was fifteen years old in 1888 when Thomas Osborne, John Leathers, and others organized Louisville's Confederate Association of Kentucky, and she witnessed how charity could change the lives of people like crippled Billy Beasley and his family.
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Charlotte Osborne graduated from Louisville Girls High School and tried her hand as a journalist before marrying John L. Woodbury, a somewhat effeminate up-and-coming corporate attorney in 1899. He spent the early years of their marriage polishing his career; she threw herself into club work; and the couple never got around to having children.

Beautiful though she may have appeared to her father and husband, Charlotte Woodbury wasn't particularly well equipped to skate through life on looks alone. She was a pale, doughy woman of five foot ten, with a manly figure. Her thin brown hair—long or bobbed—never behaved itself, and her face was slightly off kilter, with eye and mouth drooping lower on the left side than the right. But she had a beautiful heart, a determination to further progressive causes, and a deep, rolling voice that could boom like a pipe organ.