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Authors: Rusty Williams

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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 Northern 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

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.”

BOOK: My Old Confederate Home
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