My Old Confederate Home (4 page)

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

T
he 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 chairs 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,” Boyd 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).

The UCV provided its members a national standing, an affiliation with small-town former Confederates throughout the country. Members of a nine-man camp in Ringgold, Georgia, could join with counterparts in Honey Grove, Texas, or Rosedale, Mississippi, or any of the hundreds of other communities throughout the rebuilt South to raise money for a national memorial or share stories at one of the popular annual reunions.

By 1892, when the fifteen camps of John Boyd's Confederate Veteran Association of Kentucky affiliated with the United Confederate Veterans, the UCV commanded more than two hundred camps and was the fastest-growing fraternal organization in the nation. At the national meeting in New Orleans in 1892, Commanding General John B. Gordon commissioned John Boyd Major General, Commander of the Kentucky Division.
¹¹
The zealous former private soldier of Lexington eagerly adopted his UCV rank and thereafter would be known as Major General John Boyd.
¹²
Yet “this is not a military organization,” John Boyd told a reporter, “but is merely a brotherhood or fraternity with benevolent intentions.”
¹³

While it was true that the members of Boyd's Kentucky Confederate Veteran Association and other early UCV camps were not armed combatants, they surely liked to march in their uniforms.

More than 150 members of the Confederate Veteran Association gathered outside the gates of Lexington Cemetery on Saturday afternoon, June 10, 1893. Most of the men wore a gray suit: matching pants and jacket cut and ornamented to look like a military uniform. In its early days, the UCV had no standardized uniform for members; any ex-Confederate who could afford it would engage a tailor to create a uniform as ornate and fanciful as the veteran desired. Men like John Boyd, however, were irritated by the inconsistency of dress, and often designated a local clothier as the sole source of member uniforms. (Globe Tailoring of Lexington did a booming business in Confederate veteran uniforms at $30 each.)

Outside the cemetery, Boyd formed his men into a line of march. It was becoming traditional among veterans' groups to arrive at their events on parade. The marching column echoed their service in the military and—especially if accompanied by a band—placed them at the center of attention.

For this march, the veterans formed up in pairs, the first two being the chaplains of Lexington and Winchester camps. The next two were Boyd and U. S. congressman W. C. P. Breckinridge, the featured orator for the day. Boyd barked a command, and an honor guard of the Brown Light Infantry led the column of men (which marched mostly in step) through the heavy iron cemetery gates, along the lanes between the gravestones, to the Confederate lot, with its sprays of fresh-cut flowers and a speakers' platform. (“The march was strikingly impressive,” according to one observer.)
¹⁴