My Old Confederate Home (7 page)

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, Morgan'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.
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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.

A thriving Confederate expatriate community awaited Young in Toronto. Confederate officials put him in command of a company of men and ordered him south to Richmond. Young and his men sailed to the West Indies, boarded a blockade runner, and slipped past Federal ships into Chesapeake Bay. At the Confederate capital, Bennett Young was commissioned a first lieutenant in the Confederate army and received secret orders for the infamous St. Albans raid.

The former ministerial student was about to become a bank robber.
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St. Albans, Vermont, was a drowsy little town twenty miles from the Canadian border and sixty miles south of Montreal. On Wednesday, October 19, 1864, teams of armed men hurried into the three banks of St. Albans, demanding gold from the vaults. Outside, another group of armed men herded passersby to the town green.

“We are here to take possession of this town in the name of Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy,” the men are reported to have shouted to a dumbstruck citizenry as the raiders removed their outerwear to reveal uniforms of butternut and gray.

The raiders reassembled on the town green, pockets and satchels bulging with banknotes and gold. A running gun battle between the score of men led by Lieutenant Bennett H. Young, CSA, and a few armed citizens erupted as the Confederates mounted up and attempted their getaway. A building was torched and more shots were fired as Young and his raiders raced north toward the Canadian border with a reputed $208,000 in bank loot.

The St. Albans telegrapher keyed out a dispatch to all points that Rebels were sacking the town, and an impromptu posse saddled up to follow the men northward. Infuriated St. Albaners might have chased the raiders well into Canada and hanged them from the nearest maple tree had not a Montreal sheriff, alerted by the telegraph operator, ridden south and taken the Confederates into protective custody.

The U.S. government was infuriated at the audacity of the raid. This was not a legitimate act of war, Washington officials claimed, but a capital crime against private citizens. The U.S. State Department sent officials to Montreal seeking the extradition of the raiders for return and trial.

The Canadian government—officially neutral, but actually pro-Southern—held a trial of fact and determined that Young's actions were sanctioned acts of war and not common criminality. Canada refused to extradite Young and his raiders to the United States and certain execution, but instead released them from custody.
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Lieutenant Bennett Henderson Young—not yet twenty-two years old—was cheered throughout the now-dying Confederacy for his audacious raid into New England. (History would record it as the northernmost action of the Civil War.) But Young earned only notoriety in the United States of America and an enmity that would last long after Lee's surrender. After Lincoln's death, President Andrew Johnson issued amnesty proclamations that specifically excluded the St. Albans raiders. Worse, Federal officials in Kentucky posted a large reward for “evil minded persons who have crossed the border of the United States … and have committed capital offenses against the property and life of American citizens.”
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After almost a year of cooling his heels in Canada, Young sailed for Britain, where he socialized with other Confederate exiles. Uncertain as to whether he would ever again be able to return to the United States, Young enrolled at Queens University at Belfast to prepare himself for the practice of law. (Some later said that his expenses were paid with St. Albans gold.) The young cavalryman was an apt student, and he graduated with first honors in the study of English common law.

It was not until 1868 that the exiled Young was allowed to return home and establish a law practice in Louisville. The former bank robber quickly became one of the foremost railroad attorneys in the United States at a time when companies were making huge investments in rebuilding rail systems throughout the South.

His law practice thrived during the last three decades of the nineteenth century, and Bennett Young became more active in capitalistic endeavors. He took the lead as investor and partner in the construction of a cantilever bridge spanning the Ohio River at Louisville in 1886; he promoted and built the Louisville Southern Railroad, which broke the monopoly of the L&N line; and he launched the Presbyterian Mutual Insurance Fund. These enterprises required a great deal of public speaking, and Young honed his oratorical skills in front of crowds of interested investors and others who merely wished to catch a glimpse of the storied St. Albans raider.

Meanwhile, he involved himself in a number of public enterprises. In 1876 he was appointed by the governor to represent Kentucky at the Paris Exposition. Young also assisted in the founding of the Louisville Colored Orphans' Home, served as superintendent of the Kentucky Institute for the Education of the Blind, and was elected president of the Louisville Library Association.

Young served as a delegate to Kentucky's state constitutional convention in 1890, partly to protect his railroad interests and partly because he saw the need to streamline a turgid state government. (His reference manual for delegates,
The Three Constitutions of Kentucky
, drove the creation of a decidedly populist new constitution.) His participation in the constitutional convention also resulted in his becoming acquainted with two up-and-coming politicians, William Goebel and J. C. W. Beckham.
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Through 1890, however, Young took no public role as an ex-Confederate.

Perhaps the ex-raider feared renewed interest by the government in Washington or retaliation by St. Albaners, but Bennett Young's official biographies from the time make little mention of his service as a Confederate cavalry officer, and he chose not to participate in the formation of the Confederate Association of Kentucky. By 1894, however, he had employed a manager to seek speaking engagements for him and was contributing publicly to Confederate monuments and causes. The handsome cavalryman-turned-bank-robber-turned-attorney was soon in demand as featured orator at memorial dedications and Lost Cause celebrations throughout the state.
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Thus, when he was asked by John Leathers in 1897 to assist in the organization of a Kentucky Confederate veterans home, Bennett Young brought impeccable credentials as one of Kentucky's most politically adept and well-connected ex-Confederates.

By the late 1890s, Kentucky's Confederate veterans were aching for a veterans home of their own—especially after seeing the way Tennesseans gloated over theirs.

The Kentucky-Tennessee Reunion in Nashville in 1896 brought together Confederate veterans of the sister states, many of whom had fought side by side on battlefields in both states, and served as a promotional event for the Tennessee Centennial Exposition. Two thousand Kentucky veterans and their families enjoyed the hospitality of their Tennessee comrades, including a tour of the Tennessee Soldiers' Home on the grounds of Andrew Jackson's old estate. The two-story brick building with broad covered galleries and all modern amenities sat among towering oak and hickory trees, looking like a cross between a college classroom building and a resort hotel. A parade the next day featured more than fifty uniformed residents of the Soldiers' Home riding decorated wagons, sitting like pashas on pillows, waving to the adoring crowd.
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Tennessee built an Elysium for its needy veterans; Kentucky had done nothing.

Returning to Louisville, John Leathers immediately appointed a committee to explore the feasibility of establishing a Kentucky home for needy Confederate veterans. He asked Bennett Young to advise the group on political matters, and the committee met sporadically throughout 1897.

Successful efforts of ex-Confederates in Missouri to open a home in Higginsville in 1891 provided an organizational blueprint to Young and the Kentucky Confederate veterans for the eventual establishment of Kentucky's Confederate home. The Missouri establishment was a ten-year effort, requiring the unified statewide support of ex-Confederates and their female auxiliaries (later the state UCV camps and UDC chapters) and the public at large. That support, along with significant seed money to buy and furnish a home, was enough to convince the state legislature to accept the deed to the property in exchange for funding the operation of the Confederate Home of Missouri for at least twenty years. This was the plan Kentucky Confederates hoped to emulate.
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“Confederate Home Wanted in Kentucky,” the
Confederate Veteran
trumpeted to its national audience. Bennett Young and his exploratory committee, reporting at the camp's first meeting of 1898, recommended that all of Kentucky's United Confederate Veterans camps join with Louisville in an effort to establish a home, that the cost of the home and its furnishings be provided through private subscription, and that the home be supported by state aid. Members received the report enthusiastically, then moved that Leathers appoint still another committee “to take such steps as may be deemed best” to get the plan underway.
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The Louisville Confederates cheered the plan, passed the motion, and then—for two long years—did nothing about it.

To be fair, much occurred during those years to distract Kentucky's Confederate veterans and sympathizers from the business of establishing a statewide home for their needy comrades.

Major General John Boyd, commanding general of the state Confederate veterans' organization, chose to ignore Louisville's plan in favor of one of his own. Still distrustful of the Louisville contingent, the former private used his old campfire connections to build support for a massive memorial hall in Lexington. The state United Daughters of the Confederacy chapters, now presided over by Addie Graves, signed on immediately. She urged her membership “to bend every energy to the erection of the Memorial Hall proposed by Gen. Boyd, in which he offers his valuable collection of relics on condition [that the hall be placed in Lexington].”
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Confederate home or memorial battle abbey? Kentucky's Confederate loyalties were split, and as a result, the veterans took little action on either front.

At the same time, Kentuckians were sniffing the first smoke of a wildfire that was about to sear the political landscape and threaten the traditional Democratic majority for the first time in thirty-five years. Kentucky's Democrats, split over the issue of bimetallism, were deserting the party in droves. Political fire bells were ringing, statehouse observers warned, and it wasn't a good time to ask nervous lawmakers to appropriate funds for former Confederates.

Louisvillians, meanwhile, were turning their attention to capturing the biggest Confederate plum of all: the United Confederate Veterans' annual meeting and grand reunion.

The annual UCV national meetings were becoming huge events for the cities that hosted them. Houston estimated that the event brought 50,000 visitors to its city in 1895; Nashville boasted 100,000 veterans and friends in attendance at the 1897 reunion. A four-day reunion of old vets could fill hotels to overflowing and stuff the cash registers of restaurants, beer halls, and entertainment venues in the host city. Louisville's business community wanted a piece of that.
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Supported by the editor of
Confederate Veteran
, the business community, and the local newspapers, John Leathers and the Louisville UCV camp prepared a bid to host the 1899 reunion. Louisville was a long shot; Kentucky had never been an official part of the Southern Confederacy, and Louisville was farther than some of the southernmost UCV camps wanted to travel. In the end, the Louisville lost its bid to Charleston, South Carolina.