My Old Confederate Home (8 page)

But at the 1899 reunion, Bennett Young was tapped to deliver the funeral oration for Winnie Davis, venerated daughter of Jefferson Davis and the original “daughter of the Confederacy.” Young's soaring Lost Cause rhetoric all but canonized the departed woman and transported his audience—men and women alike—from sobs of grief to tears of joy. It was a speech ex-Confederates and UDC members would talk about and quote from for decades.
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Now accepted on a national stage, Young was invited to plead his case for Louisville directly to the assembled delegates. Young promised the delegates that if they should come to Louisville, “Kentucky's homes and hearts, Kentucky's wealth … her tenderest lambs and fattest beeves, and the contents of her granaries, transmuted by Kentucky magic into
liquid corn and rye”
would be theirs. He would personally lead “the old Confederates beside the
distilled
waters.”
²⁹

Young knew his audience. The veterans roared their approval, and Louisville won the 1900 UCV reunion.

The Louisville reunion—the first of the new century for the United Confederate Veterans—was as extravagant and successful as Bennett Young had promised. Everyone pitched in. Citizens opened their homes to out-of-town veterans, local businesses pitched in $70,000 to sponsor reunion events, and Bourbon County farmers shipped carloads of smoked hams to Louisville to feed veterans who couldn't afford their board.
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“There is only one wish in every heart here,” Young told the 150,000 visiting veterans, “and that is to make you as happy as possible while you remain with us.”
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A favorite activity at any reunion of old Johnny Rebs was storytelling, spinning yarns—some true, some told as truth—about the war years. And one of the better storytellers was John W. Green, former sergeant-major, Ninth Kentucky Infantry, CSA. Johnny Green would tell anyone who asked about his return to Kentucky at the end of the war.

When he arrived in Nashville with little money in his pocket, Green would say, he heard he could get free rail transportation home to Louisville if he swore his oath of allegiance to the United States. Not yet ready to do that, he wandered down to the wharf, where he spotted a familiar steamboat and boat captain.

“Pay your passage and keep your mouth shut,” the captain snarled. “You can travel on my boat without taking the oath.”

Gratefully, Johnny Green climbed the gangplank and returned, unreconstructed, to his family in Kentucky aboard the riverboat
Tempest
with Captain Dan Parr in the wheelhouse.
³²

Daniel G. Parr told his children he was born in France in 1825 and brought to America as a babe by his father, a decorated veteran of Napoleon's army at Waterloo. True or not, Parr left the family farm in Kenton County, across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, to become a riverman while still in his teens. He learned the shipping trade, probably as a roustabout, on the boats and barges that transported goods along the Ohio and its tributaries. At age twenty-two Parr bought a boat of his own and promptly lost it to creditors. By then, however, he was well on his way to developing the heart of hard, black coal necessary to be a successful riverboat captain.

Parr found other investors and, by 1860, was operating a fleet of twenty river vessels. He spent the Civil War years transporting people and goods for whomever controlled the Ohio, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky Rivers at the moment, but he made little effort to disguise his Southern sympathies. When Federal troops seized one of his favorite boats for the assault on Fort Donelson, Parr refused to operate the vessel, earning six weeks in a Federal prison.
³³

In 1863 Captain Daniel Parr's thirteen-year-old daughter, Virginia, was aboard one of her father's boats at the Louisville wharf. Nearby was a transport steamer filled with Confederate prisoners who were bedraggled and unfed. Virginia stood at the gangway of the Federal wharf asking all who passed for contributions to benefit the prisoners. Parr's Rebel daughter must have raised some eyebrows among the blue-coated soldiers, but “quite a handsome sum was realized through the efforts of the child.”
³⁴

After the war, Parr established a ferry company on the Ohio, earning himself a fortune. He then plowed that fortune into Louisville commercial real estate. His daughters goaded him into philanthropy, and most of his gifts at first benefited the Baptists. He supported Louisville's Baptist Orphans' Home and gave $10,000 for a bell tower at Walnut Street Baptist Church. His will provided for a trust fund for Broadway Baptist Church and endowed Parr's Rest, a home for unfortunate women.
³⁵

At seventy-six, Parr was no longer actively involved in his investments, but the old boat captain had more money than he could spend in the rest of his lifetime. His Rebel daughter had an idea about how Dan Parr could distribute his money.
³⁶

The day following their April 1901 meeting on Fourth Street, attorney Bennett Henderson Young called at Captain Parr's for their appointment. Young later described his meeting to newspapermen: “[Captain Parr] stated that his daughter, having come to live with him, would not need the house in which she had resided.”

Parr wanted to flip the property back to his ownership, then turn it over to Louisville's Confederate Association of Kentucky.

“I suggested to him that he would be doing a most magnificent work if he would do this in such shape that it would be the basis for a Confederate Home,” Young said.

The attorney wasted no time in drafting an agreement to Captain Parr's specifications, and on April 15, 1901, the two men met again at the county clerk's office where they executed the deed and handed it over for record.

“In consideration of the regard … for the Confederate cause and its surviving soldiers,” Captain Daniel G. Parr put into the hands of nine trustees—John Leathers, Harry P. McDonald, and Bennett Young included—a house and lot at 421 East Chestnut Street in Louisville, a fourteen-room house valued at more than $5,000 on the tax rolls. According to the terms of the deed, the trustees were to use the house—or proceeds from the sale of the property, if they saw fit—”for the purpose of securing and maintaining a home for Confederate indigent and disabled soldiers in the State of Kentucky.”
³⁷

This was the spark the veterans were waiting for.

Within eighteen months of the meeting between Captain Daniel Parr and Bennett Young, veterans would be dedicating the Kentucky Confederate Home.

Chapter 4

The Auditor and the Stockman

O
n September 24, 1902, General Fayette Hewitt sat at the oak desk in his office at State National Bank of Frankfort, reviewing the morning's correspondence. Sunlight pouring through the large windows fronting Main Street illuminated the neat stacks of paper and bundles of envelopes on his desk.

Hewitt disposed of the usual banking business first—loan applications, title reports, a daily balance sheet. He was nothing if not good at processing paper and money. He scanned the balance sheet, noting yesterday's cash receipts; he initialed the loan applications and checked the title reports for the proper seals and endorsements. He managed the paperwork of his bank with the mechanistic efficiency of a dedicated high-level bureaucrat.

Paper and money. Money and paper. General Fayette Hewitt had spent most of his adult life accounting for both.

A native Kentuckian, he was appointed to the Post Office Department in Washington in 1860. At the outbreak of hostilities between North and South, he volunteered his services in Richmond and was tapped by President Jefferson Davis to help organize a postal service for the fledgling Confederate nation. Commissioned as an adjutant-general, Hewitt served on the staffs of Generals Albert Pike and John Breckinridge, helping manage the requisitions, paperwork, and currency that equipped, fed, clothed, and paid the soldiers in their commands. Returning home at the end of the war, he practiced law until he was appointed quartermaster general of the Kentucky state militia in 1867.
¹

Hewitt won statewide election for state auditor in 1880, then spent eight years accounting for the tax dollars Kentucky residents sent to Frankfort to do the state's business. A $250,000 embezzlement by the state's attorney general dropped a tinge of soot on the auditor's house, and General Hewitt resigned in 1889 to found State National Bank. Hewitt's partners named him president, and the bank flourished on the strength of deposits from state accounts.
²

On this September morning of 1902, after completing his banking business, Hewitt turned to the remaining piles of correspondence that occupied an increasing amount of his time.

The envelopes bore postmarks of towns throughout Kentucky, though a few were from out of state. Hewitt would have recognized many of the return addresses; they were from leaders of Confederate veterans camps or local politicians Hewitt met during his own statewide election campaigns. Most of the envelopes contained checks or cash, and all would require a personal reply.

More money, more paper.

So Fayette Hewitt, former adjutant-general of the Confederate army and former state auditor of Kentucky, opened a ledger book labeled “Kentucky Confederate Home.” He sorted through the envelopes stacked in front of him and began to record the paper and money.

Until Captain Daniel Parr deeded his house and lot to the ex-Confederates in April 1901, Kentucky veterans had made little real progress toward the establishment of a Confederate veterans' home. A lack of strong statewide leadership of the ex-Confederate groups accounted for some of the delay, while political turmoil in Frankfort made it difficult to achieve a consensus in the General Assembly.

Then, sometime near the end of the nineteenth century, General John Boyd disappeared—literally disappeared.

Like a ball of string wound too tight, Boyd began to unravel when it appeared that his Lexington battle abbey would never be built. His behavior became increasingly erratic, he was prone to fits of irrational rage, and his personal appearance deteriorated. Concerned officers of Lexington's Confederate Veteran Association staged a surprise “retirement” party for him in 1896, giving him a gold watch and passage to Cincinnati, where it was hoped he would seek treatment by specialists for whatever ailed him.
³
Sometime in 1899 John Boyd packed his bags, told his wife he had urgent business in Texas, walked out the door, and was never heard from again.
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Confused and dispirited, Boyd's ex-Confederate brethren chose J. M. Poyntz, a former Confederate surgeon from Richmond and close friend of Bennett Young, to head the statewide veterans' organization.
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As remarkable as Boyd's disappearance was, however, it merited just a few column inches of newspaper space compared to the forests of newsprint used at the time to report the political developments in Frankfort.

William Goebel, a progressive state senator from northernmost Kentucky, surprised traditionalists when he won the Democratic nomination for governor in 1899 with his populist platform and naked demagoguery. In the general election, 50,000 disgruntled Democrats, including many prominent ex-Confederates, crossed over to the Republican side and, by the narrowest of margins in a very dirty fight, elected Goebel's opponent. The state's Democratic General Assembly, however, refused to certify the election and appeared ready to reverse the results when Goebel was shot by a sniper who was hiding in the office of the secretary of state. Goebel was mortally wounded, but lingered long enough for the General Assembly to overturn the popular vote and name the dying man governor.
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Goebel's death on February 3, 1900, elevated his running mate, J. C. W. Beckham, a thirty-year-old former public school principal from Bardstown, to Kentucky's highest office.
⁷
Although inexperienced, Beckham was politically astute, and as the political fires in Frankfort cooled, the boy governor signaled his willingness to deal with the old-line Democrats.

A more stable political environment, Daniel Parr's real estate gift, and the increasing influence of Louisville's ex-Confederates on the statewide veterans' association put some heat under stalled plans for a Kentucky Confederate home. John Leathers and other prominent ex-Confederates (again) recruited Bennett Young to get the project back on the rails.

It is not surprising that an organization of former military men—particularly when its field commander is an accomplished cavalryman-turned-bank-robber-turned-political-advisor—would devise a textbook military strategy to accomplish its objective.

Bennett Young and other Louisville veterans spent the spring and summer following the announcement of Dan Parr's gift traveling the state and meeting influential ex-Confederates. They scouted the territory, determined the likely field of engagement, and placed their batteries on the most propitious terrain before any potential opponents knew that a battle was to be joined. Young quietly enlisted the support of Governor Beckham and buttonholed key state legislators.

With firm expressions of support in hand, Young and his cohorts prepared for the annual gathering of the state Confederate veterans' organization in Louisville in October 1901. The estranged Louisville and Lexington camps had joined together under the national United Confederate Veterans banner, and for the first time, delegates from sixty-seven local organizations representing 3,500 members would gather for a business meeting.

Henry Watterson, legendary editor of the
Courier-Journal
and a Confederate sympathizer, fired the first salvo in the morning paper with a front-page story headlined “Johnny Rebs Will To-Day Again Capture Louisville.” Lest anyone doubt the primary order of business, the subhead promised, “Definite Action Will Be Taken on a Home.” Interviewed the night before the meeting opened, Young cagily allowed that the state legislature might be persuaded to appropriate a per capita allowance to fund operation of a home if the Confederates were to ask.
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A thousand Kentucky Confederate veterans converged on Louisville's Exchange Hall Tuesday morning, October 22, 1901, streaming through the double doors to find seats on the main floor while a popular local band played marches and old Confederate songs. Pictures of Lee, Davis, Jackson, Morgan, and others hung on the walls to either side of the dais; red, white, and blue bunting draped the balcony rails and covered the front of the stage.
⁹

Major General J. M. Poyntz, now heading the state Confederate organization, sat at center stage. John Leathers and other staff officers who governed the now-united Kentucky Division of the United Confederate Veterans flanked him on the platform. With cigar smoke already thick in the air, Poyntz hushed the raucous crowd and called the business meeting to order at a quarter past noon.

After a short invocation, Poyntz tantalized his audience with an opening address that called attention to the plight of destitute Confederate veterans. “Age, like the silent night, progresses,” he intoned. He spoke of the increasing physical infirmity, mental distress, and poverty among Kentucky veterans. “Compelled by this decline, the aged soldier must have help to make his last days comfortable.”

Offering no specific solutions, he adjourned the meeting for lunch.

At the afternoon session Poyntz called on a series of speakers intended to whip up support for the establishment of a home. (Young had recommended the speakers to Poyntz and had helped craft their speeches.)

Judge R. H. Cunningham of Henderson touched all the Lost Cause bases before asking attendees to give their less-fortunate and aging comrades “a home where ease and comfort shall be theirs.” A member of the newly formed Sons of Confederate Veterans, Reed Emery of Danville, spoke as a representative of the young men of Kentucky. He urged the men of his father's generation to care for their disabled and decrepit contemporaries so that “we have done all that love could do to make their last days ones of happiness and peace.”
¹⁰

Cheers echoed around the hall as Poyntz—appearing to bow to the will of the assemblage—opened the floor for suggestions about how to found and fund a home. Well-meaning but unprepared attendees responded enthusiastically with half measures and half baked suggestions until Poyntz (according to plan) called on Bennett Young.

Young strode to the podium, crisp in his new gray UCV uniform, and proceeded to dump ice water on the mawkish sentiment expressed thus far.

The audience may have expected to hear Bennett Young the orator, but instead got a dose of cold reality from Bennett Young the attorney. Sentiment is a beautiful thing in its place, he warned them, but it wouldn't dispose of the poverty and want experienced by Kentucky veterans.

“Remember, comrades,” he said, “men who can support a Confederate home grow fewer each year, while men who need a Confederate home will increase each year.”

He spoke as if arguing to a jury of the problems Kentucky and other states experienced in maintaining a home from the pockets of the veterans alone. “The Confederate Veteran Association of Georgia with its 30,000 members did not sustain its Confederate home,” he reminded them.

Young cited the successes in Missouri and Maryland, where local veterans built and furnished fine homes, then asked their state legislatures for an appropriation to maintain the residents. “Why shouldn't we ask Kentucky for this appropriation?” he asked the crowd. “Does not Kentucky owe much to the soldiery she furnished the South?”

Of course she does, the audience roared in response.

Young introduced a formal resolution—distributing copies printed the night before—calling for Kentucky veterans to raise $25,000 to build and equip a home for indigent veterans while simultaneously asking the state for funds to maintain it. He proposed that a steering committee of twenty-five members from all parts of the state see the project through to completion.

“Let us put up fine houses, well equipped for our needy comrades. Then let us say to the legislature, ‘here is our home, well fitted out.' Kentucky will do the rest,” he assured them. “We have delayed this work thirty-five years. It is needed now more than it ever was or will be again!”

Veterans erupted in cheers, and several rushed the stage for the privilege of seconding Young's resolution. According to plan, however, John W. Green (representing the Orphan Brigade) seconded the motion. Poyntz opened the floor for discussion, and camp after camp endorsed Young's resolution.

One delegate, however, expressed reservations.

Alpheus Washington Bascom (though everyone, including his wife, called him “A. W.”) was a fixture in Bath County with a statewide reputation. Like his grandfather and father before him, he had served terms in the state legislature, but he was most widely known as a successful stockman. Bascom bred and sold the finest specimens of Bates shorthorn cattle in Kentucky. He was a generous man, and he shared his wealth with the Owingsville Christian Church, the Ladies Memorial Association, and any down-on-his-luck neighbor who needed help. A short, solid fireplug of a man, A. W. Bascom was a plain speaker who was as straightforward and honest as the manure on his boots.
¹¹

When A. W. Bascom rose to speak about plans for a Confederate home, he spoke of his concern for indigent veterans whose wives were still living. What will happen to the wives of veterans who might be left without care if their husbands were to enter a home? At the very least, Bascom urged, we might build modest cottages in different parts of the state so the old vets would not have to live apart from their needy wives.