by Mim E. Rivas
In February, he related to Rogers, “I undertook to get another darkey through the lines but was caught by the guard, the Sixth Indiana Regiment, and accused of being a spy.”
The Indianans were willing to accept his explanation that he was finished with the Rebs. But one of their officers became wary. He remembered hearing something, maybe from one of the Ohio officers who had been in Shelbyville, about a mulatto horse surgeon associated with the detested Nathan Bedford Forrest. The Ohioans were summoned, took one look at William Key, and began to smirk. Doc Key recognized them, he told Rogers, as “Union men that lived at my home.”
“That’s him,” said one of them to the Indiana officers, “the worst Rebel in the South.”
Doc Key’s justification of being compelled to serve his master’s young sons didn’t wash with the Yanks. They decided he was a dangerous prisoner and clamped him in jail somewhere between Murfreesboro and Nashville under the command of General James Scott Negley, with the plan to hold him there until they caught Officer Alexander W. Key, another presumed spy, and then hang them together.
“I staid in that prison six weeks,” the Doc recalled. At that point he overheard some grousing from his guards about the demands being put on them by General Negley. A reputed taskmaster, he had ordered his men to find him a decent cook.
The Young Doc beckoned a guard with whom he was on friendly terms. “They call me the best cook in Tennessee,” he whispered. “If you don’t believe me, ask anyone from my home.” A Shelbyville Confederate prisoner was located and when asked he ventured, “Best cook in Tennessee? Bill’s the best cook in the country.”
General Negley, accompanied by Captain Allen Prather, came to interview Bill.
“Negley and Capt. Prather both wanted me,” Key told Rogers. “I liked the looks of Capt. Prather, and I knew he was a great poker player.” With a bit of hedging, the Doc was able to have Negley order his temporary release into the custody of Captain Prather, for whom he would serve as cook, with the implicit understanding that the general be invited to dine regularly.
Key may have waited a day or two before offhandedly mentioning to Prather, after cleaning up from the evening meal, that he sure would love to play some cards.
“You any good?”
“Never found a man could beat me.”
This was enough to pique Prather’s interest, and he was eager to discover how much of a bluff that had been.
Albert Rogers understood Dr. Key never lost at cards, having, as Key had told him, an occult ability to know what cards his opponent held in his hands at any time. So how did this work out?
William Key was happy to report, “In six weeks I owned everything Capt. Prather had; he owed me over a thousand dollars. He gave me a pass to go home for the debt.”
During these weeks and months Shelbyville had its own jailed spy, a Major Pauline Cushman, an actress turned Federal secret agent who was caught attempting to smuggle Confederate papers out of town and sentenced to hang by General Bragg, whose troops were having an extended stay in Bedford County.
Fending off the winter’s cold, hunger, illness, and lice, Rebel soldiers were ordered by Bragg to be respectful of the occupied townspeople, with instructions, for example, not to enter a store unless invited in. This led to some goodwill between the townspeople and Rebels, despite some resentment after the courthouse was badly burnt when the Rebel high command took up residence in it, allegedly from an accidental fire caused by Confederate soldiers just trying to warm up.
During the six months that followed, while Major Cushman’s execution was continuously postponed due to her illness and fatigue, with the excuse that she was not well enough to walk to the gallows, Bragg played a cat-and-mouse game with Rosecrans that finally erupted in June 1863 at the Battle of Hoover’s Gap.
Of the near constant skirmishing that took place in and around Bedford County, the Battle of Hoover’s Gap was the largest battle to occur in the area. Rosecrans won it by bluffing and starting his approach from a different direction and then turning at the last minute to the less reinforced position, taking Bragg by surprise. Occupation of Shelbyville traded hands yet again, leaving Pauline Cushman to be liberated by Federal authorities as the Union took control once more and loyalists crept back out of hiding.
The Battle of Hoover’s Gap and the hasty evacuation of Shelbyville had a different significance for Young Doc Key. It seemed that in their hurry to get supplies safely out of town, a handful of Bragg’s officers had forgotten the stash of Confederate money they had left hidden under the floorboards of a certain store run by a known Union man. Attempts by any one of them to return to retrieve the money would be disastrous. But there was one person, they decided, who could do the job and get away with it.
When the officers first informed the Doc that they wanted him to retrieve the money, he was shocked by the amount: $500,000. Their proposition was that he would be given $100,000 in return for getting through the Union lines, going to the store, finding the money, and bringing it back to them.
Dr. Key admitted to Rogers, “I didn’t like this job, but there was so much money in it that one night I stole out by the camp.”
Bill’s strategy had been to wait behind the store until its early opening. If he could get in and out without running into anyone who recognized him, he was sure it would be easy to have a friendly conversation with the storekeepers and distract them long enough to get the money before slipping away and back past the camp.
He made it past the camp without a problem, but on his way into the store, the first person he encountered, and the last person he ever hoped to see, was the one he had described to Rogers before as his worst enemy. He was that certain slave driver who had tried unsuccessfully to buy young Bill Key and had sworn one day to get him and lick the blood out of him, a memory that made the Young Doc whirl around and attempt to run—straight into a group of Union soldiers. Though the slave driver had no allegiance to the Yankees, he insisted that the mulatto horse doctor was a convicted Rebel spy who had escaped once from their jail, and he demanded that Bill be walked across the square, clapped into prison, and hung before daylight the next day.
“Well,” Dr. Key said to Rogers, “they would have, if not for W. H. Wisener, the lawyer who knew me and knew that I had money.” For the one thousand dollars that Wisener knew Doc Key had in his shoe, he promised to get him off.
“My case was put off time and time again by this lawyer,” Dr. Key recalled, “until one day the inspector said he wanted a good whitewasher. I told him that was my regular business, and that my brushes were at a certain store in town. He sent me there with a guard. I went behind the counter and pulled off the sole of my shoe and gave the money to the lady who run the store, and she gave it to Wisener.” Then, in a feint to go collect his brushes, he went to find the elusive 500,000 Confederate dollars. Someone had beaten him to it.
William Key was disgusted. If Wisener didn’t manage to have his case dismissed, or if he wasn’t able to escape his sentence while whitewashing, he was going to be hung for no crime at all.
Albert Rogers was eager to know what strings the lawyer pulled or what Houdini-like escape Doc Key masterminded next. Neither was responsible, as it turned out. “The next day the Rebels raided the town and captured the place and I was let go.”
Rogers assumed he had to have been grateful for that bit of providence.
Yes, Dr. Key agreed, except for the fact that after his lawyer was locked up, his own money was gone too.
The Confederate raid that rescued Doc Key from the gallows the second time was followed by a brief stint of Rebel control. That soon yielded again to the Yankees as Shelbyville became a Union garrison town for General William Tecumseh Sherman, subject to intermittent skirmishing, ongoing attacks by guerrillas, home guards, and bushwhackers, and general lawlessness.
When Sherman began cutting a swath of devastation across the South in his March to the Sea, some Tennesseans believed he spared much of the Volunteer Stat
e from greater destruction on account of the pockets of support for the Union he had observed in places like Shelbyville. Others simply felt that there was nothing left to destroy.
Such was the scene of death and ruin that met William Key when he returned Merit and Alexander, alive, to their parents. A few weeks before their return, the surrender of General Robert E. Lee to General Ulysses S. Grant at the Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia had ended the Civil War. Five days after Lee’s surrender, while attending a play with his wife, President Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. As cataclysmically as it began, so it concluded.
The world changed, as though altered on its axis. Three million Americans fought, 600,000 died, while many times more were left disabled, homeless, widowed, orphaned, sick, and impoverished. And four million Americans who had been slaves were free. Of those former slaves, 275,000 had been from Tennessee. She had been the last state to leave the Union, and the state that, with the exception of Virginia, had been scarred by more destruction than any other state in the nation, and so plummeted from former economic stature. But Tennessee was to be the first Confederate state to return to the Union.
Racism would find some of its greatest foes on Tennessee’s home soil, but also its greatest perpetuators—including the KKK, which was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, the same year as the war ended. On the other hand, only a month after Lee’s surrender, black and white activists opened schools for African-Americans across the state. In May 1865, a Texan Confederate soldier named Samuel Foster was heading home through Greenville, Tennessee, and he marveled in his diary that he had that day seen Negro children going to school. He stopped a little girl “about 12 years old dressed neat and clean,” and asked her to show him what she was studying. “I opened the Grammar and the middle of the book and asked her a few questions—which she answered readily and correctly. Same with her Geography and Arithmetic. I was never more surprised in my life!”
The power of education was radically made evident to Foster by a radical change in his thinking:
It seems curious that mens minds can change so sudden, from opinions of life long, to new ones a week old. I mean that men who have not only been taught from their infancy that the institution of slavery was right; but men who actually owned and held slaves up to this time,—have now changed in their opinions regarding slavery…to see that for man to have property in man was wrong, and that…“all men are, and of right ought to be free” has a meaning different from the definition they had been taught from infancy up…. These ideas come from not the Yanks or northern people but come from reflection, and reasoning among ourselves.
The famous and not-so-famous individuals whose journeys had intersected Bill Key’s, if only peripherally, met varied fortunes. Grant became the only general of the Civil War to accept the surrender of three separate armies after three major battles and, of course, went on to be elected to two terms as President of the United States. Parson Brownlow’s fiery antisecessionism didn’t hurt him at the ballot box, and he became governor of Tennessee in the years immediately following the war and later a United States senator. Major Pauline Cushman enjoyed celebrity status for a while but eventually fell from the public eye and died penniless. Shelbyville Unionist Lewis Tillman became an advocate for Negro suffrage and went on to serve as a U.S. congressman. W. H. Wisener prospered in business, but his radical Republicanism in his fight for racial equality proved unpopular during the turbulent Reconstruction era. David Key, a first cousin of John W. Key, made a name for himself when, in 1877, he was appointed postmaster general of the United States under President Rutherford Hayes.
Though William Key didn’t boast to Rogers how he had helped John and Martha, the story was subsequently recounted by Nashville mayor Richard Dudley, Bill’s childhood friend. The mayor noted that Dr. Key had remained with John’s sons for the duration of the hostilities and that “upon their return found the tanyard and everything else belonging to the family destroyed.” An invalid by this time, John W. Key lived long enough to see his boys come home. Unable to pay the heavy mortgage hanging over his property, he tried to raise the money by selling a large portion of it to his nephew, J. M. Minter, along with the last of his livestock: one bay mare and colt, and six hogs.
But the money didn’t cover their debt, and when John died shortly thereafter, Martha could do nothing about the $5,000 still owing for the mortgage. Mayor Dudley recalled that it was Bill who went to work to raise the capital, paying off the note and tearing it up when he was through. Apparently the Doc had accumulated some substantial poker winnings after spending much of the last year and a half up north. Descendants of townspeople and relatives confirmed they had heard accounts that Dr. William Key not only paid off the mortgage but also supported Martha and her offspring for the remainder of her days, paying for her kids’ education and starting them in business. Some claimed that Bill even paid for Merit and Alexander to attend Harvard, partly as a vicarious experience he would have prized for himself, and partly because that would have been the education that John would have most wanted to provide for them.
Many of the Doc’s friends of color went north during and after the war. He had thought about joining them and had apparently been on trips to look for a place to settle. His idea was to open a hospital for horses and mules wounded in combat, something he assumed might be better received in Northern cities—where the first themes of the humane movement were now being sounded. But by September 1865, he changed his mind about leaving, bought his first piece of Bedford County property—spending $650 for two and a half acres bordering North Main Street, also known as the Shelbyville and Murfreesboro Turnpike—where he established his horse hospital and veterinarian office.
Within five years Doc Key was known as one of the more prosperous, prominent men in town. He had received the blessing of reuniting with his mother, Caroline, with whom he had stayed in close contact in earlier years, though he lost her soon afterward, much to his sorrow. Free to legally marry, Bill wasted no time making his longtime sweetheart, Lucy Davidson, his wife. Similarly, his sister Nancy got married right after the war was over, becoming Mrs. Henry McClain.
The fact that Bill and Lucy had no children was probably for the better, considering that the household couldn’t have accommodated one more individual, what with Lucy’s mother, Arabella, living there, along with Bill’s uncle Jack, various nieces and nephews, stable hands, and with the Doctor’s nonhuman patients staying over more often than not. Before long, Doc Key built a second home on his property for the overflow.
In short order, William expanded his operations to include a blacksmith shop next to his horse hospital, then opened up a wagon wheel and harness-making business at a separate location. With these revenues he raised the capital to manufacture Keystone Liniment on a scale large enough to market it through his traveling medicine shows across the South. In turn, Dr. Key’s restaurant, hotel, and racetrack were enterprises launched with profits from the liniment sales.
A quintessential entrepreneur, Bill Key had mastered the ability to parlay one success into the next one. His gambler’s sensibilities guided him to take calculated risks and to know how to fold when he was losing. A scrupulous businessman who took goods in place of money when poorer folks couldn’t afford to pay in cash, he had also learned, from John W. Key’s excessive borrowing and loaning, to avoid both. Friends and relatives told stories about what a hardcore capitalist he was. A sister-in-law later claimed, “He would walk a mile to collect a nickel.”
Rogers asked if gambling had continued to help fuel Dr. Key’s financial success after the war.
“When I ran my restaurant,” the Doc admitted, “I won a peck of onions from a farmer I beat playing poker.” Although the farmer made threatening remarks, Bill didn’t see cause for worry. But he was wrong. “Sure enough, the farmer had me arrested and fined forty-five dollars. That slowed down my gambling.” Dr. Key grinned cryptically, letting Rogers come to his own conclusions.
Most of th
e black citizens who stayed in Shelbyville after the war, like Dr. Key, had a pronounced entrepreneurial determination that was all the more remarkable, considering the problems of a backlash against freed Negroes that increased during Reconstruction. The Freedmen’s Bureau assessment was that although former Unionists and former Confederates generally approved of black schools, whites were united in bitter opposition “to any action looking to what they are pleased to call equality.”
Bill Key managed to stay above the fray, maintaining warm personal and business relationships across color and class lines. Even so, he was very much rooted in the black community. He was inducted as a member of the Colored Masons not long after lodges were chartered in Tennessee, and he belonged to an African-American Episcopalian congregation.
It was not surprising to the much younger Rogers that a man who had lived so many lifetimes had also suffered his share of setbacks and losses. He had been crushed by the death of his mother-in-law, Arabella Davidson, in 1882, followed three years later by the death of his wife, Lucy, to whom he had been married almost seventeen years. When asked what he wanted inscribed on Lucy’s gravestone, William could hardly speak and mumbled the reply that eventually read: “She was but words are wanting to say what think, what a wife should be, she was that.” Less than two months later, his sister died. Nancy McLain’s headstone was inscribed: “Erected in token of love and affection by her brother William Key.”
The Doc remarried, making Hattie Davidson (Lucy’s younger sister) his second wife. Known for her cheerful temperament and exceptional singing voice, Hattie brightened Bill’s home and stables with her presence. But less than two years after their wedding, sudden illness took Hattie’s life. Brokenhearted, the Doc swore never to marry again. Family and friends attempted to change his mind. No one had any luck until his friend George Davis, a much respected area blacksmith and father of eleven younger Davises, encouraged Bill to consider his eldest daughter as a prospect. Twenty-seven-year-old Lucinda Davis was a beauty and a scholar, who refused to marry anyone until she found a way to attend medical school at Howard University. Such stubbornness would have scared off most men. But William Key was not most men. In fact, he leapt at the opportunity to sponsor Lucinda’s education. She was not only a strikingly handsome woman, but she also had a curiosity and boundless energy that made the Doc, at age fifty-five, feel like a young man again. Besides that, after the two were married in April 1888, she went on to tolerate and then encourage her husband’s unconventional tutelage of Jim Key.
