My Old Confederate Home

by Rusty Williams

  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.18

  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.19

  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.”20

  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.21

  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.22

  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.23

  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.24

  “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.25

  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].”26

  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.27

  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.

  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.28

  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.30 “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.”31

  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 com
e 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

  On 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.