My Old Confederate Home

by Rusty Williams

Coleman immediately implemented changes recommended by the board's consultant. He installed temporary partitions at firstfloor stairwells, cutting off daytime heat to the upstairs bedrooms and limiting it to the first floor. Inmates found it necessary to leave their rooms in the morning and gather in the downstairs library and parlors in order to stay warm. Coleman fired the kitchen help and servers, replacing them with part-time black women from the area, in the process reducing the number of employees by half. Fearful that employees might steal food or supplies, he began a weekly inventory of the pantries, weighing every pound of sugar and beans, counting each pillowcase and box of soap, paring stores down to the bare minimum. Meals that had been varied and appetizing became grayer and more institutional.

  Coleman's efforts received the full support of the board. They changed his title from “superintendent” to “commandant”—a title given the person in charge of a fort or other military institution—and the change allowed Coleman to take direct responsibility for hiring and disciplining Home employees. Commandant Coleman also intended to impose greater military discipline on his inmates.2

  Beginning in February 1903, inmates were issued uniforms consisting of underdrawers, pants, shirts, jacket, a military-style waistlength dress cape, and a felt hat. Although the uniforms were originally intended for use during special ceremonies when visitors were expected, or to supplement everyday clothing, Commandant Coleman decreed that inmates should wear them at all times, whether they were strolling the grounds of the Home or napping in the library. Part of Coleman's reasoning involved increased efficiency: the Home's laundry staff could process standardized garments faster than they could wash, iron, and sort varied personal items of clothing. But the uniformity also served to reinforce a personal discipline that Coleman felt was slipping. Gone were the oddments of clothing; every inmate was expected to dress in full uniform at the morning inspection and remain so dressed throughout the day.

  The new clothing was of top quality; it was supplied by Levy Bros. Department Store in Louisville. But it was the first time since leaving military service forty years before that these men had been required to wear uniforms. Bennett Young put a more positive spin on the uniform requirement: “It was thought,” he later wrote, “that the Confederate uniform which they had worn with much honor and credit should be used by them now, in the declining years of their life, when they had come to enjoy the benefits of this State institution.”3

  Coleman also instituted a zero-tolerance policy for infractions of Home rules, particularly those involving the use of alcohol.

  “Charges are hereby preferred against Stanford P. Ashford for drunkenness at Confederate Home on March 6 & 7,” Coleman reported to the board before an April executive committee meeting. He included the specifications and a list of witnesses. In addition, E. J. Sanders was reported to be drunk at dinner on March 16, and Matthew Little was caught with a whiskey bottle on March 17. Both men were brought up on charges.4

  The board's executive committee was required to hold hearings on the offenses. The men admitted their obvious guilt, but charges were “dismissed upon their positive promise that they would not repeat the offense.”

  Commandant Coleman wanted to make a special example of James Elbert, however. Elbert had been a whiskey drummer—a salesman representing local distilleries and bottlers to the retail trade. As the years went by, however, he spent less time selling his product and more time consuming it. By the time he entered the Home, he was long unemployed and practically homeless, nursing a mighty thirst for Kentucky's finest. On the evening of March 5 a drunken Elbert verbally abused Coleman, then staggered out of the Home before he could be restrained. Elbert made his way to Louisville for a four-day tear, and a county sheriff was dispatched to return him to Pewee Valley. At his hearing, he was unrepentant and, at Coleman's insistence, was expelled from the Home. The minutes of Elbert's court-martial by the executive committee state that “the Commandant was directed to furnish a railroad ticket to his former home and to give him lunch and $1 in money.”5

  Within weeks of Coleman's arrival, the Home was transformed from a comfortable lodging place with bountiful meals and an accommodating household staff to a chilly military installation that was becoming increasingly crowded with bored and disgruntled old men.

  Meanwhile, the board members were struggling to dig their way out of a deep financial hole. Coleman's operational changes had reduced the costs of running the Home, but the board faced additional, extraordinary expenses as well as repayment of the short-term loans they had taken out in January 1903.

  Bennett Young's plea to the UCV camps for additional financial help was bearing fruit. Members of the camp in Paducah voted to pledge 25 cents per member per month in 1903 to help the Home out of its financial jam, and the Confederate veterans of Lexington reinstated a $500 pledge that had been withdrawn a year earlier. W. J. Stone, an active veteran from Kuttawa, stood up at a meeting of the Little River Baptist Association to speak on behalf of the Kentucky Confederate Home. He raised $35, telling Fayette Hewitt he thought it was a pretty good sum, “considering that the crowd had been so thoroughly drummed for money for missions.”6

  With the board's approval, Young retained five independent financial agents, promising them a 25 percent commission on the money they raised. Florence Barlow, editor of The Lost Cause, was one of the agents, and she collected donations while speaking at UDC luncheon meetings around the state. J. W. Bird and Alexander Lawson traveled around Kentucky seeking donations, while C. C. Cantrell looked for big donors in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Chicago, and New York. (In April 1903 the New York Times reported that Cantrell was at the Broadway Central Hotel, “having come to New York to secure contributions for a fund of which the [Kentucky Confederate Home] is in immediate need.”) William O. Coleman also drew a commission for any financial contributions he could raise, but Bennett Young said Coleman's duties as commandant had “prevented him from further pursuing these collections.”7

  The financial agents collected $4,600 during the spring of 1903. Those funds, added to other monies squeezed from here and there, allowed Young to report on May 6 that the executive committee had been “extraordinarily successful in raising money to pay off the deficit.” Further, Young said, we are now “satisfied that the State appropriation will pay the running expenses of the institution.”8

  Confident as Young may have sounded in public, however, he had to have been aware that this financial stability was only temporary.

  The Kentucky Confederate Home was operating at near capacity. By the end of June 1903, just eight months after the formal opening, the board of trustees had approved more than 140 applications for admission. Of those, 125 needy ex-Confederates had arrived at the Home and signed the register. The first winter in the Home had been hard on the old men: fourteen died and nine were under temporary care at various hospitals.

  A hundred men were living in the Home that summer, and they were putting a strain on the facility. Water wells were barely keeping pace with the daily needs of the laundry and kitchen; a pump used to fill roof cisterns with water for storage and fire protection was failing, causing the wooden cisterns to dry out in the summer heat and develop leaks. Many of the inmates who came to the Home had no familiarity with indoor toilets, and plumbing clogs were a constant problem. (Commandant Coleman was forced to enlarge the septic beds and dig two outdoor privies to handle sewage.) In addition, the old resort hotel was constructed for genteel vacationers, not a hundred idle old men; spots of tobacco juice stained hardwood floors, heavy boots frayed the delicate carpets, and pocketknives whittled away sections of the wooden porch rail. Repairs and maintenance weren't immediately necessary, but they were imminent, and they would be costly.

  Despite overcrowding at the Home and its precarious financial situation, there is no evidence that Bennett Young or the board of trustees ever considered limiting applications for admission. To do so would have broken faith with every UCV camp in the state, every Kentucky Confederat
e veteran who had pledged a dollar for the care of needy comrades. Suspending admissions would also betray the Home's political supporters, legislators who voted the Home's appropriation and who might be counted on to provide some future financial relief.

  Winter was coming, and dozens more old veterans would need the warm beds and hot meals they were unable to secure for themselves and that had been promised to them. So the men responsible for managing the affairs of the Kentucky Confederate Home chose to squeeze every penny possible out of the operating costs while continuing to pack their indigent comrades into the strained facility.

  And it was just this kind of stubborn male nonsense that led the United Daughters of the Confederacy to The Motion.

  One of the earliest speeches in support of establishing a Kentucky veterans’ home urged the men of the state's United Confederate Veterans camps to accomplish the hard work of financing, building, and running the home. “If we do our part in this,” the (male) speaker said, “the noble women, the Daughters of the Confederacy, will see that [the indigent veterans] do not lack for ministering angels.”9

  But the women of Kentucky's United Daughters of the Confederacy didn't wait until the hard work was done before commencing their daughterly duty.

  When the Committee of Twenty-Five first announced its goal of $25,000, the clubwomen organized bake sales, flower fairs, fetes, and market-day lunchrooms to raise funds. They encouraged other clubwomen to donate, then put the touch on husbands and friends. The women of Carlisle collected $100; the Newport UDC chapter pledged $500; the Louisville chapter raised $1,500 toward the purchase of the Pewee Valley property and another $1,000 intended for furnishings. Funds raised by Kentucky UDC chapters, sent directly to Fayette Hewitt or reported through local UCV camps, likely accounted for as much as half of the $10,000 originally used to purchase and improve the Villa Ridge Inn.

  When Bennett Young and the board of trustees needed fast cash to close the purchase of the Pewee Valley property, UDC chapters paid more than $2,200 for room naming rights, then expended thousands more to paint, carpet, refixture, and furnish those rooms.10

  And when the board of trustees finally opened the doors to the Kentucky Confederate Home, the ministering angels of the UDC flew in to provide luxuries and comforts for the old veterans. The women arrived at the Home with gifts of clothing, magazines, hard candies, fresh fruit, handkerchiefs, games, rocking chairs, and books. Women from the Paducah chapter staged monthly musicales for the veterans; the chapter in Winchester made deliveries of baked goods and special gifts. Within days of the formal opening, UDC member Virginia Sale—Daniel Parr's daughter—announced the formation of the Confederate Home Woman's Committee, an organization formed to “give all the sunshine possible to these men in their declining years.” The state's UDC chapters vied to provide amenities to the Confederate veterans residing in the Home.11 But in the first flush of excitement after the Home opened, the ministering angels seemed not to notice that many of the old men arriving in Pewee Valley—their “living heroes”—were too blind to read the books, too addled to enjoy the music, too sick to sit in rocking chairs.

  “This Home is not intended to be a mere receptacle for men who are paupers,” said one of the speakers at the opening of the Kentucky Confederate Home, “but as a comfortable, luxurious home for the honored ex-soldiers who are invalid.”12

  Oratory surrounding the opening of the Kentucky Confederate Home (and the speeches that helped raise money to pay for it) described the elegance of the facility and the creature comforts to be showered on those who would live there.

  “Here, with sheltering love, no want shall go unsupplied,” Bennett Young had promised. “Tender affection will anticipate every need.”13

  From the public words of Young and his board members, Kentuckians could reasonably expect that the Home would be a sort of Cockaigne, a sugar-cake palace of luxurious and idle living where distinguished old Southern gentlemen lounged away their final days. But the realities of overcrowding, financial shortages, and the precarious physical condition of many of the inmates quickly eclipsed the rhetoric.

  Living conditions at the Home were indeed far superior to those a destitute old Confederate veteran would encounter at countyoperated poorhouses or state asylums. (Residents of the Bath County poorhouse, for example, were forced to take their meals with criminals from the county jail, and a Clark County inmate, unable to tolerate conditions in the poorhouse there, attempted suicide by jumping headfirst into a rain barrel.) The state legislature would fail to pass a bill raising to $60 the annual mandatory minimum that Kentucky counties could spend on the care of each of their poorhouse inmates. Meanwhile, the state was paying $125 annually for each ex-Confederate inmate.14

  But when the women of Kentucky's United Daughters of the Confederacy saw their Confederate Home in operation in the spring of 1903, they weren't happy.

  Their immediate dissatisfaction arose from problems with the Home itself: insufficient water, poor sewerage disposal, irregular heating, poor food preparation, and tacky decor (not to mention the coarse deportment of the old inmates). Most women visitors could ignore (or were too modest to mention) the smell resulting from clogged sewer pipes (or the inmates’ poor hygiene), and most were unaware of the periodic water shortages. But the lack of general cleanliness tempted many women to grab a mop and bucket and commence to swabbing tobacco stains from the floors or scrubbing handprints off the walls. One visitor, appalled at the quality of the evening meal, put on an apron and proceeded to instruct the cooks on how to properly boil fresh greens. The indignant woman left the kitchen only when escorted out by Commandant Coleman.

  Of more serious concern was the poor health of the men residing in the Home.

  “It has been demonstrated that the Home is to be a great infirmary,” Florence Barlow wrote to Kentucky UDC members in The Lost Cause. “Three-fourths of those who have been received have been unable to do anything for themselves.” Bennett Young was also frustrated by the quality of care, but financial constraints allowed no immediate solution. “The truth is, instead of a Home, we have a great infirmary,” he admitted to the board members. We must, he said, do something “to give these sick men at least the ordinary comforts that sick people are entitled to have.”15

  The earliest arrivals at the Home were in many cases the most infirm; they were the ones most debilitated by tuberculosis, most crippled from stroke or lost limbs, most blinded by cataracts. Several upstairs rooms had been set aside as sick rooms, but there was no on-site professional medical care. Due to the expense, Commandant Coleman was reluctant to call for a doctor or send the men to a hospital except in the direst of circumstances, so the healthy inmates would carry the sick and dying from their beds each morning to chairs or daybeds in the warmer downstairs sitting rooms.

  On June 3, 1903, the birthday of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, a delegation of women—including Kentucky UDC president Mrs. James M. Arnold—arrived at the Home for a solemn ceremony, the conferring of the Southern Cross of Honor on ninety-two inmates. The Cross of Honor had been created by the UDC that year for living veterans, to recognize their “valorous service to the Southern Confederacy.” In dress uniform, those inmates who were ambulatory received their brass Cross of Honor pins in a ceremony held under the trees on the lawn of the Home. The UDC delegation then entered the Home, going room to room to pin the award on the blankets of those too ill to attend the outdoor event.

  That afternoon the leadership of Kentucky's United Daughters of the Confederacy came face to face with conditions at the Kentucky Confederate Home, and they found the situation too dreadful to ignore. (“Perhaps the most pathetic service ever rendered by the chapter,” one woman described it.) By all reports, the Home was going from bad to worse.16

  The women of the UDC had been content to do their daughterly duty as ministering angels to the sick old veterans, but it was past time to have a say in how the ministering was done and who was ministered to.

  It
was time for a woman's touch.

  One woman in particular recognized that there was a fundamental difference in how the men of the UCV and the women of the UDC perceived their roles in the operation, management, and organization of the Home. She had bumped into that attitude before.

  Almost a year earlier Henrietta Morgan Duke had negotiated—reasonably, she believed—with Bennett Young and Harry P. McDonald for the establishment of a woman's advisory board at the Home in exchange for $1,000 the board of trustees desperately needed to complete the purchase of the Pewee Valley property. Young backed out of the transaction at the last minute, apparently preferring to risk bankruptcy than give the Daughters a say in how the Home should be run. Had Young not reneged on the deal, the UDC would even now be helping to assure healthy meals, provide tender medical care, and maintain cleanliness. Instead, the allmale board seemed determined to turn the Kentucky Confederate Home into an overcrowded, disreputable boarding house, while ignoring some of the niceties that made for a respectable place to live.

  Henrietta Duke made no public expression of resentment toward Young or the board of trustees for denying the women a role in managing the Home. (To take personal offense would have been unseemly for the wife and sister of beloved Confederate generals.) A woman as well-schooled in high society as Henrietta Morgan Duke could communicate far more clearly with a raised eyebrow, a knowing smile, or between the lines of chatty letters to other UDC chapter members throughout Kentucky. “Is it right and fair, in your opinion,” she asked, that women be deprived of having a say in the operation of the Home?17 Henrietta Duke thought it was not.

  Mary Bascom of Owingsville agreed. It was an issue she had discussed with her husband, and they agreed that the presence of women living in the Home would exert a healthy influence on the men there. “The Daughters had better band together” and buy land adjacent to the Home, she wrote her cousin, who was a member of another UDC chapter. “Put the wives of indigent Confederates on it and keep it as UDC property.”